Max Clifford And The Platell Hypocrisy

One pundit is not at all unhappy to see Max Clifford being nicked and lightly grilled by the Met’s finest as part of Operation Yewtree, the potential reasons for which I discussed yesterday. The happy person is, to no surprise at all, Amanda Platell, appalling Glenda and holder of the only known season ticket for the sofa on The Andy Marr Show (tm).

The stuff of nightmares

“I’ll shed no tears for the king of sleaze” she snipes, before telling of “the scores of people whose lives and families Clifford and his clients have ruined during his long and lucrative PR career”. And who might some of those be, Mandy, these “legions of home-wreckers, prostitutes and gold-diggers” as you put it? Well, for starters, there’s Rebecca Loos, she of the David Beckham affair allegations.

Ms Loos only got the publicity because some papers had no problem in running with the story, and there are examples a-plenty out there, starting with “Rebecca tells all”, with the highlights of her interview with Kay “Surly” Burley on Sky News (“first for breaking wind”). The same paper then followed up with “Stop this woman, pleads Becks”, covering the legal wrangling.

And there was more to follow: next up was “Becks: affair claim ludicrous” as the Beckhams pushed back. Moreover, the appetite for Ms Loos did not need the intervention of the great Cliffus Maximus, as witness later pieces such as “Rebecca Loos is back in a bikini eight weeks after giving birth” and “Rebecca Loos completes her transformation from glamour girl to sensible mother”.

There are no prizes for guessing that the paper running all those articles is the same one that is now publishing Mandy’s why-oh-why fest. So the usual hypocrisy from the obedient hackery of the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre. And the reason that Amanda Platell is so keen to sneer at Max Clifford is also not hard to find, as the deeply subversive Guardian tells us.

After the 2001 General Election drubbing of her then boss William ‘Ague, Clifford told the paper how his potential successors might proceed. “They desperately need a good PR person in the Conservative party” he concluded. Platell was still employed by them. He went rather further in the Maily Telegraph, telling “She’s been a disaster. What would Amanda Platell know about making a politician popular?”

He went on “She is a failed newspaper editor and hasn’t got a clue”. But she clearly had a long memory, probably reinforced after Clifford came to the defence of his pal Simon Cowell (aka The Black Helmet) after Platell had run a hatchet job on the Cowell fiftieth party (by sheer coincidence, she hadn’t been invited). The part about Cowell paying his taxes in the UK won’t have gone down well with the Mail’s owners.

“Shame about Amanda Platell” he concluded. And that’s why she’s so catty today.