Conspiracy theories
Culture Secretary John Whittingdale may have now become a focus for the press – but we have to look very closely at each and every motivation for penning articles about him.
John Whittingdale is the story that refuses to go away – marvellous in its many facets.
The Culture Secretary is now as controversial for his private life as he is for his determination to impose his free market will on the broadcasting institutions of the UK.
Shadow Culture Secretary Maria Eagle described his behaviour as “bullying” at the Voice of the Listener and Viewer conference.
The greatest damage that can be done to a political reputation, however, is to become a figure of ridicule and Whittingdale is very close to suffering that fate.
The jokes are starting to roll.
His fate lies in the hands of the Whips.
It’s great that there’s someone out there who can give him a lesson in humility.
Of course the biggest joke of all is his political ideas with the BBC in particular on the receiving end of his black humour.
The latest and most risible Whittingdale trial balloons revealed to the Sunday Times would see the BBC being forced to sell off its 50 per cent stake in UKTV and hand over a slice of licence fee money out of the BBC children’s TV budget to commercial operators.
As Eagle noted, the profits from the UKTV stake helps to keep the cost of the licence fee down – and anyway, UKTV gets a lot of its best programmes from the BBC.
Five out of the six VLV nominations for best children’s programming went to CBeebies and the award went to the reborn Clangers.
Why would any rational person want to try to damage a success story such as CBeebies?
The trial balloons have largely been shot down but there is a track record of DCMS stories being strategically leaked to the Sunday Times.
It is of course his colourful sex life that is turning Whittingdale into a figure of fun that will contribute to the ending of his political career just as it once did for David Mellor.
Years later the only thing that Mellor is remembered for is doing it in a Chelsea shirt, even though the football shirt was an untrue embellishment dreamt up by the discredited Max Clifford.
It is the sheer weight and number of the tasteless stories, when combined with his Brexit stance and his media bungling, that will ultimately carry Whittingdale away.
The latest – the splash in the Evening Standard devoted to Whittingdale admitting he accepted free hospitality from a London lap-dancing club while chairing a committee looking into the licensing of such clubs.
For some reason “the official visit” was not recorded in the committee’s published records or mentioned in the eventual report.
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Small potatoes but not when it appears to be part of a pattern.
The Mail on Sunday gave Whittingdale both barrels with allegations he let his girlfriend at the time – a “former porn star” – see the contents of his ministerial Red Box, something he denies. He sent her a confidential picture of Cabinet ministers relaxing at Chequers in breach of protocol, rather difficult to deny because the MoS published the pictures.
The married ex-Page 3 model claims Whittingdale told her he had been dating a dominatrix, even though he previously claimed he gave her up as soon as he found out about her true occupation.
And then there is said to be the lady from Belorussia and the blonde from Lithuania. Most damaging of all, according to the former Page 3 girl, Whittingdale did a Ratner and described his Essex constituents as “oiks.”
There is something a little surprising about the Mail on Sunday coverage – all five pages of it containing remarkable detail.
Enterprising reporters can produce a lot in a week but it has the mark of something that took a lot longer and was prepared a lot earlier.
If the Mail on Sunday had all, or most, of that material at the time the paper decided not to publish – until the BBC’s Newsnight broke the mainstream media silence on Whittingdale – then the decision is more than a little surprising.
Single man he might be but a senior politician behaving like that around London is a legitimate story so that his Cabinet colleagues and the “oiks” in his constituency can make up their own minds.
Conspiracy theories are still rattling around the media on the Whittingdale affair. The BBC decided to get Whittingdale because he has been so hostile to the Corporation. They must have been tempted, but asking why four national newspapers investigated Whittingdale and came up with the dominatrix, if not more, and decided not to publish looks like a legitimate story.
It is highly unlikely there was any collusion between such intense newspaper rivals on the decision to stay silent but it stretches credulity to breaking point to argue that all decided the story was not in the public interest.
It is doubtful that they were holding a sword of Damocles over the Culture Secretary, merely that they all saw self-interest in keeping him in place because of his distaste for more draconian press regulation.
And that is where the real conspiracy came into play – cooked up by Byline, the crowd sourced investigative platform, which broke the original story online with media pressure group Hacked Off.
We are grateful to Andrew Gilligan and the Sunday Telegraph for uncovering the murky details.
Gilligan says that Byline.com is substantially funded by a Chinese billionaire who has attacked independent journalism, and argued that reform of the “morally bankrupt” West may depend on it becoming less democratic in future.
Max Mosley, Gilligan goes on, is a major funder of Hacked Off and has also funded Byline.com.
The Sunday Telegraph adds that Hacked Off issued a press release about the Byline story on the silence of the press on Whittingdale on 10 April two days before the Newsnight story.
According to Gilligan Hacked Off worked with Byline.com to promote the story to Newsnight and other media outlets to help the cause of stricter press regulation.
In fact it was not Whittingdale, but his predecessor as Culture Secretary Sajid Javid, who announced on 25 April 2015 that the government would play “no further role” in press regulation.
Whittingdale publicly said he too was no longer in favour of further regulation of the press four months before his relationship with the dominatrix began.
The Culture Secretary may have become a figure of fun but we will find out next month when the broadcasting white paper is published whether the joke is ultimately on us.