Sending messages in a hurry says nothing about character

Independent on Sunday, 8 January 2012

I once emerged from an Underground station to find central London in the midst of a torrential storm. I sent a text to my publisher, telling him I’d be late for a meeting while I waited for the rain to stop, and received a perplexing reply. Was I ill? Should he come and get me? I stared at my mobile, wondering what on earth he was talking about, until I re-read my own message. Predictive texting had changed “rain” to “pain”.

I’m sure something similar has happened to anyone who texts, dashes off emails on a smartphone or uses Twitter. I compose tweets on my iPhone, on a keyboard that’s two inches by one, and I’d be astonished if I didn’t make mistakes. Usually I catch them, but I’m also aware of the brain’s ability to see what it expects, rather than what’s actually there. When I read Ed Miliband’s tweet about the death of the TV presenter Bob Holness, I registered the typing error – “Blackbusters” for “Blockbusters” – and thought no more about it. Sadly, I can’t say the same for the people who rushed on to Twitter and composed lame jokes about it. In no time at all, Miliband’s Twitter “gaffe” was being discussed as though it revealed something about his character or his ability to lead the
Labour Party.

Did Harold Wilson ever make a mistake in a handwritten note? Margaret Thatcher? I don’t know, largely because they lived in an age before social media, when their communications would have been scrutinised (if not actually typed) by someone else before being exposed to the world. I hope I’m not destroying cherished illusions here, but publishers employ copy-editors to correct errors by some of their most erudite and
successful authors.

In the case of Twitter, there are compelling reasons to think twice before mocking someone’s latest tweet. Not long after Miliband’s “Blackbusters” error, a political blogger quoted a satirical response that appeared to come from Diane Abbott, whom Miliband had reprimanded a day earlier for a carelessly expressed opinion on Twitter, and suggested that shadow ministers were now “openly taking the piss out of the leader”. Shortly after that, the blogger was on Twitter again, acknowledging that this “Abbott” tweet was a hoax. So, it seems, were recent tweets purporting to come from Rupert Murdoch’s wife, Wendi Deng.

In this unregulated world, it might be wise to think twice before using a single word or badly expressed phrase as evidence of anything. In Miliband’s case, we don’t even know for certain that he, rather than someone in his office, composed the tweet that caused this storm in a teacup. Of course someone is bound to say he should be in total command of everything that’s going on in his office, but that would inevitably lead to accusations of control-freakery. That Ed Miliband, he’s so worried about his image! He doesn’t trust his staff to do anything!

Much has been written about the abuse of social media by assorted bullies, racists and misogynists. What’s been less attended to is the way in which platforms such as Twitter encourage responses from an area of the brain that can’t entirely be trusted. Instant communication is just that: a fast response that doesn’t take into account factual accuracy, conflicting evidence and questions of authenticity.

There is a good side to Twitter, when conversations are conducted civilly and rationally, but sometimes it descends into the kind of name-calling you get at a children’s party. Ed Miliband has nothing to be ashamed of in this trivial episode, which simply demonstrates the capacity of Twitter to turn over-eager users into twits.

The single most effective means of reducing the number of unhappy relationships is education

The Independent, Wednesday 4 January 2012

I had dinner the other night with one of the most successful couples I know. They’ve been together most of their adult lives, clearly adore each other and recently celebrated their 30th anniversary with a trip to Paris. The only problem is that they’re not actually married – being gay, they’ve had to make do with a civil partnership. And their model
relationship doesn’t get a look-in when the great and the good start agonising (again) over family breakdown and the parlous state of marriage.

I agree we have a problem with relationships. Each January, having endured the myth of a joyful family Christmas, thousands of miserable husbands and wives pick up the phone and make an appointment to see a divorce lawyer. The divorce rate is rising, after a period of slow decline, and there are currently 3.8 million children in the family justice system. This is hardly a snapshot of a nation of happy families, and it has persuaded a High Court judge to set up a foundation which aims to reverse the “appalling and costly impact of family breakdown”. Sir Paul Coleridge wants to end what he calls a “recycling” pattern of switching to new partners instead of trying to make existing relationships work. I’ll come back to “recycling” in a moment, but a big part of his mission – the bit I greet with a weary groan – is to promote marriage.

