Quintin Jardine's blog

I read a strange piece today in the Sunday Herald to which I subscribe on line, by one Paul Hutcheon. It’s an earnest essay, well motivated I’m sure, in which Mr Hutcheon condemns the phone-hacking activities of the News of the World, yet applauds the ‘technical transgression’ (many people would call it theft) that led  to the Telegraph’s lauded parliamentary expenses expose, and seems to suggest that if journalists had hacked into the phones of Richard Nixon and his cronies they would have been seen as heroes. If he really believes that, he’s making the case for greater media accountability, not opposing it.

However that’s by-the-by. At the beginning of his essay, Mr Hutcheon refers to a friend whose constant railing against the media makes him want to hit the chap. Funny, isn’t it, that a man can rant about freedom of speech and expression, yet feel violent to those who exercise it. Well, get this Paul. Early in your piece there is a reference to press officers. After beginning my professional life as a working  journalist, I was one of those. I did my job honourably, honestly and in all that time I never, no,  rarely said a word that I knew to be an untruth, the only exceptions being when I worked in politics and declared that my by-election candidate was going to win when I knew that he was as fit for purpose as a chocolate tea-pot and had as much chance of survival when put to the test. The great majority of my colleagues were as conscientious as I tried to be, and remained calm even in the face of the occasional abuse which came our way from Mr Hutcheon’s equivalents of that era. Thinking journalists recognise that press officers are there to help them not to obstruct them, but many, too many, are antipathetic. I know this and I lived with it for all the time I was in that profession. But when I read a journalist describing my successors as ‘snakelike’, well, I’m not having that. Mr Hutcheon sometimes feels like hitting his pal? In that case he’ll understand how I’m feeling now. As well we’re in different countries, for I might not be as restrained as him.