Mail Rowling Hedge Attack Flops

The obedient hackery of the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre never let go of a vendetta, no matter how lame the copy generated in pursuit of it, and so it has proved with a fresh assault on author and campaigner Jo Rowling, because, well, she’s more famous than any of their dubiously talented hacks, and, more importantly, she humiliated the Dacre doggies in open court recently after winning a libel case against them.

So what has Ms Rowling done to offend the inmates of the Northcliffe House bunker this time? Has she published another book? Perhaps she has donated to a cause that does not meet with the approval of the Vagina Monologue? Maybe she has appeared at a bash attended by an array of slebs and no-one from the Mail got an invite? Well, no: what has caused grave offence to the Mail is that Ms Rowling is having a hedge trimmed.

Yes, the Mail is running a story about Jo Rowling’s leylandii. I kid you not: “Harry Potter and the prisoner of the traffic jam: JK Rowling causes four days of travel chaos after installing temporary traffic lights so she can have her Leylandii bush trimmed” screams the headline. Did she “install temporary traffic lights”? Well, no: all she did was engage a contractor to come and do the work, but hey ho.

That cuts no ice with the Mail: “Furious residents have blasted JK Rowling for causing traffic 'chaos' - because she is having her hedges trimmed. The Harry Potter author, 49, is having the massive Leylandii bush outside her luxury Edinburgh home cut back and temporary traffic lights have been put up during the works. The 30ft plants outside her Edinburgh property are currently being tended to by gardeners who have been working on them for three days”. So she’s being a responsible neighbour, then.

Keeping leylandii from getting out of hand is no more than that, but the Mail wants readers to know that this is causing outrage: “Many residents are now wondering how much longer it will take because of long tailbacks being created leading one to dub the situation traffic 'chaos' because of queues on surrounding roads”.

And, as Jon Stewart might have said, two things here. One, the Mail manages to get precisely no residents at all to voice their concerns. And two, how much longer the work will go on is redundant for one very good reason: Ms Rowling had the work done LAST WEEK. We can be sure of this because the story was covered by the Daily Record SEVEN DAYS AGO. There is only one reason for running this story.

To see that reason, all we need to do is to scroll down to the very end of the Mail Online story, to see … oh look! There’s a video of Jo Rowling at the Leveson Inquiry. That, folks, is why the Mail is dredging up a week-old story: to run knocking copy against someone who has had the courage to speak up against press misbehaviour and stand with the less well-known victims of press abuse. This is just a continuance of the Mail’s vendetta.

So sad to see sensible hacks forced into generating this hateful drivel. But not surprising.