“My message is, mend it – don’t end it,” declared Sir Paul. Unfortunately, his announcement came at roughly the same time as news was breaking of the latest in a series of horrific domestic murders over the festive period. On New Year’s Day, according to Durham police, Michael Atherton shot dead his partner, Susan McGoldrick, her sister, Alison Turnbull, and her niece, Tanya Turnbull; Ms McGoldrick’s daughter, Laura, 19, was injured, but managed to escape through an upstairs window. Friends said the couple separated for a couple of months last summer but got back together, and Laura was “scared” of her stepfather’s violence.

This is an extreme case of family breakdown, but it follows similar episodes last month when two apparently happily married men attacked their families and then killed themselves. Two days ago, in what police are treating as another “domestic” incident, a young mother was found dead from stab wounds in a car which had been used to abduct her from her home in east London.

My point is that many people urgently need to leave dangerous relationships, and no amount of lectures about the desirability of marriage is going to change that. In most cases, warning signs exist in the form of controlling behaviour, if not actual beatings, and everyone who goes into a relationship with another adult should know what to look for. Two women a week, on average, are killed by current or former partners, and there are 13 million separate incidents of physical violence or threats of violence against
women every year.

Pro-marriage rhetoric has little to say about these figures, which suggest there are fundamental problems in adult relationships right across the board. Unrealistic expectations are fuelled by celebrity magazines, which vastly accelerate the process of falling in love, getting married and having children; from first date to fevered speculation about a “baby bump” seems to take about three months. Recycled relationships are the norm among soap stars and reality TV contestants, and no one bats an eyelid when one of Katie Price’s ex-husbands takes up with a woman who was briefly married to a pop star she met in the Big Brother House.

This is real-life soap opera, its miseries cushioned by higher disposable incomes than most couples can call on. And one of its effects is to encourage an addiction to romance, where people who don’t have much else in their lives crave the highs of a new relationship. The result is the phenomenon of women who have babies by several different fathers, all of them absent, and the likelihood of one or more of the children ending up in care.

This is not a happy outcome for anyone, but the single most effective means of reducing the number of unhappy, and indeed abusive, relationships is education. Lessons in what constitutes a healthy relationship and how to deal with conflict should be routine for teenagers, and there are plenty of experts who could be invited into schools to provide it. I’m all in favour of sex education, but it also needs to cover the impact of having children and the fact that some people simply don’t want to become
parents.

There’s also an argument for offering relationship classes to adults when they’re going through a divorce or break-up, to help identify damaging patterns and reduce the effect on children. It’s hard to do this if you start from the premise that it’s better for couples to stay together or promote the one-size-fits-all solution of traditional marriage. My gay
friends could teach straight couples a lot about how to live with another adult, but no one thinks of asking their advice. I mean, it’s not as if they’re married, is it?

Independent on Sunday, 1 January 2012

I like handbags as much as anyone. Or I thought I did, until I went to the winter sales last week, saw the prices and reeled back. When did a fairly ordinary handbag start to cost £250, even when it’s reduced by half? When did they begin to have names – Marcie, Evelina and Daria – as though you’re acquiring a posh new friend rather than somewhere to keep your keys and phone? I’ve also discovered that there’s a kind of person who’s prepared to queue before dawn – when sensible human beings are still snuggled up in bed – for the privilege of buying one of these over-priced accessories.

In the West End of London, a crowd surged through the doors of Selfridges on the first morning of the sale as though their lives depended on getting inside. “We just want Gucci!” a young Chinese woman exclaimed, heading towards an area of the store that had been roped off in anticipation of the need to control numbers.

