Leveson – Letts Make It Up

Yesterday, when more attention was being paid to the fallout from the latest round of local elections, and many were waiting for the results from London to come in, there was a special sitting of the Leveson Inquiry. Here, the Government applied for Core Participant status. They did not get it. But several ministers, including former Murdoch employee “Oiky” Gove, did.

Harry Potter and the Gobshite of Arslikhan

This will give them prior sight of evidence, and this fact alone has caused significant disquiet. But, were you to read the customarily inane witterings of Daily Mail “Parliamentary sketchwriter” Quentin Letts (let’s not), you would be unaware that this had even taken place. Because Quent has discovered a far greater danger to the credibility of Leveson, and that danger is Europe.

More specifically, any action stemming from Leveson, according to Letts, may be vetoed by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). See, it’s Littlejohn’s Yuman Rights again! Some Mail readers may believe this, but anyone with prior engagement of brain will have smelt a rat, given that no other media outlet is running with this rather dubiously reasoned line.

So what is the source of Letts’ information? “Westminster authorities fear that ... Strasbourg might intervene”. Not a mere court, then, you understand, but a city full of people talking foreign who drive on the wrong side of the road and use nasty things like Euros and kilogrammes. So there then follows a cloud of whataboutery as Quent paints a picture telling readers What They Will See.

The ECHR “could rule that” all sorts. In support, Letts cites George Galloway’s trip to the USA to testify before Congress, which has sweet jack to do with Parliament or the ECHR. But then we find out where Quent is getting this Grade A fairy story: self promoting Tory MP Dominic Raab, another of that club inhabited by the likes of Priti Patel, Philip Davies, Louise Mensch and (yes, it’s her again) Nadine Dorries.

So what we have here is an MP desperate to get anyone to listen to his latest hare-brained slice of Europhobia talking to a hack desperate to kick Europe and trot out a few more hundred words of Phil Space verbiage in order to meet the deadline demands of his legendarily foul mouthed editor. Raab “sees a legal mess”, but in reality sees an opportunity to get his name in the paper.

The Leveson Inquiry will see no intervention from the ECHR. Full stop. End of story. But this pile of freshly steaming bovine by-product enables another of what Robin Day rightly and memorably called “here today and gone tomorrow politicians” to advance his cause, while a hack well beyond his use-by date meets a deadline and simultaneously curries favour with the boss.

The readers, meanwhile, remain utterly misinformed. No change there, then.