Friday, August 31, 2007

Diana: Thoughts and Reminiscences

Where was I when I first found out?

At my mum's house, in Hitchin, Herts. I'd gone there for the weekend to help her with the garden, but the news from Paris put paid to that. By 11am the following morning I was at my desk in the Commons helping my paper, the Newcastle Journal, put together its Diana coverage. I ended up writing a piece about how the marriage turned sour, though I'm not sure what qualified me, as political editor, to do that one.

What was my initial reaction?

I'm afraid to say my very first reaction was that MI5 must have bumped her off. Diana had become increasingly outspoken over the previous 12 months and was on the verge of becoming a political embarrassment. Of course only Richard Desmond and Mohammed al-Fayed still think this way today, but it seemed to me a logical conclusion to draw at the time.

Was it really Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell's finest hour?

Even as a Campbell-hater, I have to admit the man was awesome that week. He appeared in complete charge of the situation, to the point where he almost gave us lobby correspondents the impression that he had personally drawn up the funeral arrangements. A tour-de-force.

Did I think the Monarchy would be overthrown?

A lot of very influential people - notably Will Hutton, then the editor of the Observer - were trying to push that line, and the initial reporting of Charles Spencer's speech has to be seen in that light. But I always took the view that Diana was held in such public affection more because of her royal status than in spite of it.

Did Britain fall victim to an outbreak of mass hysteria?

It was more the case that public displays of grief became socially acceptable for the first time, though that must have seemed like hysteria to more conservative types.

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Monday, August 27, 2007

Did Murdoch really save The Times?

Iain Dale visited here yesterday to leave a comment on an old post about the lack of cricket on terrestrial TV that referred en passant to the Murdoch takeover of Times Newspapers Limited in 1981. Iain's view is that the Dirty Digger saved the Times and the Sunday Times, mine is that he destroyed them. The full exchange can be read HERE.

Since the role of Murdoch in demeaning British journalism over the past 40 years is something of a pet subject of mine, I thought this was worthy of its own post. I would certainly be interested to hear others' views.

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Saturday, August 25, 2007

Tough on crime victims...

"Laura Norder" has leaped back to the top of the political agenda this week following the Learco Chindamo controversy and the Rhys Jones killing. Here's what I had to say in my weekend column published in the Newcastle Journal and Derby Telegraph this morning.

***

Every so often, an individual crime takes place in Britain that is seen as so horrendous and which provokes such a degree of public outrage that it actually shifts the political consensus.

The death of Liverpool toddler James Bulger in 1993 was one such instance. It produced some in us deep soul-searching as to what kind of country we had become, and a new emphasis on the need to mend our “broken society.”

It was shortly after this that the then Shadow Home Secretary, Tony Blair, first displayed his infallible ability to capture the zeitgeist by coining his memorable soundbite "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime."

It is arguable that the Bulger death played at least a part in Mr Blair being elected leader of the Labour Party the following year ahead of Gordon Brown, who up until then had been the senior of the two men.

A similarly seminal episode was the Dunblane Massacre, in 1995. It resulted in the Labour ban on handguns introduced after 1997 and, with the Tories having opposed the move, was a small but significant issue in the general election of that year.

Then there was the murder of the London teenager Stephen Lawrence, which led to the Macpherson Report into “institutional racism” in the Metropolitan Police and a huge change in the culture of UK policing.

Few crimes, though, have generated as much public debate and as many political repercussions as the 1995 murder of the London headteacher Philip Lawrence while trying to protect one of his young pupils.

This week, the case was dominating the political agenda again, following the judgement that Lawrence's killer, Learco Chindamo, should not be deported to Italy if, as expected, he is released on parole next year.

The Lawrence case was always one that pushed a lot of buttons. The extent of knife crime, the rise in gang culture, and the rights of victims were but three of the issues it threw up.

It gave rise to a knives amnesty at the time, and later helped lay the ground for the introduction of “victim statements” in which those most closely affected by individual crimes were allowed to address the court at the end of a trial.

But for all the Blair government’s oft-repeated hype about “putting the victim at the heart of the criminal justice system,” the system remains stacked against the victim as this week’s ruling showed.

It remains the prevailing legal view that the justice system is not about delivering the wishes of Mrs Frances Lawrence or any other victims, and that attempts to make it do so stem more from “tabloid hysteria” than ordinary common sense.

For what it’s worth, my own view of the case is that the focus on the row over the deportation of Chindamo has obscured an even more glaring injustice – the pitifully short sentence he has had to serve in view of the seriousness of the original crime.

This was also the case with Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, the killers of James Bulger, who were set free under new identities several years ago.

But the fact that Chindamo has become eligible for parole after just 12 years only serves to emphasise the extent to which the deportation tribunal decision has failed Mrs Lawrence, who must now live with the thought that her husband’s killer is at large in the same city.

If life could not mean life, the system could at least have ensured that Chindamo was sent somewhere a long way away from the people whose lives he has ruined.

So much for my views – what of the law? Well, the initial blame for the ruling attached to the Human Rights Act passed by New Labour in 2000, which holds that Chindamo has a right to a family life.

His Filipino mother still lives in London, and although his father lives in Italy, he is currently in jail for throwing acid in a woman’s face and has not seen his son for many years.

But as the week has gone on, it has become clearer that the real legal culprit was not the Human Rights Act but the 2004 EU Free Movement Directive, which makes clear that Chindamo cannot be deported unless he is a serious threat to public security.

Politically, this is something of a heady cocktail, encompassing not just concerns about youth crime and gang culture but also Britain’s whole relationship with Europe at a time when the EU constitution referendum row is raising its head once again.

Little more than 48 hours after the Chindamo ruling came the fatal shooting of 11-year-old Rhys Jones, a crime that carried more than a few overtones of the Bulger killing a few miles away on Merseyside.

It has also stirred similar emotions, with Home Secretary Jacqui Smith struggling to hold back the tears in a television interview yesterday after watching Rhys's parents talk about his murder.

Meanwhile, in a further shift away from traditional Tory concerns, David Cameron has insisted that the “broken society” would be a central theme of his party’s general election campaign.

Even before this week’s events, the youth crime issue was growing in importance as talk of that election continues to intensify. It is sure to be a key election battleground now.

It was one of Tony Blair's great political achievements in his 13 years as Labour leader to make crime a “Labour issue,” and it is still too soon to talk of it becoming a “Tory issue” again.

But simply by virtue of having been in power for ten years in which the problem of gun crime in particular has continued unabated, Labour is once again vulnerable on the issue.

The political impact of the James Bulger murder was to catapult youth crime to the top of the agenda and put Tony Blair in pole position to become Labour leader and later Prime Minister.

Fourteen years on, the combined political impact of the Chindamo ruling and the Ryan Jones killing might just be to put David Cameron back in the game.

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