Short of toppling a statue of Rupert Murdoch and beating at it with their shoes, Britain's MPs could scarcely have depicted themselves in recent days more like the long-suffering victims of the despot's whip.
For displays of pomposity, self-congratulation, mutual back-slapping and retrospective posturing, the last week has known no equal. There were members of parliament standing up in the Commons on Wednesday declaring that in their handling of the News Corporation scandal they had collectively expunged memories of the Expenses scandal.
Gordon Brown - a man who can turn any amount of public sympathy to eye-rolling apathy with a single word - explained to skeptical government benches that it would all have been done on his watch but for those meddlesome kids at the Civil Service.
Faced with an open goal, the honourable members have not so much kicked a ball through it as dived bodily into the net. As Sordel writes, there are politicians, responding to the news of the resignation of Rebekah Brooks, flailing wildly in self-made toils in their desperation to press some new demand.
Yet where was all this a month ago?
To the peasants who stream, torches in hand, to Baron Frankenstein's castle, the news that this is the birthplace of the monster is at least news. Indignation is at least comprehensible.
Britain's politicians can hardly claim innocence in the original and subsequent cover-ups of wrongdoing at the News of the World. If Rebekah Brooks had a fiduciary responsibility (to know who was being paid by her paper, and for what) then so did politicians: to ensure that the investigation into the original hacking case was a little more probing than accepting the assurances of the very organisation being investigated.
The story of the News International scandal is not only about journalists going rogue in search of a story. The greater blame falls on the police and government that were supposed to prevent or punish that wrongdoing.
The spite with which MPs are attacking the Murdochs would perhaps be justified in small boys overpowering a bully. It rings false from people hitherto only too happy to turn a blind eye for the chance of an invitation to dinner.
No comments:
Post a Comment