Piggate - What The Mail Left Out

Such have been the arguments over whether Michael Ashcroft and Isabel Oakeshott’s unauthorised biography Call Me Dave should have included the story of what the PM might or might not have done with a pig’s head that so far nobody has stopped to think that the Daily Mail, which serialised the book, might have left anything out from their trawl through the book’s pages. And it seems they did leave something out.

What the f***'s wrong with keeping schtum about hacking, c***?!? Er, with the greatest of respect, Mr Jay

By the most remarkable of coincidences, part of what was left on the Mail’s equivalent of the cutting room floor concerned the less than upstanding behaviour of of another newspaper, not that the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre would indulge in enforcement of any kind of code of Omertà, you understand. But it is telling that what was not included in the serialisation concerned one Andy Coulson.

Coulson had become Cameron’s chief spinner at the recommendation, so the story goes, of the Rt Hon Gideon George Oliver Osborne, heir to the seventeenth Baronet. That much was not the central point of Ashcroft’s argument: his real concern came when Dave decided to take Coulson with him into Government. And the book reveals that he and other senior Tory figures had significant misgivings about the move.

This is the key passage: “Cameron had come to rely on his clever director of communications. Convinced Coulson had known nothing of phone hacking (and presumably unaware that Coulson and [Rebekah] Brooks had been lovers), the prime minister ignored at least three high-level warnings about bringing him into government … Among those who privately counselled against the move were Daily Mail boss Paul Dacre, who said it was ‘storing up trouble’, former Evening Standard editor Max Hastings, and his old family friend Nicholas Soames”. Yet Dacre did not publish that.

So then-editor of the Guardian Alan Rusbridger was not the only press figure warning Cameron. Dacre and “Hitler” Hastings both showing concern should have at least caught the PM’s attention. Moreover, it was not just Nick Clegg and Paddy Ashdown from the world of politics who counselled against Cameron’s move, but Soames as well - someone who is far, far wiser than he is sometimes given credit for.

Why Dacre might have warned against Coulson being allowed into 10 Downing Street, but wanted to keep that nugget out of his serialisation, might not be unconnected to the Mail titles having several of their staff hacked by those working for the now-defunct Screws. It would also remind readers of the Mail’s involvement in illegal information gathering.

And that’s a pity, because the same part of the Ashcroft book claims that “Brooks, the former Sun editor and News International chief executive, was left ‘deeply angry and upset’ after Cameron ‘deserted’ her in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal”. Rebekah Brooks is now back in the CEO’s seat at News UK. And the Sun has begun to make hostile noises over removal of child tax credits. Dave may have a problem there.

So it’s not about Piggate. It’s about something far more interesting.