Daily mail

A funny thing happened on my way to lunch last week. I opened the Daily Mail and read a few snippets about the Camilla–Charles saga by Penny Junor, stuff to make strong men weep with boredom. But then a certain item caught my eye: ‘Camilla and the Queen finally met in the summer of 2000, when Charles threw a 60th birthday party at Highgrove for his cousin King Constantine of Greece… They shook hands, smiled at one another, Camilla curtseyed, and they had a moment or two of small talk before going to different tables for lunch.’ Hey, wait a minute, I told myself. You were there, for God’s sake, and had much too much firewater. It had obviously slipped my mind, 17 years and 5,000 booze-ups later. Thinking back, I remember it well.

This month marks the tenth anniversary of the death of Nigel Dempster, once the world’s best-known gossip columnist. For three decades he was paid a fortune by the Daily Mail to provide juicy tittle-tattle about the royal family (he was a close friend of Princess Margaret), the aristocracy (particularly priapic minor baronet Dai Llewellyn), tycoons including Jimmy Goldsmith and racing figures such as Robert Sangster, as well as mainstream TV stars like David Frost and Robin Day. Alas, by the time of Nigel’s death (from the awful effects of progressive supranuclear palsy) his Diary page was already an anachronism. His brand of gossip was in its death throes. His cast of characters had already been ousted by reality TV nonentities all desperate for their 15 minutes of fame.

So now we know who’s really responsible for the horrible attack at Finsbury Park Mosque: it was the Sun wot done it. And maybe the Daily Mail too. No sooner had Darren Osborne allegedly crashed a hired van into Muslim worshippers than certain so-called liberals were stringing up the tabloids. The low-rent press poisoned his mind, just as it’s always poisoning plebs’ minds, they claimed, without a morsel of evidence. He could take the Guardian for all we know. They present their tabloid-baiting as a challenge to bigotry, when anyone who knows anything about history knows that fearing the tabloids and their dim, malleable readers is classic British bigotry.

One must not make odious comparisons between Mrs May’s legs and those of Ms Sturgeon, but it is not sexist to ask which is the more sure-footed. So far, Ms Sturgeon has run much the faster, and by doing so has gained attention far in excess of the numbers she can command. Mrs May might look the more plodding. But as Ms Sturgeon charges forward yet again with a call for another referendum, I wonder if she is becoming like Bonnie Prince Charlie, who reached Derby, and then slipped.

Here’s a cast-iron law of the media in 21st-century Britain: the hysteria about a Daily Mail article will always be worse than the Daily Mail article itself. It will be more silly, shrill, over-the-top, reactionary and potentially harmful to public life than the polemic or editorial or sidebar shot of a half-dressed celeb it is raging and spluttering against. You can hold me to this. Go through the archives of Twitterstorms about the Daily Mail — they number in the gazillions — and you will see it’s the same every time: every bad thing the Mail has said or done has paled into insignificance in comparison with the hot, mad 24-hour fury of the Twits it has generated. Consider ‘Legs-it’.

Congratulations to the Daily Mail for exposing the unpleasant methods by which TV Licensing’s staff make people pay their television licence fees. Capita, the company that does the dirty work for the BBC, encourages its employees to use ‘ruthless and underhand tactics’ to collect the money, says the Mail. The paper offers painful examples of the victims — ‘RAF man with dementia, mum in a women’s refuge’. It could have added ‘veteran Spectator columnist’, since these activities were first exposed on this page in 2006, when I got fed up with being pursued by Capita to buy a TV licence for a flat without a television. The Mail correctly identifies the unpleasant incentive system, but it doesn’t get to the heart of the issue.

The legalisation of cannabis is once again in the headlines. Following the death of his 21-year-old son Rupert Green, Lord Monson has called for a 'war on skunk' and the legalisation of less potent forms of cannabis. According to his father, Rupert became addicted to skunk, developed paranoia and psychosis, and took his own life. His death is yet another reminder that young people remain at the sharp end of cannabis policy. Monson argues that legalisation would allow users to understand it better and help them avoid strains which are more likely to cause psychosis. 'That is no different from our approach to alcohol. No one needs to drink moonshine whisky which makes them blind, they can buy legal whiskey,' he said.

Ahead of the government's supreme court appeal against the high court ruling that Article 50 cannot be triggered without a Westminster vote, the Daily Mail ran an article suggesting the judges who ruled against the government were 'enemies of the people'. What's more, the paper then ran a handy guide which ranked the 11 Justices of the Supreme Court by giving each a 'Europhile rating'. However, after today's ruling, Mr S wonders if the paper will have to rethink its approach to some arch-Europhiles. Although the government lost its appeal (and will now need to trigger Article 50 with a vote in Parliament), three Justices of the Supreme Court found in favour of the government. And just who were they? Well, two are among the most Europhile judges, according to the Mail.

Just about this time of year, 42 years ago, Dunhill’s of London, the famed tobacconist, had a bold idea. Its president, Richard Dunhill, flew 32 backgammon players to New York and had them board the QEII for the return trip to Southampton. The backgammon players were a varied group. As with cricket of old, there were gentlemen and there were players. For players read hustlers and small-time con men. Among the gents were players such as Michael Pearson, now Lord Cowdray, some very nice Americans, like Porter Ijams, whose aunt was canonised, and yours truly. The hustlers were a more amusing bunch.