Stephen Lawrence: a spectacular victory for the Daily Mail
Thursday, 5 January 2012
The guardians of Britain’s social conscience have had a confusing week. Two of the killers of Stephen Lawrence have been given life sentences, thanks in large part to the crusading bravery of a newspaper determined to expose the racism that inspired the crime.
Our moral arbiters have been forced either to concede, through gritted teeth, that without that other newspaper’s brilliant campaign to bring Stephen Lawrence’s killers to justice that all five of the thugs would still be swaggering around south-east London or, perhaps worse, shut up entirely and miss the best opportunity in a decade to trash the working classes they despise so much and take up their harps for the causes of diversity and multiculturalism.
Had the paper not published that front page, and taken up a ferocious campaign thereafter to bring the killers to justice, the extraordinary chain of events that followed would never have come to pass. Stephen’s parents would never have had justice for their son’s brutal stabbing.
It was, of course, that paper’s valiant gamble on 14 February 1997, when it branded Gary Dobson, Neil and Jamie Acourt, Luke Knight and David Norris as murders, that gave the case a new lease of life after an initial failure by the police to secure a conviction.
And, as the paper’s editor said this week, it was an enormous commercial and editorial risk. Had the any of the five won a legal action against the paper, it could have landed him in prison and cost the owners vast sums of money. So, under normal circumstances, the paper would now be the toast of Fleet Street.
The problem? It was the Daily Mail. Worse, this week’s court judgements were a personal triumph for Mail editor Paul Dacre, fount of all malevolence in the eyes of Islingtonian prudes. The finger-wagging Left hates the Daily Mail in ways that can’t be explained entirely in terms of the paper’s appeal to a despised “Middle Britain”. No: behind the bile-spewing fury of Guardian journalists lies their own shameful secret.
They read the Mail voraciously themselves. Admittedly, they’re careful to invent excuses for the habit. Just as upper-class French families used to insist that they only owned a television “pour les bonnes” – for the servants – liberal Left commentators say they buy Dacre’s hated rag “for work” or for the amusement of their Ukrainian housekeepers.
Whatever. The point is that the Mail set out to expose and bring to justice a group of racist scumbag murderers while the worthies of the Guardian were still agonising over the “responsible sourcing” of their coffee beans.
A word of advice to Guardian and Indie hacks: if you want to pull off a remarkable triumph of this sort in future, you might just have to tear yourself away from your comfy offices – and the Nespresso machine.
As for Guardian figurehead Alan Rusbridger, I know that it’s difficult paying for investigative journalism when your newspaper makes less money than the average parish magazine – but perhaps a little more time actually “editing”, as I believe it’s called, and a little less time trying to pass yourself off as a concert pianist might one day allow you to gloat like Dacre.
Still, the Guardian’s hissy fit over the Mail’s coup won’t last for long. The paper’s hacks – including its spoilt socialist aristocracy – will soon have to start worrying about redundancies again. Word reaches me that the sports coverage is about to be decimated, while the much-lauded Friday arts review will be quietly relegated to G2. And as for the paper’s decision to pack off loads of hacks to cover the US elections, it’s not looking like such a brainwave now that the Guardian is turning into Fleet Street’s equivalent of Greece, is it?
Meanwhile, there is no corresponding wave of redundancies planned at the Mail titles. All the best hacks are too busy exposing racism – you know, the sort of thing Guardian journalists did before they discovered that King’s Place serves such deliciously frothy lattes.
For all the Guardian’s incessant and preposterous whining about equality and diversity, their achievements, if they can be said to have had any, have been irrelevant. It is the Mail, object of such lunatic hatred, which has done more both to bring racist killers to justice and to tackle institutional racism in the police force. Man, that’s got to sting.
As for the poor Independent, I gather that most of its hacks can’t even afford to visit the coffee machine these days, let alone Starbucks. Still, they shouldn’t be disheartened: surely there are still racist scandals to be exposed. Why, just a couple of months ago the internet started buzzing with rumours of a particularly disturbing piece of racist gay incest porn whose author, it is rumoured, is not only a professional writer but possessed of Orwellian cunning.
This could be the Indie’s chance to expose yet more of the dark underside of drug-addled British street culture so brilliantly illuminated by the Daily Mail.
Posted in: Media
