Taki's Mag

As I write these words and watch them grow into sentences, I am living the final hours of my fifties. By the time you read this, I’ll be sixty years old. Or, as French and other Romance languages put it, I shall have sixty years. Having these four-seasons-times-sixty on my person feels heavy, but it seems I am far from alone. We oldies may be a majority soon in Britain. The hair is going white, the teeth wobbling a little and the memory fumbling. Gabriel Garcia Márquez in Love in the Time of Cholera charts Dr. Juvenal Urbino’s slow demise and death through his urine flow. The trappings of age, once the sole property of my father and his generation, are now all mine.

Things could be worse. I could be Tony Blair, Andy Coulson, or Alan Johnson. All of them stumbled into the headlines with tales of woe as my birthday approached. Blair was required to give further evidence in London last Friday to the Iraq Inquiry chaired by Sir John Chilcot. This was hard for Blair, who had already testified to the same panel a year ago and disposed of it in his recently published memoir, A Journey. Unfortunately, his former Attorney General Peter Goldsmith had given testimony that contradicted Blair’s. Goldsmith told Chilcot he had all along insisted to Blair that he needed a second United Nations Resolution for his war to be legal. Blair came back to the panel on Friday morning, sat and prevaricated for a few hours, and left. His credibility, already strained, was broken.

Blair wants the billets-doux he wrote to George Bush in the year before the invasion kept secret. Sir John Chilcot made clear his impatience with Blair’s reluctance to release the documents: 

There is one area where, I am sorry to say, it has not been possible to reach agreement with the government.

“Things could be worse. I could be Tony Blair, Andy Coulson, or Alan Johnson.”

The papers we hold include the notes which Prime Minister Blair sent to President Bush and the records of their discussions. The Inquiry recognises the privileged nature of those exchanges but, exceptionally, we sought disclosure of key extracts which illuminate Prime Minister Blair’s positions at critical points. The Cabinet Office did not agree [with] this disclosure. On 10 December last year, in accordance with the Protocol, I asked the Cabinet Secretary to review that decision.

It seems Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell is abiding by Blair’s wish to keep the messages private. Where is the WikiLeaks leaker when you need him? I give it a month before someone publishes Tony’s promises to George, his assurances to commit British lives to the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld crusade to plant American bases in Iraq and control its destiny. It was a bad day for Blair, but—like my turning sixty—it could have been worse.

He could have been Andy Coulson, who used to edit the most scurrilous of all Rupert Murdoch’s scurrilous rags, the weekly News of the World. He resigned when one of his reporters and a private detective were sentenced to prison for bugging Princes William and Harry’s telephones. Coulson insisted, much as senior officers did at Nuremberg, that he did not know what had been going on. After departing the Murdoch stable, he might have disappeared from our lives forever—or ended up as a CNN talk-show host like that other disgraced British tabloid editor, Piers Morgan. (Morgan’s reporters were imprisoned for insider trading, pumping up stocks and shares in which they invested. Morgan invested in one set of shares, made a killing, and later insisted that he did not know what had been going on.)

Yet Coulson did not disappear. He became communications director for David Cameron and moved into 10 Downing Street. All was forgiven until it gradually emerged that other reporters and another editor were involved in the phone-tapping. The net was drawing closer. How could the editor Coulson not know where his stories on celebrity love lives, politicians’ indiscretions, and royal princes’ cavortings originated? If he did not know, he was at best careless not to ask. (I’ve never worked for an editor who did not demand to know the source for front-page stories. Some of the best, including a few television-news executive producers, would send you back to the source for reconfirmation and demand second sources before risking publication.) Whether culpable or negligent, Coulson had to go. As an experienced spin master, he chose to depart on the day Blair testified. If all went well, the newspapers would highlight Blair’s discomfiture and relegate Coulson to the back pages.

Even as a spin master, Coulson got it wrong. He knocked Tony Blair off the front pages. Having scored Coulson’s head, the non-Murdoch press is demanding to know why the police officer who should have investigated the case became a Murdoch newspaper columnist. They also want to know who else at News of the World was involved and whether the phone-hacking originated on Coulson’s watch or that of his predecessor and now Murdoch’s vicar on British earth, Rebekah Wade. As the sharks circle closer to Wade, Murdoch must wonder if his own staff has been telling him the truth.

Meanwhile, the government is considering Murdoch’s latest bid to increase his near-monopoly of media control. He’s seeking to jump from a minority stake in the country’s sole satellite broadcaster, BSkyB, to full ownership. Then he can bundle his newspaper, television, and Internet paywall packages to put his rivals out of business. But if his local CEO caused a phone-tapping scandal that is still costing his British company millions of pounds to settle lawsuits, one can argue that such a company should not be allowed to increase its British media presence. Murdoch has flown to Britain to settle matters and has offered concessions to the government in exchange for them not referring his attempted BSkyB purchase to the Competition Commission. It can’t be easy for a man accustomed to obsequious politicians such as Tony Blair. Still, he must count himself fortunate not to be Alan Johnson.

Johnson was a minister in the Labour government, a working-class lad made good and by all accounts a decent man. The new Labour leader, baby Ed Milliband, named him his shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer—basically, Treasury Secretary-in-Waiting. The fact that Johnson knew nothing about the economy quickly became apparent when he failed to answer simple questions about sales-tax rates and other items that all consumers who do their own shopping know. There were calls for Johnson’s head, but Milliband stood by him. Then, on the day Blair faced further disgrace and Coulson scurried out of Downing Street, Johnson resigned. The reason was not his financial illiteracy so much as the fact that his wife had been having an affair with the policeman assigned to protect her while Johnson was in office. Poor Alan.

After reading about them, I don’t mind turning sixty. I only hope I survive the big lunch with about forty family members and friends that my sons are giving to mark (not celebrate) the day. In Britain, someone else will undoubtedly disgrace himself to keep my old age off the front page.