Pants starting to smoulder?

As you can see none of this is having the slightest impact on the Polls in which the Conservative Party are doing rather better. I think it is about the clearest example I can recall of a subject that matters to nerds but to absolutely no-one else.Imagine talking to someone with a real job…

” God its awful …
” Really what ?”
” David Cameron…!”
” Oh.. whats that then, cuts ,hoodies letting criminals off or something? ”
“Far far worse he employed someone who worked for the News of the World ”
” At the time ?”
” No”
” Is he still employed ?”
” No”
” So the awful thing is that the Prime minister employed a Press man for a Press job not employed by the News Of The World and he has since resigned ”
” Yes but the hacking scandal …”
” All at it weren`t they ?”
” Ye but the man who used to work for Cameron and the News of the World was involved ”
” Did he know that?”
” No”
” So without knowing about any scandal David Cameron briefly employed a man who had once worked at a Paper that now is involved in a scandal everyone was involved in ..I shall toss and turn all night …”
” Isn`t that terrible judgement …”
” Oh yeah off with his head, you know what mate , could not give a f— and may I say , if you were to speak in Russian blank verse I might have more chance of understanding why your knickers are in a twist”

Try it ,I am not even exaggerating

…or alternatively, Paul Newman: ‘Cameron employed a guy who worked for the organisation which hacked Milly Dowler’s phone’. Somehow, I don’t think that explanation is only for ‘nerds’.

I may be innocent in my old age, but I can see nothing wrong with the Ed Llewlyn/ Yates interchange at all. On the Wallis matter, again, I must be missing the point. Can you please explain why you and others think this the smoking gun?

“As you can see none of this is having the slightest impact on the Polls in which the Conservative Party are doing rather better”

Shorter troll……tories are so sleazy that they don’t give a shit what their masters do.

I hear a clown got slapped in the face with a cream pie today. My spidey senses tell me it’ll be front page news for some reason though…

So people are to be thrown under the bus just because they are arrested?

Should it be determined whether they are guilty of something, first?

The Left has worked itself up into such a fever-pitch of anticipation, with lurid fantasies of getting revenge on tabloid scumbags, that’s it’s losing the plot a bit. The public pie attack on a frail old man by Sunny’s pals in UKuncut just says it all, really. Clueless.

My best bit was this…

Rupert: …….”This only happened because our competitors were out to get us.” Don’t you just love free market bullies blaming the system. Another libertarian moron.

So he’s saying competition is to blame?

As you can see none of this is having the slightest impact on the Polls in which the Conservative Party are doing rather better.

And News Corp’s share price has been rising today. These hardly look like the Last Days of the Murdoch Empire. They seem to have acquitted themselves very well before the select committee, and even garnered some sympathy thanks to the antics of the comedy left.

“The public pie attack on a frail old man by Sunny’s pals in UKuncut just says it all, really. ”

Oh look a tory butler troll. Always defending their maters.

So he’s saying competition is to blame?

“Competition” certainly might explain why the Mirror has not been subject to the same kind of scrutiny, despite the Information Commissioner saying they “hacked” three times as many phones as the NotW. Yes, “competition” explains that peculiar elision.

Scooby is a good name for you as a butler troll. An obidient dog

Serving your corporate masters, and begging for a tit bit is all you have.

Always defending their maters.

I’d defend any 80 year old man being subjected to a thuggish attack as a publicity stunt. That’s because I have some decency and human feeling. You apparently don’t need any, as your bile-filled ideology substitutes admirably for your purposes.

As you can see none of this is having the slightest impact on the Polls in which the Conservative Party are doing rather better.

Are polls now supposed to determine what is right or wrong?

Come on Sunny, you yourself have argued on occasion that it’s not whether something is right or wrong, but how it plays with the public. Remember how you advised Labour to exploit Ken Clarke’s daft comments on rape?

An 80 year old piece of dog shit is what Murdoch is. He should be handed over to the CIA and waterboarded untill he tells us what we want to know. After all, that is what he has supported through his right wing media megaphone. Always telling us the criminals get it too easy.

So put his family on a plane along with Brooks and send the some client state and then torture them till they tell the truth. I’m sure he would not mind since he thinks it is just fine for other people.

“I have some decency and human feeling.”

In your dreams fido. Anyone who defends Murdoch has not got an ounce of human decency.

HRT can help with that, you know.

“He should be handed over to the CIA and waterboarded until he tells us what we want to know.”

Extraordinary rendition could be even more effective.

But who knew at the time this fellow ought not have been employed?

