While it happened on Friday evening, repeated Saturday afternoon, I’m still seething Monday morning. Though occasionally speaking a bit of sense, Matthew Parris on Friday’s Question Time was mostly craven, as his bosses at News International seek to deflect and defuse the public anger by making the scandal diffuse in dragging in all journalists. The first tack he tried was to downplay the seriousness of the allegations. Justifiably, he got a few boos for this. In response, he followed the party line of his paper, The Times, by saying all of Fleet Street were up to their necks in it, most journalists as rotten as the next. This is scandalous talk in itself. While it may be true, if it is, where is his evidence? Can’t prove it? How convenient. (Here’s a bone – it seems The Sunday Times, according to Lord Ashcroft, illegally acquired the latter’s tax receipts from HM Revenue and Customs; would like to verify this Matthew?) But the real outrage is the attitude. In what jaded and morally decadent universe does Parris inhabit, where it is not just the accepted norm to hack in the phones of a missing girl (raising hope for the family be deleting messages), those of the parents of murdered children, the families of terrorist victims and the families of soldiers who have fallen in service to their country, but to publicly back these people and causes all the while eavesdropping on what they thought was personal and intimae anguish? That is despicable betrayal from people who have expunged all their humanity.
Parris even had the chutzpah to drag in the BBC (for no good reason) and say that the whistle-blowing on MPs’ expenses reported on by The Daily Telegraph was directly comparable to the immorality, illegality and corruption within his own organisation. He may be pleasing his paymasters but by acting as apologist, he is choosing to reside in the same moral vacuum as those who committed these dreadful, dreadful acts. Oh and just for the record, Mr Parris, contrary to your declamation, your newspaper has been conspicuously reticent in reporting the whole hacking saga, as lax as a Berlusconi media organ in reporting bunga-bunga parties (do you read anything other than your own column?). The Times only piped up when this disgrace could no longer be ignored and even then casually flinging the muck around. Clean out your own stables (or would that test even Hercules?) before you criticise anyone else.