Apologies for the misleading headline. This is a shameless attempt to get some better adverts on the blog. I've noticed that recently it's been liberally festooned with ads for lawyers, ironic given the nature of the posts but that's what happens when you're at the mercy of some cyber adman. So now you've finished clicking on ads for marital aids, weekends away in New York and you've bought yourself a car and booked a restaurant, let's get down to business.
And my word this News of the World lark is a business, eh? The whole thing feels like a box of fireworks thrown onto a bonfire: dangerous and unpredictable effects shooting out in dangerous and unpredictable directions at similarly unpredictable intervals. Unless you've got more time than I am inclined to spend poring through the detail of all this, it's very hard to assimilate the ins and outs of it all. Plus, at the end of the day, do we really care much and if we do, what exactly are we to care about? Personally, I wouldn't give two hoots if someone hacked into my voicemail. If they're really interested in messages like "If you're in ASDA, we're low on washing powder" or "It's me dad, please send money" then good luck to them. But of course I'd still be straight on the phone to Messrs Sue, Grabbit and Run for a quick bit of no-win-no-fee action against Murdoch and chums. Max Clifford got a cool £1m out of them apparently: it's an ill wind, eh readers?
Perhaps poor old Gordie Brown could do with Max's services. Looking increasingly like a man who can't even win when backing a dead cert in a one horse race, he now has egg on his face as we learn that his son's medical details didn't find their way into print as a result of hacking or blagging (there's another law I didn't know about) at all. Talk about a lose/lose. No, never mind the mobile phone, I'd be far more worried that if it's that easy to hack a phone, how about a bank account? No one seems to have mentioned this.
The Murdoch organisation of course has always had a touch of the Milwall syndrome about it, you know, "no one likes us, we don't care." Indeed, so unloved are they that the whole of the House of Commons has agreed to gang up against them in some kind of "stop being so horrid or I'll get my dad on you" motion. But are they the real baddies? Is parliament just projecting onto Rupe its own failures properly to stop this kind of thing? And what about the likes of us news consumers? If there wasn't such a demand for reading tawdry tittle-tattle about so-called celebrities then the newspapers (and is it really only News International titles up to no good here?) wouldn't spend the money on the private dicks and their dirty tricks in the first place.
The there's the police. I've been worried about them for a while. Now we learn that not only have some of them been taking money in return for juicy little titbits of info but through some combination of idleness, incompetence and, dare one suggest, an aversion to biting the hand that feeds them, their efforts to date to nail the hackers make Inspector Clouseau look like Sherlock Holmes (mind you, Sherlock bribed the police too.) One of the most senior of the coppers left the force a year or two back and now actually works for News International! Bloody hell! How convenient.
The police have, over the years, become quite literally a law unto themselves. One feels considerable sympathy for the honest rozzer trying to do his bit for society as he is constantly let down by the corruption, bungling and sheer laziness of so many of his colleagues. When we read that police policy guidelines have become infected by the rampant virus which is health and safety to such an extent that in some circumstances officers are told to avoid crimes rather than investigate them, we are entitled to wonder what madness has taken hold. And why does no government ever tackle the problem?
Governments have only two essential duties: to protect the country from its enemies and to protect the honest citizens from the dishonest. Everything else that governments do (and my goodness, don't they do a lot?) is either unnecessary or could be done by someone else. It's about time that the UK government remembered this and got to grips with police failures. Elected chief constables would be a good start. And a bit more zero tolerance wouldn't go amiss. But that's another subject altogether.
So there you have it. It's not the Dirty Digger we need to be venting our anger at, it's either ourselves for buying this rubbish or the police for not doing their job. Or, ultimately, successive governments for not making sure the police do their job. I never bought the NOTW but I'm sorry it's gone. There's something sad (or wrong) that one man get get rid of a national institution - what next, the Times? Imagine if one man could get rid of other national institutions, like pubs. Or the House of Lords. Or fox hunting. Oh...hang on...
If you did buy the last edition of the NOTW, you will have been reminded of the many occasions when they were several steps ahead of the police in exposing serious wrong-doing. There's nothing to be gained here from the NOTW's demise. On the contrary, perhaps we need a few more fake sheiks and a few less bent and lazy coppers.
Goodnight all.
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