I don’t know how the leaders of the Chinese communist party spent the past few days – nervously trying to read the signals coming out of North Korea would be my guess – but I doubt whether it involved queuing half the night for a must-have shoulder bag at a bargain price. Six decades of communist propaganda have evidently produced a generation more knowledgeable about Gucci than about Chairman Mao.

I hadn’t previously encountered the phenomenon of queuing to get into high-end stores as though they’re nightclubs, but it’s also been visible in out-of-town shopping centres such as Bicester Village. In the bleakest economic conditions for decades, such conspicuous displays of affluence turn shopping into a status symbol, suggesting that the individuals waiting behind the rope have more cash than the rest of us and aren’t
embarrassed about it. They’re willing to pay astronomical prices for things they didn’t even know they wanted a few years ago, with huge (in every sense) handbags a case in point. You can’t wear them, and they don’t make you look slimmer, but they announce to the world that the lucky owner can afford to carry a shoulder bag with a full-price tag of £1,000.

Personally, I’ve never been on first-name terms with a handbag, but when Mulberry named one of its bags after Alexa Chung last year, it proved so popular that there was soon a waiting list – and a leap in the company’s profits. Angelina Jolie is the face of the upmarket brand Louis Vuitton, and she was photographed (by Annie Leibovitz, no less) with a huge LV bag in a wooden boat in Cambodia for its current advertising campaign.
Jolie didn’t wear make-up for the shoot and the bag is no longer in production, which, in the strange world of designer brands, counts almost as a bold anti-fashion statement.

At this point, I suppose I should admit I’m not the world’s most successful shopper. I went to the sales last week, fully intending to buy some dinner plates, and came home with a pair of pink sunglasses. I’m a sucker for beautiful objects and I quite admire the fashion industry’s ability to create demand for things we don’t really need, but the cult of the designer handbag is a step too far.

A thousand quid for something that, when you get it home, is full of scrunched-up tissue paper? Which you then have to fill with other things, until it’s so heavy it makes your back ache? It may be called Alexa or Donna and turn some of your friends green with envy. But it’s still just a bag, for god’s sake.

Independent on Sunday, 18 December 2011

There is a kind of man – witty, dashing, raffishly handsome – who is attractive to both men and women. Lord Byron was one such, and so was the writer Christopher Hitchens, who died on Thursday at the cruelly early age of 62. Appreciations have focused on his ferocious intellect and contempt for cant (another trait he shared with Byron). I admired his disdain for religion, which he maintained to the end, and latterly I enjoyed his forensic demolition of the death-loving cult of jihad.

Hitchens belonged to a circle of writers – Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie – who were fiercely protective of “the Hitch”. He grew up in the austere years that followed the Second World War, and his ideas were shaped by the intellectual upheavals of the Sixties. “I was a 1968er”, Hitchens once said, and his politics reflected the unthinkingly male outlook of his generation.

Later, after the 9/11 attacks, his support for the war in Iraq led to bitter accusations that he had betrayed his principles. I was on a platform with him in London when he declared he was no longer a socialist, but my difficulty with his politics pre-dated that change of heart. The problem wasn’t particular to him: Hitchens was typical of a group of intellectuals who relished challenging traditional power structures, but their
radicalism stopped at the bedroom door. He argued with feminists over abortion, and even though he later supported a woman’s right to choose, he never stopped describing the foetus as an “unborn child”.

It’s not unusual for revolutions to propose a redistribution of power among a limited group, and the shortcomings of Sixties radicals were striking in the matter of gender. In his memoir, published just before he was diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus, Hitchens barely mentions the women in his life. At some points in the book, he seems to regard women as another species, artlessly quoting Amis and the poet Craig Raine who believed “that there is a design flaw in the female form and that the breasts and
the buttocks really ought to be on the same side”.

Hitchens recalled hearing the feminist slogan “the personal is political” for the first time, and said it filled him with a “deep, immediate sense of impending doom”. He dismissed it as escapist and narcissistic, appearing to place one of the great ideologies of the 20th century in the same category as what he called “New Age gunk”. I don’t think he hated women, but he appeared to regard them as having limited usefulness.