Mr. Murdoch:…..” Do you accept that ultimately you are responsible for this whole fiasco?”

Rupert: “No.”

All you need to know about right wing capitalist thugs who always preach personal responsibility.

I was fascinated to learn how close the relationship between the News of the World and Gordon Brown was. I guess that was probably a mis-judgement in retrospect. La Brooks was at No.1 0 six times a year with Brown, not at all with Cameron
They have a real problem here. The more it comes out the more obvious it is that this is a put up job using the Dowler issue to pay off scores and sort out a man grown too big for his boots. No problem with that but oh god the hand wringing is unbearable .
It was crystal clear that all of this trade was well known.It is recorded fact that Brooks herself had already appeared to discuss it two years ago
She can say quite rightly she has nothing that the rest of the industry were not doing, which you Parliament knew about.
I loathed her before but my god she is sexy smart beautiful and running rings around the creepy balding clerks whose pretence of shock looks like second rate pantomime.

All our leaders for the past 20 years or more have pandered to the Murdochs and others in the right wing press. If none of this came out they all bloody would have continued. Left, right, all the lot of them. This is why the polls haven’t chaned.

I genuinely believe instead of going for Cameron a better tactic for Ed would have been to recognise this toxic relationship with the press and to genuinly try to move us all away from it, instead of just making out only the Tories have been up to this.

Obviously Cameron has more serious questions with the Coulson case – but Brown and Blair would have swam through shite to get a nod from Murdoch. And thats what, IMHO, the majority of us in the country want to change – we want to see our representatives representing us. Not the press. Especially ‘our’ lot on the left.

@16. sally: “An 80 year old piece of dog shit is what Murdoch is. He should be handed over to the CIA and waterboarded untill he tells us what we want to know.”

Christopher Hitchens had the balls to try this experiment. He was waterboarded and determined that it was torture.

At the time of the experiment, Christopher Hitchens was unaware of his cancer status. He knew that he was an unhealthy bloke, but to define physical torture is about a couple of questions: Do you think that you might die or be permanently incapacitated if somebody does this to you? And then the experimenters put his head under water.

Hitchens was bloody lucky. If he had conducted that experiment six or twelve months later, the results may have been different.

My point is that liberals don’t make jokes about abuse unless they are really funny or illuminating. Waterboarding foes is not funny. Jokes about imprisoned Murdoch family members meeting stereotyped black inmates in the showers are not funny. Soap, not funny.

Savour this by Andrew Giligan – of Blair’s Iraq dossier fame – in the Telegraph:

Why the tide is lapping at the Government’s feet
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/phone-hacking/8646264/Why-the-tide-is-lapping-at-the-Governments-feet.html

Giligan turned out to be right in that interview with John Humphrys on the BBC Today programme in 2003 about sexing up those claims of Iraq’s WMD. Could be that he is right about this too.

I merely point out the hypocrisy of people like Murdoch. They think that torture is just fine for other people, but when they are in they dock they get lawyered up, and scream about their rights. Just like the bleeding heart liberals who they attack all the time.

Murdoch, Conrad Black, Bush, Blair, they are all the same.

They think that torture is just fine for other people

No they don’t. The only person on record wanting to see torture (in fact probably fantasizing about doing the torturing yourself) is you. That’s why, bad though people like Blair and Murdoch might be, the rest of us will always, always prefer them to sad nutcases like you and the rest of the truly lunatic left.

27 Typical tory troll. Has not got the fuck idea what he is talking about.

Fox news, just one example has been pushing the idea of torture for years.

Sorry for being a bit slow, can somebody explain this for me: at that point in time why did Ed think it best Yates did not discuss this topic with Cameron? Was it not because it’s wrong for some reason to discuss ongoing investigations, or was it because they wanted to get away with doing nothing yet wanted to pretend they had no idea if thing came out, or for some other reason?

In case it’s not clear, I’m not trying to cast doubt on anything, genuine question. Not been following things that closely, not seeing import of this, yet.

@25. Bob B: “Giligan turned out to be right in that interview with John Humphrys on the BBC Today programme in 2003 about sexing up those claims of Iraq’s WMD.”

What I do know is that a very talented and thoughtful scientist may have taken his life following that exposure.

I think that is shameful for them (I am not embarrassed by it) that the journalists who questioned David Kelly failed to understand his stress, who he was.

@30: “What I do know is that a very talented and thoughtful scientist may have taken his life following that exposure”

True and sad. But Dr David Kelly’s suicide – if it was suicide – can’t be blamed on Andrew Giligan, who was voicing the doubts that Dr Kelly had expressed but in a news context which ensured a much larger audience.

