In his balanced and often engaging account of the calamitous case against "Brooks and others", as the Old Bailey tannoy messages had it, Peter Jukes remarks on the clannishness of newspaper journalists.
"..though I've enjoyed working with them, I've never met quite such a tribal profession," says Jukes, who tweeted and blogged on the entire eight-month process.
And I suppose the widespread relief, even delight, at the acquittal of Clodagh Hartley proves his point well. People who work for newspapers do often feel a collective sense of pride and loyalty, defiance and self-preservation.
I share delight in Hartley's good fortune, as this tweet exchange rather suggests:
@jamesdoleman Absolutely chuffed for her. Prosecute NI by all means; going for the foot soldiers is squalid
— Colin Randall (@salutsunderland) November 26, 2014Among my occasional nightmares is one in which I suddenly find myself working for Hartley's old paper, The Sun, or another redtop tabloid. It never happened in my long career and for that I am grateful.
But what if they'd come in with a sensational offer when I was a young reporter with two small children, a dodgy car and a hefty mortgage? Would I have entered into a culture that was, from top to bottom, built on the principle of getting the best stories at whatever cost, and how might I have responded? I think of the ordinary people of France under Nazi occupation; they did not actually collaborate but they acquiesced, to get through the war, as Britons would have done in a similar predicament. But is it necessarily wrong, or nearly always wrong, to pay for stories in any case?
Clodagh Hartley admitted paying for what she considered important stories in the public interest to publish. As Roy Greenslade's excellent appraisal of the Not Guilty verdicts confirms, journalists have always paid or otherwise entered into social contracts for information.
Giving evidence for our consoeur, he had said there would be no political journalism at all without leaks and that to obtain those leaks, a journalist had to cultivate sources which is what Hartley did. "The relationship between sources and journalists is transactional. It’s a contract between the two sides, and it doesn’t always involve money. As I explained to the jury, some people act as sources because they want to make mischief, some will do it to gain a political advantage, some will do it for a lunch or a drink. Some will do it in order to receive a favour. Some will do it for public benefit. Whistleblowers have many motives."
Greenslade may write for The Guardian but is also from a tabloid background; he edited the Daily Mirror. Yet broadsheet and broadcast journalists cannot be snooty about this. My own former newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, paid a lot of money for the devastating leaks on parliamentary expenses (honest, guv, it was after I'd gone!). TV and radio, as well as the other papers, gleefully repeated and followed up the revelations. No hint of a prosecution followed.
So the Crown Prosecution Service has set itself up as the arbiter on what is in the public interest, and what is not, a situation I find chilling. There is no statutory defence but this story, it decides, is whistleblowing and OK, that one's tittle-tattle and punishable. Judging by the extracts of the closing speech I have read, the CPS simply hasn't a clue.
Hartley obtained, among other information, budget proposals in advance and made what I felt was a powerful point about wishing readers to see them before inevitable spin was applied by ministers or their aides. The prosecution acted as if it believed the reporting of government ought to be by approved press release (but then, the prosecution was only doing its job).
I salute the Old Bailey jury for standing up to this desire to make foot soldiers culpable under a dredged-up old law about misconduct in public office. But imagine the consequences for this mother of two young children if she had been less fortunate. I cannot escape the feeling this was a rotten, vindictive prosecution. It was, in my humble assessment, scandalous to drag her through the courts.
Hartley showed herself to be a decent, conscientious reporter, working in an intensely competitive field for an employer that was at the very, very least exceptionally demanding and, in the end, disloyal to both its journalists and their confidential sources.
And before any passing troll starts foaming at the mouth, let me say that reporters on tabloids are, very often, as focused on the truth as any lofty TV or broadsheet journalist. One of the kindest and most helpful reporters I ever met, Harry Arnold of The Sun, who died this month, struck me as having bags of integrity.
There is not much more that can properly be said in the current context of constant judicial proceedings. Even a statement supplied to me by the CPS seems, on the face if it, hazardous to repeat just now. I feel I cannot even safely write as full a review of Jukes's book as I'd like, though he has lived up to my hope, expressed in a tweet long before publication, that he would at least try to be fair. He also turns out to be a fine court reporter, and I say that as one who immodestly believes he was quite good at it, too.
Greenslade and others, including some anti-press voices seeking to second-guess the the jury's verdict, have had their say. I will eventually feel freer to have mine in greater depth.
* See more about Beyond Contempt, Peter Jukes's book about the Rebekah Brooks trial at this link.
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