Hitchens admired the ideas of the Enlightenment, but had little self-knowledge. One of his friends, the CNN commentator Barbara Olson, died in the plane that smashed into the Pentagon on 9/11, and I sometimes thought that might account for his intemperate rage towards people who opposed the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. His second wife, Carol Blue, described him perceptively as one of “those men who had never really been in battle and wished they had been”.

His premature death is a sad loss, but he is no more a secular saint than George Orwell, another radical who had strange ideas about women. Hitchens once said women aren’t funny, which is nonsense, but it’s also revealing about the way in which he formed his opinions. Like many clever men, he believed he inhabited the rarefied world of the intellect, but he couldn’t always distinguish between a thought and a feeling.

Whenever one of these tragedies occurs, it always has a long history

The Independent, Thursday 15 December 2011

Four adults and three children are dead; two children are in hospital. This is the grim tally from just two incidents of extreme domestic violence committed in ordinary British homes in the last few days. Such apparent murder-suicides have a profoundly shocking effect on family and friends, who are left asking painful questions, but they also underline the need for the Government’s new consultation on how domestic abuse is understood and handled in this country.

It is only a week since a former police inspector, Toby Day, murdered his wife and youngest child and wounded two older children before killing himself. Last weekend, another father, Richard Smith, like Day, aged 37, stabbed his wife and two sons before setting fire to a bedroom and dying of smoke inhalation. We’ve since seen a heart-rending photograph of Smith holding his baby son Aaron, while his wife Clair places a protective arm around their elder son, nine-year-old Ben.

They look like the perfect family, and it’s far from unusual for stunned neighbours to talk about men who appeared to live for their wives and children. Clearly this impression of normality cannot be right, but it also shows that the understanding of what constitutes domestic abuse is too limited. Physical violence is just one of the ways that abusive men (and some women) maintain control over their partners, as social workers and refuge staff know from working with victims. Men who “live for” their families often have an abnormal need for control; when they experience stressful events, such as losing a job or discovering an affair, they may decide that their families would be “better off” dead. By then, their partners may have endured years of controlling behaviour – shouting, bullying, restrictions on what they are allowed to wear – without recognising that the situation could escalate into lethal violence.

Yesterday, in a welcome development, the Home Office announced that its consultation will focus on whether the definition of domestic abuse should be widened to include “coercive control”. Obviously the signs are less easy than bruises for outsiders to spot, but it would be a significant step in changing how victims themselves think about abuse, and hence their readiness to talk to someone about it.

The consultation will also look at expanding the definition to victims below the age of 18. The Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, recently warned that 16- to 19-year-olds are now the group most at risk. The murders of two families in a single week are extreme and unusual events. But whenever one of these tragedies occurs, it always has a long history. No matter how difficult the circumstances, adults in happy, healthy relationships do not suddenly slaughter their nearest and dearest.

Independent on Sunday, 11 December 2011

As a breed, Conservative politicians hate the nanny state. So do right-wing columnists, some of whom are still whining about the fact that they can’t smoke in public places. Any suggestion that the principles behind the smoking ban be extended to junk food prompts near-apoplexy, as though we have an inalienable right to consume as much high-fat, sugary rubbish as we wish.

I’ve never been convinced that eating popcorn is a human right, and the argument that governments shouldn’t intervene in the nation’s eating habits looks shakier than ever. According to an analysis carried out at the Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine and published last week, around 40 per cent of cancers could be avoided by a change in lifestyle. High among the bad habits that need to be tackled are smoking and excess body weight, which we’ve known for a long time, but the study makes hard-hitting
claims about the specifics.

Among women, being overweight ranks second (after smoking) in the lifestyle factors linked to cancer, while for men it is fifth. The analysis suggests that 17,000 cancers a year are linked to excess weight, but warns the figure may be an underestimate. Another 29,000 may be attributable to poor eating habits, from insufficient fruit and vegetables to excess red meat and salt. Overall, the analysis suggests that around 134,000 cases of cancer a year are linked to environment and the way people live,
including poor diet, weight, smoking, alcohol consumption and inactivity.

