Danczuk - The Bidding War

Phone and computer hacking are out of the question. The rest of the Dark Arts are off limits for the foreseeable future. Bribing Police and prison officers is difficult, especially after the Murdoch Mafiosi shopped so many of them. So for the press, it’s back to getting out the cheque book and bidding for the big stories. So it was with nominally Labour MP Simon Danczuk’s first wife Sonia and her account of their life together.

Sadly for those waving chequebooks, Sonia Rossington had already decided who was going to get her story. Plus she might as well have some little recompense for having the phone ringing at all hours of the day and night, plus all the hacks camped outside her house for days on end, especially when they knew their paper had not got the story, but they still had to get a quote.

So there could only be one winner in this case, and it was the Mail On Sunday. So how did three of the unsuccessful papers take their loss? Here is our hopeful trio.

Daily Mail - Spoiler: yes, the MoS found itself bidding against its daily sister paper. And, such is the needle between MoS editor Geordie Greig and the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre that the latter, I am told, ordered a spoiler in retaliation on discovering he had lost out. Hence the Saturday headline “SEX SHAME MP SAVAGED BY EX-WIFE”. The Dacre doggies didn’t know what Sonia was going to say, but they knew it was going to be moderately explosive. Most of that story is recycling other copy.

Sunday Mirror - Quiz The Ex: there was no way the Mirror titles were going to compete for the story with the MoS, so they spoke instead to Claire Hamilton, who, being a good Labour Party member, was ready to talk to the only mainstream paper that consistently supports The Red Team. Ms Hamilton brought the Mirror the satisfyingly vengeful headline “Self-obsessed Simon Danczuk cried like a baby when I dumped him says ex girlfriend”.

This was in addition to leaving a potential unexploded bomb in the vicinity by telling “He follows loads of random young women on Twitter so who knows who else he has been texting and sending messages to”. Can you hear the sound of hacks sharpening their pens as they scour Danczuk’s Twitter account for likely targets?

Sun On Sunday - King Size Onion: after spending three days ritually trashing Danczuk in its pages, the Sun has today allowed him to present his rambling excuse note, telling that, more or less, The Bottle Did It, Honestly.

The article gets off to a bad start, as readers are told “SHAMED MP Simon Danczuk yesterday admitted he sent sex texts to 17-year-old Sophena Houlihan because he was ‘drunk, horny and on my own’”. This is an MP we’re talking about, remember. Does Sir have any further excuses to deploy? “Younger women are my Achilles heel. My first wife was ten years younger than me, my second wife was 17 years younger, my last girlfriend is 17 years younger … Some men like older women, some like younger women, some like brunettes, some like blondes”. That would very much depend on how much younger.

And what the Sun hacks should have told Danczuk is that all his tedious apologia will do is to get more people reading, and talking about, Sonia Rossington’s claims. Serves him right courting the tabloids in the first place. Bad move for him - but good for their sales.