Max Clifford – Max Dacre Pundit Grovel

[Update at end of post]

There is one drawback to being a regular Daily Mail columnist: every so often, word will be sent from the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre instructing the pundit concerned to perform a hatchet job, often on the most slender of pretexts, the result being that said pundit ends up looking like a jackass, and the rest of the profession knows it – although the financial compensation is generous.

What's f***ing wrong with telling pundits what to write, c***? Er, with the greatest respect, Mr Jay

So who is the latest to be ordered over the top at the bidding of the Vagina Monologue? Step forward Dominic Lawson, to show how far the mighty can fall: Dom has edited the Spectator and Sunday Telegraph, but is now reduced to being a substitute for Melanie “not just Barking but halfway to Upminster” Phillips. His latest task is to blame Max Clifford’s misbehaviour on “the left”.

“Why Max Clifford's greatest PR coup was to get the Left to fall for his lies” tells the blatantly fraudulent headline. “You might think that the downfall of a multi-millionaire businessman, particularly one who was chauffeured around town in a £225,000 Rolls-Royce Ghost with personalised number-plates, would prompt delight on the part of the usually puritanical Left-wing Press” he posits loftily.

Then comes the assertion that the deeply subversive Guardian had been influenced by Clifford into going soft on him. This is, let us not drive this one around the houses for too long, a hot and steaming pile of weapons grade bullshit, as anyone who has seen Saturday’s Guardian front page will know. The headline, “Eight years’ jail. For your crimes and your contempt for women” sets the scene.

The sub-heading adds “Clifford pays added price for ‘extraordinary’ behaviour in abuse trial”. Josh Halliday’s article continues “Judge Anthony Leonard imposed a sentence more than double than had been expected, partly because of Clifford's attitude during the trial at Southwark crown court, where he was ‘laughing and shaking his head’ in the dock at some of the accusations made against him”.

Moreover, “Leonard concluded: ‘I find your behaviour to be quite extraordinary and a further indication that you show no remorse’ ... Clifford was told that had some of offences been tried under today's law, they would be considered as rape or assault by penetration with a maximum sentence of life imprisonment”. Perhaps Lawson and his editor would like to show where that is “going soft” on Clifford.

They will not, because it isn’t. This is a classic, and classically inept, attempt to deflect the Daily Mail’s own incompetence over the years: as with Jimmy Savile, someone else is at fault, but the Mail, which never so much as said boo to Clifford until he got guilty, never does anything wrong, never needs to say sorry for its own abysmal journalism. Dominic Lawson should hang his head in shame.

He made a pact with the devil, just for the wad. And that’s all his own fault.

[UPDATE 1900 hours: not only is Dominic Lawson desperately trying to smear the Guardian to the order of his editor, his research is so selective that it has failed to pick up on the one article that came close to nailing Max Clifford, which was in, to no surprise at all, the Guardian.

The article, entitled "Circus Maximus", by Carole Cadwalladr, contains enough for the reader to be able to join the dots. And what is worse for Lawson and Paul Dacre is that it is dated 23 July 2006 - almost eight years ago. Yet the free and fearless Daily Mail did nothing in the meantime.

Why that should be is to be found in one short paragraph: "The reason, he says, that his sexual exploits were never exposed is because, 'I beat the tabloids at their own game. It was a competition. Another sport... And I won'".

Yes, Clifford bested the tabloids, including the Mail. Only Dacre and his overpaid and under-investigative pundits can't bear to admit it]