That figure is bound to rise as more people exceed sensible weight limits, with one study published in The Lancet predicting that half the population could be obese by 2030. The cost in extra health care alone would be about £2bn a year, and that’s without taking into account all the misery caused by cancer and other obesity-related conditions such as heart disease. Last week, cancer charities were keen not to blame individuals for habits that raise their risk; it’s clear that many people find it hard to
resist fatty food and cheap alcohol, which leaves government intervention the only serious option.

It’s worked with smoking, which used to be enjoyed by more than half the male population and has now dropped to a fifth. The success of campaigns against tobacco, from graphic health warnings on cigarette packets to high rates of tax and an advertising ban, provides an optimistic model of how self-destructive behaviour can be altered. But Labour governments were never as bold about tackling the food and drinks industry, and Conservative politicians have a visceral loathing of imposing punitive rates of tax on, for example, cheap alcohol and fatty food.

Of course they don’t have the same scruples when it comes to other species of “interference” in people’s lives, such as telling them they shouldn’t expect to depend on state benefits. Cancer charities claimed last week that new proposals mean even patients on chemotherapy in hospitals will have to prove they are too sick to work. The
Government says the proposals have been misunderstood, but wouldn’t it be more
sensible to try to reduce the number getting cancer in the first place?

Thousands of lives have been saved by the smoking ban. Unless it wants to look criminally irresponsible, the Government should tackle weight and alcohol problems with the same ferocity. Bring on the nanny state, and ignore the predictable protests.

Independent on Sunday, 4 December 2011

It could happen to anyone, surely? You walk naked from the bathroom of your hotel suite and encounter a cleaner, who gives your genitals a seductive look. In a moment, and without a word being spoken, the two of you are at it like rabbits. The whole thing’s over in six minutes and you put on your clothes, ready to enjoy an agreeable lunch on your way to the airport. Then you board your plane, first-class of course, heading for Paris and Berlin where you have important meetings.

If this sounds like a fantasy from a 1970s lads’ mag, you may be surprised to learn it’s what’s supposed to have happened to the former director of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, in a New York hotel. In real life, DSK’s pleasant day in Manhattan – shower, blow-job, lunch – was rudely terminated by the arrival of the NYPD, who removed him from his plane seat on suspicion of attempted rape.

Yet it was all an unfortunate misunderstanding, according to Michel Taubmann, DSK’s biographer, whose book on the furore has just been published. The politician’s friends might think the last thing he needs is more publicity; it’s only a couple of months since French prosecutors decided there was evidence that DSK committed a sexual assault on a journalist in 2003, and declined to proceed only because it fell outside the three-year statutory limit. But Taubmann says he talked to DSK half a dozen times, and he offers a version of events that prompted a pithy headline in New York magazine: “Ladies Look at DSK and Instantly Want to Do Sex, Says DSK Biography”.

The book repeats the claim that DSK was the victim of an international conspiracy to prevent him becoming the Socialist party’s residential candidate, a theory that has also been given space in the New York Review of Books. But the most startling passage in Taubmann’s book refers to the moment when DSK emerged naked from the shower to find Nafissatou Diallo in his suite and is said to have concluded, although he didn’t speak to her, that she wanted to have sex with him: “The flesh is weak. Dominique Strauss-Kahn saw a proposition. The situation amuses him. Rarely in his life has he refused a moment of pleasure. He does not resist the temptation to receive oral sex. The act is fast, very fast.”

Ms Diallo’s lawyers dismiss the notion that she consented to DSK’s “violent and abusive sexual acts”, along with Taubmann’s claim that she stole his BlackBerry. Elsewhere, Taubmann discusses DSK’s alleged involvement in what’s become known as the Carlton affair, a French plice investigation into claims that a prostitution ring existed at the luxury Carlton Hotel in Lille. Taubmann says DSK admits to having enjoyed “libertine gatherings” but denies paying “even one cent” for sex, fleshing out his portrait of a man who is irresistibly attractive to women.

