Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz. Rupert Murdoch is now the wizard – the curtain has been whisked back and there is an old, bewildered man. Photograph: Cine Text/Allstar/Sportsphoto?At a time like this, all journalists ought to examine their consciences, those sometimes atrophied organs. I've never hacked a phone, and wouldn't know how; in my early days the height of criminality was thought to be acquiring a carbon copy of a rival's article.
I did have one felonious moment. A woman in Belfast had been shouting imprecations from her kitchen window at paratroopers who were in her neighbourhood, and a soldier had fired a rubber bullet into her eyes. Robert Fisk of the pre-Murdoch Times and I went to the hospital to see her, gaining entry by claiming we were relatives from Leeds. Ulster folk were always delighted to tell you what horrors they had suffered, so we assumed a warm welcome when we revealed who we were. Unfortunately the nurse, having said: "Some relatives have come all the way from Yorkshire to see you!" decided to stay at the bedside, so we couldn't maintain the fiction and instead made a swift exit. It was wrong, certainly, though it was also a matter of public interest, not public prurience.
The late Nick Tomalin said that journalists needed to have "rat-like cunning". Mine was mouse-like cunning. For example, when I was collecting material for a political gossip column, and someone said something interesting, I would wait for them to add, "and I don't want to read that in your magazine!" In which case I wouldn't use it. But if they didn't remember to say it, I'd nip off to the loo, write the story up, come back and change the subject.
If a few days later they said, "But I was speaking off the record!" I would express deep regret and say, "Well, you should have told me ..."
?Rupert Murdoch is suddenly the Wizard of Oz. The curtain has been whisked back and there is an old, bewildered man who doesn't seem to have any real idea about what is happening. I never met him but I saw him at the London Aquarium during a reception I was covering for the BBC. There was an elderly, short, stooped man standing on his own against the wall opposite the shark tank, lit by an eerie blue light. I peered closely and noticed it was Murdoch. My eyes turned from Murdoch to the shark, its jaws wide open, then from the shark to Murdoch. Then Jack Straw came to chat to him, so he wasn't lonely any more.
?Captain Ian Hale sends me an extract from Castles of Steel by Robert Massie, which covers the disastrous Gallipoli campaign. It was reported by one Keith Murdoch, Rupert's father, with a blend of exaggeration and outright fibs. He contrasted the noble, manly Australian soldiers with the British troops, whose "physique is very much below that of the Turks ... they are merely a lot of youths without strength to endure or brains to improve their condition ..." The fib was this: "After the first day at Sulva an order had to be issued to British officers to shoot without mercy any British soldier who lagged behind or loitered in advance."
As Hale suggests, "the gratuitous denigration of British troops, the black and white contrasts and the underhand and vaguely dishonest methods used are a sample of things to come".
?Poor Harper Seven Beckham, having to live with that name all her life. It's the Boy Named Sue syndrome; at the very least it will toughen her up. Ed Balls must have suffered the same, though at least his parents didn't give him some stupid forename like Chocolate Salty as a tribute to Isaac Hayes. Moon Unit Zappa quietly dropped the Unit. Zowie Bowie has become Duncan Jones.
Why do parents do this? I'm not suggesting everyone should be called John or Mary. We need people to push things along; I like the name Agatha, except I couldn't inflict it on any girl, especially one called Hoggart. A friend who's a registrar says we're already seeing a return to names which today's parents' parents had: Maureen, Sheena and Penelope, even Dorothea.
I recently heard about a baby boy called Boaz. That is just not fair. And it tells you too much about the parents. I was looking at one of those sympathetic magazine articles about working mums, or straitened middle class people or something, and we were meant to feel kinship with a woman who had called her daughter "Toffee". It's cruel, and it makes us mistrust everything she said.
?To the annual Kew the Music concert season at the Royal Botanic Gardens. It's a good moment in the year. They get great performers – often from the nostalgic past – such as Kid Creole, The Bootleg Beatles, Manfred Mann and Jools Holland. Everyone brings picnics and too much to drink, and you spread your blanket as near to the stage as you can. Then as the session continues, you go to the front and dance, a few feet from the star.
But it's all changed. Not only has the number of concession stands increased so that they virtually ring the eating area, but far worse, they have fenced off the grass closest to the stage for holders of premium, first class tickets. The zone was no more than half full, but stewards kept the hoi polloi away. Everyone else had to spread further out, often with their view of the stage blocked by trees. Rare and impressive trees, but not transparent trees.
The effect was to ruin the democratic, free and easy atmosphere of Woodstock for people who were old enough to be at Woodstock but didn't make it.
Now it's just another corporate money-grubbing operation with no dancing. We enjoyed eating and drinking with friends, and liked Bryan Ferry's singing, even though we couldn't see him. But I don't suppose we'll bother going back next year. It's spoiled.
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