I wasn’t wildly impressed with Channel Five’s dramatisation of the fall of Huw Edwards. But it should at least remind people that it was good old-fashioned tabloid journalism in the public interest by the Sun – and especially the now North America editor Scarlet Howes – that uncovered exactly what the newsreader had been up to.
I remember very well the fury and loathing poured upon the paper
Let me declare an interest – I also work for the Sun. And I remember very well the fury and loathing poured upon the paper by both Edwards’ friends and left-leaning hacks at the time. Jon Sopel, co-presenter of the godawful dadcast The Newsagents, one forgives a little more because he was a personal friend of the snarly-faced Welsh nonce. But what about the BBC’s magisterial John Simpson, who said that the whole affair ‘feeds into a concerted political campaign in this country against the BBC’? He added:
It’s encouraged by the Murdoch newspapers, by the Telegraph and the Mail group, they want to see effectively the end of the BBC, they want to see it destroyed.
You ass, Simpson. But that was the tone from many at the time. I remember defending the Sun’s coverage (as if it needed defending) on the BBC, saying that the paper had handled the story ‘sensitively’ – which it had. And yet even that comment provoked outrage or derision from the left.
Then, when the full details emerged, the Left suddenly went very quiet indeed. The Sun deserves an apology from them, but don’t hold yer breath.
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