That isn’t the picture that’s emerged since DSK’s arrest. Though charges in New York were dropped, the politician looks more and more like a figure from a previous age. Feminism and gender equality have passed him by, leaving a man who behaves more like an 18th-century rake than a progressive politician.

Two days ago, DSK started to distance himself from Taubmann’s book, but his insight comes a little late. In the modern world, there isn’t much sympathy for men who appear to attribute such improbable pulling power to the penis.

A woman’s place is off the pitch, is it?

The insidious bit excuses the ‘experts’ and places the blame firmly on the public

The Independent, Thursday 1 December 2011

Imagine the scene at the BBC. There they are, busily collecting nominations from sports editors for the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award, when someone notices that most of the names belong to men. I mean, how on earth did that happen? Especially after they went out of their way to create a “level playing field” – I think that’s the requisite cliché – by seeking nominations from such admirably gender-neutral publications as Nuts and Zoo. Sick as parrots all round!

As I’m sure you know by now, this year’s 10-man shortlist is exactly that: no Rebecca Adlington, no Jessica Ennis and no Jill Scott (plays football for England, in case you didn’t know). And someone said, as someone was bound to do, that “you shouldn’t include a woman just for the sake of it”, as though there are so few women involved in sport at the top level that they couldn’t possibly get on the shortlist on merit.

The thing about most lists, whether they are of sports stars, chefs or public intellectuals, is that they’re more likely than not to display a (mostly) unconscious male bias. What comes next is a series of rationalisations as the people responsible try to argue themselves out of a hole, claiming that it’s not their fault – they just canvassed “expert”
opinion – and that, anyway, women simply haven’t got to the same level as men.

This is usually “bollocks”, to use a technical term, but it chimes with the prejudices that excluded half the population in the first place. For all the sour claims that women run
everything these days – enough to get you a documentary slot on TV if not a mini-series on Radio 4 – it’s still the case in most professions that men confer authority on other men. It’s not so much a matter of disliking women (though some do) as the simple fact of not seeing us in the same way. Andy Murray is always more likely to get on a list of top sports people than Rebecca Adlington.

Now we come to the really insidious bit, which ecuses the professional commentators and places the blame firmly on the ublic. Sorry, guv, the argument runs, but your verage viewer isn’t interested i women’s sport, and it won’t get anything like the same coverage unless and util that changes. Of course, this sidesteps the question of who makes the
decisions that shape public taste in the first place; it’s pretty obvious that people can’t watch sports that aren’t shown on television, no matter how interesting they might find them.

This year’s Sports Personality of the Year shortlist includes three golfers. If it was up to the lads at Zoo, it would also feature a snooker player. That’s all you need to know about the assumptions of the people who helped compile it, and I have a timely piece of
advice for the BBC. Next year, ask Vogue.

Tuesday 22 November 2011

Writing for Channel 4 News, journalist Joan Smith reflects on her day giving evidence to the Leveson inquiry at the Royal Courts of Justice.

Now I know how actors feel before they go on stage. Waiting to give evidence at the Leveson inquiry was the most difficult moment of a long day, as I expect it will be for other witnesses this week.

There’s something unnerving about sitting in a hushed courtroom, knowing you’re on next, with the points you want to make running in an apparently endless loop in your head.

First you have to get into the courtroom, and it was a relief to leave behind all the photographers and camera crews who’d gathered to get pictures of alleged victims of phone hacking arriving at the Royal Courts of Justice in central London.

It’s a gothic warren of a place, and a curious setting for an inquiry which is hearing evidence about intense tabloid interest in the girlfriends of actors and footballers.

Fearful stillness

Of course the inquiry is also about ordinary people – I was going to say less well-known people, but that’s no longer the case for Bob and Sally Dowler. The abduction and murder of their daughter Milly thrust them into the spotlight, and on Monday they talked in quiet but firm voices about the false hopes raised when Milly’s phone was hacked by someone working for the News of the World.