Giligan was forced into resigning his job with the BBC as a result and Greg Dyke, the BBC Director General, lost his job as well. Blair – and Campbell, who had a big hand in editing that infamous dossier on Iraq’s WMD – have much to answer for.

At the time, many, including myself, thought it extremely odd that the dossier claimed no less than four times that Iraq could use WMD within 45 minutes of a command from Saddam Hussein. Only later did it come out that the branch in the Defence Intelligence Service tasked with assessing incoming intelligence on WMD disowned the claims made in the dossier. And later, it emerged that the claim was based on intelligence from one unproven source, a factor Blair was aware of but chose not to disclose.

I say all this to show that: (a) current concerns about where we were with the embedded connections between Murdoch’s staffers and Downing St and the Met Police go well beyond political tribalism and partisan sympathies, (b) more than a few of us believe that the time is long overdue for cleaning out the political stables – more than half of MPs in the last Parliament overclaimed expenses.

With the very honourable exception of Tom Watson, the Labour MPs on both hearings were pretty terrible.They failed to ask many of the questions they should have done or pressed points home when they got the opportunity – it was like watching your team mess up their tactics, miss open goals etc. Jim Sheridan was particularly bad. Wasted opportunities abounded.

@32 – So let’s…

a. Clean things up, and I’m sure you love your contention that they’re “all in it”, but the pattern is quite clear who will suffer most, and that can’t be used as an excuse by the Tories not to do it.
b. Stop grossly underpaying MP’s, so expenses can be cut without turning parliament into a rich boy’s club more than it already is!

29. Luis enrique: “Sorry for being a bit slow…”

Your’e not slow. If this was my business to analyse, I would have employed you to tell me stuff. And we would have sensible answers.

@22

“La Brooks was at No.10 six times a year with Brown, not at all with Cameron”

Wrong. Brooks has had meetings with Cameron 26 times, as was mentioned in the hearing. She’s not been to Downing St? Maybe because her henchman Coulson was working for Cameron in the same bloody building?

Sadly I can’t see either of these tidbits as a smoking gun. Having thrown Coulson under the bus, they are probably insulated from his use of Wallis unless it can be shown they were aware of it. As for the e-mail, Llewellyn appears to be trying to ensure that no-one accuses No. 10 of being behind the decision to drop the investigation. He probably could have phrased it better.

And does the late Dr. Kelly have to be exhumed at the slightest excuse? There’s only one person responsible for a suicide. By definition.

I think Simon Jenkins has it right

The BBC led on the story every day for two weeks, despite the state of Europe’s finances, famine spreading across Africa and Cameron’s challenge to the welfare state. The BBC had its share of hard knocks from the Murdoch press and clearly could not resist hitting back.

This precisely shows why a single dominant state broadcaster is unacceptable and there is still no evidence whatsoever that anyone cares except his political enemies and commercial rivals , the Guardian and the BBC

@36: “And does the late Dr. Kelly have to be exhumed at the slightest excuse? There’s only one person responsible for a suicide. By definition.”

There are bigger and more worrying issues at stake. Alastair Campbell, Blair’s communications director, was a contributor to Forum magazine and then political editor of the Mirror before his ascendancy.

I take all the stuff in the news about the pernicious influence of the Murdoch tabloids on British politics, the intrusive phone hacking to gather news, and embedding Murdoch staffers in Downing St and the Metropolitan Police but Blair also wanted to buy in tabloid expertise and cultivate tabloid support. For years, he carefully nurtured his personal relationship with Murdoch:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2006/jul/23/newscorporation.rupertmurdoch

Compare the serial fixation on the influence of the tabloids in Britain with this illuminating TV documentary by Adam Curtis of how Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew, originated the early development of “Public Relations” to manipulate public opinion: The Century Of The Self
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyPzGUsYyKM

it was also admitted by the Conservatives that Neil Wallis was advising David Cameron while he employed Andy Coulson.

No, Neil Wallis gave informal advice on an unpaid basis to Andy Coulson, not Dvid Cameron. In less fraught circumstances this would probably be described as ‘having a pint’.

Sorry for being a bit slow, can somebody explain this for me: at that point in time why did Ed think it best Yates did not discuss this topic with Cameron?

Two reasons, I suspect. The first is that it would be improper for No.10 to be seen to be involved in an ongoing police investigation (that was apparently the view of the Permanent Secretary, who was consulted). The second, less formal and more political, reason was that No.10 didn’t want there to be a controversial answer to ‘when did the Prime Minister first know about this.’

