A book is a many-splendoured thing. From the bible to Das Kapital, from Tolstoy to Salman Rushdie, it can shake and shape the world. A book is not for banning, though many oppressors try. A book is not for burning. A book is scholarship and toil and belief and honesty. Or then again, it’s Call Me Dave.
And here’s the fascinating thing after a week of grubby non-revelations from My Lord Ashcroft and Isabel Oakeshott, his rather too eager helpmate. You don’t need to hold any sort of brief for David Cameron to feel that hatchet jobs of this ilk, flogged to the Daily Mail for six figures and labelled “Revenge!” at the top of page one, are wild, woolly and pretty wonky. The grime just comes off as you turn the pages. The slime runs on and on.
Ought it not to be allowed? Perhaps we need an independent book regulatory organisation now, just as we need an independent supervisor of bullying charity phone callers (the latest Mail campaign victory). Perhaps, for starters, the grisly details of “Pig-gate” – starring a young David Cameron and a head of dead porker – are so horrendous that vulnerable people must be shielded from them. Call for an Ofhog, or maybe an Ofswine.
The real problem, though, goes back with a mighty clunk to first principles. That pig’s mouth and that “private part” of a future PM’s anatomy… It’s a yarn spun by “a distinguished Oxford contemporary” of Cameron’s who is “himself an MP”. He told Ashcroft and Oakeshott about it not once, not twice, but three times. He said there were photographs of this bizarre ceremony at a Piers Gaveston Society initiation. But no one has ever come forward to attest that the young Cameron joined this club. No one has provided Ashcroft with those pictures. Indeed, no one has provided any hard evidence at all. Repetition has to serve as conviction.
Which is simply not good enough. No editor of any paper I know, and nor any night lawyer advising him or her, would blithely rubber-stamp this deep-throat pig for publication. As Ian Kirby, once political editor of the News of the World, writes in the Spectator: “The easy way for a newspaper to publish a scandal nowadays is simply to serialise a book, preferably one by a ‘name’, and then print whatever they say about somebody you know doesn’t have the time or inclination to sue. The reputation of the author, not the newspaper, is on the line.”
In this case the semi-demi-author is Michael Ashcroft, who owns the company who published it and has enough cash in the bank to keep a hundred libel lawyers in claret. Could Cameron sue in such circumstances? Only if he had similarly deep pockets and was prepared to resign in order to head for the law courts in the Strand. It’s a libel-free zone of cynical operation when you think about it. Who cares about two sources, proof, corroboration? Not relevant. Who cares about libel horrors? Off the piste. Just load the muckspreader and push the red button. Maybe this book was supposed to published after Cameron’s May defeat, a kind of stamp on his political grave. But hey, who cares that he won after all? Why waste a truckload of silage?
Meanwhile, look narrow-eyed as the Daily Mail sidles to the periphery of the action. Not me, guv! it’s that Lord Ashcroft you need to blame. He’s really sole proprietor of this pig’s breakfast. His allegations, his sources, his money, his hired wordsmith. The Mail is merely the humble conveyor of allegations to set Twitter pulsating. After all, it’s a book, sold by respectable shops. How can the stories it plonks into open discourse be suppressed? Feel the weight, count the pages.
On closer inspection, though, such a defence totters at the first hurdle. The decision to publish book extracts in a newspaper is one for the editor of that paper, just as the decision to broadcast them for the radio or TV editor concerned. The immediate speculation about Call Me Dave is whether the mighty Dacre of the Mail has fallen out with Cameron for good? (Answer: here’s the first bitter fruit of Cameron’s announcement that he won’t be standing for re-election in 2020: get your favourite candidate into this open house early.) But there is, even so, one line that can’t easily be crossed.
Dacre is once and continuing chairman of the Independent Press Standards Organisation’s editorial code committee. That doesn’t make him the sinister deal-broker behind the arras of Hacked Off legend, but it does mean he has special knowledge of the code and its warnings against publishing “inaccurate, misleading or distorted information”. Does he, personally, know who the “distinguished Oxford contemporary” is? Has he embraced a lower standard of proof than would be the case if this were a Mail original?
The parcel can’t be passed so insouciantly – especially when, among other stories, it includes one headlined “How desperate Dave betrayed Britain’s free press”. Desperation comes in many forms to many deadlines, but freedom is a concept you can’t bring to book. And pork needs stuffing.
