Status Anxiety: The shame of not being hacked

Like many of my colleagues in the media, I’m shocked by the News of the World phone-hacking scandal. As the list of those targeted by the newspaper grows longer and longer, my sense of outrage deepens. What were the papers’ executives thinking? Did it not even occur to them to tap my phone?

OK, OK, I’m not an A-lister. I’m not even on the B-list. My ­status ­hovers somewhere between C-list and D-list (on a good day). But if you look at the people queuing up to sue the paper, some of them are below even me in the celebrity pecking order.

George Galloway I can understand. He was the leader of a political party at the time, even if he isn’t now. And Bob Crow I can forgive. After all, he’s a communist thug bent on the destruction of the British way of life. But Leslie Ash? Her great claim to fame was playing one of the dolly birds in Men Behaving Badly and that hasn’t been on telly since 1998. If the News of the Screws is going to be so indiscriminate in its choice of targets, couldn’t it include me?

In truth, I’m not the least bit disappointed that my phone wasn’t tapped by the Screws — no tabloid would ever cast its net that widely — but I bet some people are. I’m not just thinking about the compensation cheque. Being included on the list of people whose phone was hacked by the News of the World is an unofficial status indicator, like being asked to go on Desert Island Discs or appear in Who’s Who. It’s the contemporary equivalent of being invited to Caroline Astor’s annual ball in Gilded Age New York, when the group of invitees were known as ‘the 400’ because her ballroom could only accommodate 400 people.