Fraser Nelson - “Innocent Face”

While the right-leaning part of the Fourth Estate - which is to say, most of the press establishment - attempts to sustain its assault on Labour’s deputy leader Tom Watson, who has committed the heinous crime of doing the job he was elected to do, taking with it a motley convocation of useful idiots (pace Nicholas Soames, who ought to know better), one supposedly reputable journalist has thus far escaped scrutiny over his behaviour.

Fraser Nelson

That supposedly reputable journalist has been Spectator editor Fraser Nelson, who shamelessly used his free ride on The Andy Marr Show (tm) last Sunday - fellow newspaper reviewer Tina Brown contrived to be rather more than fashionably late - to position himself as some kind of disinterested and reasonable observer, while he is anything but. Nelson is, as ever, joined at the hip to the rest of the right-wing press.

Those who have witnessed Nelson shamelessly dissembling in support of sham press regulator IPSO will already be familiar with this: sounding sincere, with a straight face, and without hesitation, deviation or repetition, telling that the PCC’s successor is the “toughest regulator in” whatever jurisdiction he chooses to select, when he has no evidence to back up that claim. There is no comparative study on press regulators in existence.

Going from straightforward spin ...

So they would not have been surprised when Nelson got his gofer Sebastian Payne to pen “The hardest word: Tom Watson still won’t apologise for smearing Leon Brittan”, going on to tell “Tom Watson, Labour’s embattled deputy leader, delivered a statement to the House of Commons this afternoon on accusations about the former home secretary Leon Brittan - which proved to be baseless”. Watson is far from “embattled”, but hey ho.

At first, the argument is one of measured analysis: “No one complaints [sic] that Watson passed allegations to the police”. Then Payne cuts to the chase: “They are complaining that he used PMQs to make his accusation on live television (and, ergo, feeding the beast of social media). They are complaining that he claimed, then, to possess ‘clear intelligence suggesting a powerful paedophile network linked to parliament and No.10′ when, in fact, there was no such intelligence”. And to that I call bullshit.

... to flagrant dishonesty

Watson did not make accusations, but put on record that they had been made by others (something with which all too many self-appointed experts on this matter are having considerable difficulty). And the “paedophile network linked to No 10” has nothing to do with Leon Brittan being declared innocent of a totally unrelated matter.

Payne ends with the kind of veiled threat that, had it come from the left, would have had him and his pals in the most righteous of froths: “The pressure on Watson to apologise isn’t going away”. Got some clout with the press mafiosi, have we, Speccy people? But enough: this is a prime example, and sadly not the only one, where the likes of Fraser Nelson show themselves not to be disinterested observers, but partisan players.

Nelson’s behaviour in this matter is yet another craven dereliction of his journalistic duty. For that, it is not Tom Watson who should be ashamed, but the editor of the Spectator.