It was one of the few moments when the courtroom was completely silent, paralysed into an almost fearful stillness by the pathos of what we were hearing. The hacking of Milly’s phone led directly to the setting up of the Leveson inquiry so it seemed right that they should be the first victims to talk about their experience of tabloid intrusion.

Later in the day, Hugh Grant‘s evidence produced some dramatic moments as he
disagreed with Robert Jay QC, counsel to the inquiry, about his interpretation
of events and headlines. Grant came over as wry, modest and funny, although he was also visibly annoyed about years of intrusion into his private life.

Censorship

When I gave evidence, I was encouraged to talk not just about seeing my personal details in Glenn Mulcaire’s notes – a chilling experience I’ll never forget – but about the importance of a free press. That made the experience a little easier because this is something Icare passionately about, and I don’t think for one moment that the Leveson
inquiry is going to place unacceptable restrictions on the media.

I’ve spent years campaigning for free expression in countries where censorship is rife, talking to journalists who’ve been imprisoned and tortured because they tried to hold the powerful to account.

During the proceedings, I couldn’t help thinking about the latest demonstrations in Tahrir Square. In Egypt, people are risking death because they believe in the freedom to express themselves, championing values that some sections of the British press seems to have forgotten.

That is what the Leveson inquiry is about, and so far it’s doing a very good job of establishing what’s gone wrong with the popular press. It’s about values as much as regulation, and that came across very strongly in the first day of witnesses’ evidence.

I think those brave Egyptian demonstrators might be puzzled by what’s emerging in a steady stream from court 73 of the Royal Courts of Justice; somehow, I don’t think they’re dying for the opportunity to publish pictures of Hugh Grant’s baby.

The ‘core participant victim’ on the day she gave evidence to the Leveson Inquiry

The Independent, Tuesday 22 November 2011

I woke long before the alarm and was out of the house by eight. Then I got a bus to my solicitor’s office where I joined Milly Dowler’s parents, Bob and Sally for coffee. We spent half an hour going over final details as we prepared to give evidence at Lord Justice Leveson’s inquiry into the ethics of the press.

In the lobby, I said hello to Max Mosley and someone introduced me to Hugh Grant. Then we were outside, ready for the short walk to the High Court and the waiting media. Even when you are expecting it, the massed ranks of cameras are a sight to behold. As I walked towards them, slightly ahead of Bob and Sally Dowler, I heard the endless click of shutters, as though a flock of birds had been startled by our arrival.

Inside, we got the lift to the second floor and entered court 73, where I greeted more alleged victims, Elle Macpherson’s former adviser Mary-Ellen Field and journalist Tom Rowland. After just a week of formal hearings, a camaraderie has developed among the core participant victims, as we’re known.

Mr and Mrs Dowler were the first witnesses and Lord Leveson treated them with gentle courtesy, thanking them for agreeing to appear. The moment when Mrs Dowler described finding space in her missing daughter’s voicemail – the mailbox had previously been full – electrified the room. Naturally Mrs Dowler fell to the conclusion that Milly was alive, not realising that her messages had been accessed and deleted by people working for the News of the World. The story is familiar by now – it triggered the setting up of the inquiry – but to hear it in her own words was almost unbearable.

There was a brief recess before it was my turn. A barrister for the inquiry, Carine Patry Hoskins, asked if I regard myself as a celebrity, which made me laugh – a rare light moment in a mostly sombre and often gruelling day. Like the other alleged hacking victims I’m aware of the irony that complaining about tabloid intrusion means having to talk about my private life. That is something Hugh Grant clearly found hard, although the court laughed when he described having to make a press statement in trying
circumstances: “I was dressed as a cannibal at the time.”

Yesterday’s evidence ranged far beyond phone hacking to cover aspects of media intrusion, and Lord Leveson is keen to hear witnesses’ ideas about how to reform the press. We are only at the beginning of a long process, but I don’t think that powerful, ethical journalism has anything to fear from this inquiry.