Hugh Grant, the News of the World scandal, and tabloid scum

The only time I’ve ever been approached to take part in a criminal conspiracy was by a Sunday tabloid hack. It happened over three decades ago. He’d done a photo item about a rather dubious “gentleman’s” magazine the publisher I was working for was launching.

After the story appeared, the “reporter” invited me out for lunch at a local wine bar (I was a bit surprised, given that publicity folk normally pick up the tab). After we’d got through our portions of game pie and a bottle of red, he suggested, smirking all the while, that we got together regularly for lunch, paid for it in turn, and then both submitted expenses claims for the lunches we hadn’t paid for. I seem to remember he’d figured out a way of getting restaurants to dish out two copies of the bill – and most things were paid for in cash back then, so the transaction would have been untraceable.

From the practiced way he made the proposal, I assumed he had this sort of arrangement with a number of public relations people. A nice little earner. I presume he thought I’d be up for it because I was working for a publisher who had just entered the sleazy world of soft-porn and therefore had to be a sleazeball myself.

Flesh crawling, I made my excuses and left.

Up to that point, I’d only dealt with literary editors – ever paper had one back then – and there had never been a scintilla of an iota of a hint of anything underhand: they were all, de haut en bas, nice, educated chaps, with whom I spent many an afternoon guzzling, quaffing and chatting. (To such an extent that I piled on three stone in weight over an 18-month period.)

Now, I’m not suggesting that defrauding your employer by submitting false expenses claims is on a par with, allegedly, hacking into the phone of a missing girl and, by deleting some of the texts, giving her parents false hope that their daughter might still be alive. Anyone guilty of the first crime deserves to be dismissed by their employer, and, possibly, receive a short custodial sentence, whereas the perpetrator of the second evidently deserves to spend an extremely long time in a very unpleasant prison surrounded by large, violent men with catholic sexual proclivities

Call me prejudiced, but ever since that lunch, nothing I’ve ever heard about what the people who work in the world of tabloid papers get up to has surprised me in the least. They appear to inhabit a different moral universe from the rest of us – and it’s a particularly disgusting one. (Sorry to come over all high-handed, but really!) 

I used to have to read these rags when I was with BBC News, but I’m not sure I’ve so much as glanced at one in 14 years, apart from the innocuous give-away celebrity-fests you find on the tube. I realise these papers aren’t exactly aimed at me, and I have no problem with the fact that millions of Britons read them: I’m just delighted I don’t have to. (This isn’t simple snobbery, by the way - it’s also a  source of joy that I don’t have to soil my mind with the Independent, the Guardian and the New Statesman.)

When it comes to disgusting, though, I also have to mention Hugh Grant, who’s gleefully jumped all over this case to support his own campaign against the intrusion of the press into the private lives of the rich and famous.

Not a classy move. There’s a world of difference between torturing the parents of a missing child and trying to find out what a world-famous actor who was once arrested for paying a prostitute to perform a sexual act on him in a car in a public place is getting up to these days.