More interesting (for constitutional/legal bores anyway) is the way the emails are written – I’d have said that’s an obvious way of avoiding FOI requests turning up anything relevant.

Thanks Tim. Well, isn’t that always how we imagined political secretaries to behave. But I guess ex-post that behaviour looks like wilfully ignoring that you are employing bad guys.

“ce whatsoever that anyone cares except his political enemies and commercial rivals , the Guardian and the BBC”

You have to be to a particularly heartless bastard to describe the family of Milly Dowler, and families of dead soldiers as “commercial rivals” and “political enemies”.

If you could cut the childish partisan crap, and just focus on making the case for the break up of the BBC you’d get a lot further.

“37. Paul Newman

This precisely shows why a single dominant state broadcaster is unacceptable and there is still no evidence whatsoever that anyone cares except his political enemies and commercial rivals , the Guardian and the BBC”

If that was true the NotW would still be a going concern. Nor does it explain why Sky News – Sky! – have been giving the story as much prominence as the BBC.

Check out this, where Tory MP Claire Mensch manages the seemingly impossible feat of allowing Piers Morgan to claim the moral high ground:

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/europe/07/19/uk.phone.hacking.morgan/index.html?hpt=hp_c2

And I thought the Labour MPs, apart from Tom Watson, were bad yesterday.

Cameron employed a guy who worked for the organisation which hacked Milly Dowler’s phone

Problem is that you can substitute “Ed Miliband” for “Cameron” and the sentence is still true. If Coulson’s appointment was a lapse of judgment, so was Baldwin’s.

It looks like Ed Llewellyn is almost certainly toast.

Absolutely not. He did the right thing, playing it according to the book. As the Cabinet Secretary has since confirmed.

@Scooby #11:

“Competition” certainly might explain why the Mirror has not been subject to the same kind of scrutiny, despite the Information Commissioner saying they “hacked” three times as many phones as the NotW.

Do you have a cite for this? I’m assuming you’re not talking about the 2006 reports (“What price privacy?” and “What price privacy now?”), since for very obvious reasons they cannot support this claim.

For the hard of thinking:

– “illegal obtaining of confidential personal information” is not identical to “phone-hacking”;

– statistics compiled from the papers seized from a single private investigator cannot readily be extrapolated to another private investigator

– the single private investigator concerned was Steve Whittamore, not Glenn Mulcaire, who was NotW’s blagger of choice; so the fact that NotW turned up in the stats shows how widespread their activites were.

@Paul Newman #22:

I was fascinated to learn how close the relationship between the News of the World and Gordon Brown was. I guess that was probably a mis-judgement in retrospect. La Brooks was at No.1 0 six times a year with Brown, not at all with Cameron

Look at it this way, Paul. With whom do yoiu have the closer relationship: someone you meet 6 times a year at the office, or someone with whom you share tennis matches, walks, picnics, and with whom you exchange Christmas and birthday party invitations?

@ 44

“illegal obtaining of confidential personal information” is not identical to “phone-hacking”

Not identical, but morally equivalent; don’t you think?

@Flowerpower #46:

Not identical, but morally equivalent; don’t you think?

Not necessarily. In fact, I would say that some of the other methods could be morally worse than phone-hacking.

@37 – Absolutely, countries with 90% state broadcaster share need to cut them down to size.

What, you say, under half that for the BBC? Well, then.

Simon Jenkins and all the tossers who have been taking the Murdoch shilling are not to be taken seriously.

Could be Robin , that wasser name preferred Cameron`s company, who would not, .Judging by which leader issued an invitation to the NOTW to his own child`s funeral ,however, I think there is little doubt who was trying hardest.
The BBC carries about 70% of the news a dominant position it has used to attack it rivals. Sky`s share of broadcasting is iro 6% but a lot of that is sport .There is no comparison .
I would say something like 20% would be appropriate with room for one or two similarly powerful rivals.

If it can be shown that Cameron was knowingly involved in the commission of a crime, he is toast. If it can be shown that Cameron was knowingly involved in the cover-up of a crime, he is toast.

If all that can be shown is that Cameron once employed someone who was later accused of a crime which did not involve Cameron in any way, he is fine.

@Paul Newman #55:

Could be Robin , that wasser name preferred Cameron`s company, who would not,

Indeed. So who has the closer relationship with “wasser name”?

So who has the closer relationship with “wasser name”?

I think it’s reasonably clear that Brooks had a closer relationship with Cameron, and Murdoch had a closer relationship with Brown.