Glenda Goes After Hugh Grant

What did I tell you? As predicted on this blog yesterday, the obedient hackery of the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre has followed the Murdoch Sun and piled in against actor and campaigner Hugh Grant. The only unknown was which of the Mail’s singularly unappealing bevy of Glendas would find herself at the front of the cab rank and be therefore ordered to write the hatchet job.

And the surprise winner of this dubious award has been Sarah “Vain” Vine, otherwise known as Mrs “Oiky” Gove, who has discovered that there is a downside to getting More And Bigger Paycheques For Herself Personally Now from the Mail: not only does she get to write her weekly Me-Me-Me-fest, but may also be called upon to peddle the occasional shameless pack of lies.

There is no need to wait for the whopper, as the headline reveals “With a love life like this, no wonder Hugh Grant wants to silence the press”. He does? And how, exactly, has Ms Vine figured out this slice of fantasy? “Through his support, financial and vocal, of an organisation called Hacked Off, he has seized on the justifiable and wholly understandable public anger surrounding cases such as the hacking of Millie Dowler’s mobile telephone to ride the anti-press bandwagon to his – and his celebrity friends’ – advantage”. And to which I call bullshit.

Hacked Off, given that it supports the cross-party Royal Charter, which has no provision, repeat no provision, repeat no provision for prior restraint, or as Ms Vine so subtly calls it, “gagging”, does not seek to silence the press. End of story.

So when the sainted Sarah tells “Grant’s obsession with gagging the press looks like his treatment of the mothers of his children, entirely self-serving”, she is mixing faux righteousness and dishonesty in roughly equal proportion. Moreover, her grovelling before the Vagina Monologue is so wilful, it descends into unintentional hilarity: “It’s the kind of thing you expect from a Channel 4 documentary”.

But let me put Sarah Vine straight: Hugh Grant isn’t trying to stop the press reporting his personal life. Nor does he want to stop them going about their business, despite what Paul Dacre has ordered her to write. And what Hugh Grant has done is to pay for his children’s upbringing, free of any state support. Papers like the Mail should be cheering him to the rafters for that.

And what Hugh Grant is not doing, Ms Vine, is spraying hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money up the wall pursuing the ideological dream that is Free Schools, something that will soon become unsustainable – without other schools suffering, or closing. And Hugh Grant is also defending himself, rather than looking the other way while a retinue of polecats roughs up his opponents.

Because that, Ms Vine, is where your husband is at. Now who’s a hypocrite?