It makes the little hairs in my ears go all atwitch. You know how it works. A paper can't prove that someone is having an affair, so they run a story about adultery on the same page as a photo of the celebrity concerned. Or they have heard on the (nearly always inaccurate) rumour mill that someone is gay, so they wait until they can run an accidentally camp-looking photo. Or they use a deliberately ambiguous headline. Or commission a suggestive cartoon. All plausibly deniable in court. And all so blasted cowardly. If you've got something to say, say it. Don't insinuate; don't dissimulate; don't hide behind titter words and double entendre. Publish and be damned.
Sadly, this snigger tendency has been in evidence in some parts of the press this week in relation to Liam Fox and it completely missed the point. Of course Fox had to go, in my view, because while serving as Defence Secretary he had been running his own independent foreign policy and he'd broken the ministerial code of conduct. But for heaven's sake, let's grow up and stop this Carry On up the Division Bell way of doing politics...
Chris Bryant MP, the Independent's new Saturday columnist, on that nasty Liam Fox business.
On Monday Bryant came up with the great line; "I'm perplexed by this smear and innuendo about 'smears and innuendo'."
Itself a bit of innuendo, surely?
Perhaps Bryant was thinking about this profile in The Indy of the "colourful" MP "who loves to party".
The Independent is the Foxiest newspaper today.
We also get; 'The rise and fall of the council estate boy who took up the Thatcherite flame'.
And their other house gay, Philip Hensher, bores for England in 'Werritty had a priceless commodity that others could mine – he had Access'.
I know! Who knew???
Snore.
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