Sun Replaces Bullied With Bully

While Parliament takes its customary lengthy summer break, over at the Baby Shard, the Super Soaraway Currant Bun is reshaping its political team, after all the Operation Elveden trials and the subsequent departures. And the result may be a result for cost accountants, but at a cost: the number of properly trained staff - that would be as in real journalists - appears to have been reduced by one.

Courtesy? What's one of those?

Before the rozzers descended on all those unsuspecting hacks - as a result of the News International (as was) Management and Standards Committee shopping them in the hope that it would divert attention from what the rest of the Murdoch faithful were up to - the Sun’s “Whitehall Editor” was one Clodagh Hartley. She was one of those shopped, but after her acquittal, it was clear she would not return to her previous job.

Why she might not want anything more to do with her previous employer was laid bare at her trial: she had been subjected to persistent bullying by one of her colleagues, who was still in post. Who that colleague was, we were unable to hear, as had she been found guilty, that colleague could have found himself facing prosecution. So all concerned had to keep schtum and wait for the trial to run its course.

And so it came to pass that the name in the frame was revealed to be the Sun’s non-bullying political editor Tom Newton Dunn, whose routinely disgraceful behaviour towards women continued recently, to the extent that he featured in a recent issue of Private Eye magazine after a particularly unpleasant episode where he made a number of allegations against a waitress in Moncrieff’s Bar. And there was more.

It's his new middle name

Newton Dunn later complained to one reporter about being named. The target of his ire had to point out that the Sun man’s barrister had not raised any objection. The bullying attitude was also evident in his exchanges with Labour MP Tom Watson - not that trying that approach was ever going to work. So now Ms Hartley has to be replaced, not with another “Whitehall Editor”, but a “Westminster Correspondent”.

Yes, the nearest replacement for the luckless Ms Hartley is the odious flannelled fool Henry Cole, formerly tame gofer to the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines at the Guido Fawkes blog, and here Newton Dunn has a problem. There is no way he is ever going to get away with bullying Master Cole and getting away with it. Cole is well experienced in the art of bully-boy tactics. One wonders if the Sun people have thought this through.

What will happen the first time Newton Dunn tries to pull rank on the flannelled fool? Will the expensively educated duo - neither of whom managed to get into Oxbridge - really get on without the occasional shouting match - or worse? And will they be able to keep any outbreaks of disharmony out of Private Eye? On previous form, the answer to that one would appear to be an emphatic no. Indeed, popcorn ordering may be more useful.

The Sun’s new political team may prove interesting, but not for the reasons they hoped.