How Did The Sun Doorstep Rowling Ex?

While the inmates of the Baby Shard bunker discover just what public opinion thinks of their decision to embolden domestic abuse perpetrators across the UK and elsewhere, a further question begs itself about their front page story today. The Sun claims that its reporter doorstepped Jorge Arantes at his mother’s townhouse in Porto.

Dom Luis bridge, Porto

Which sounds like the usual kind of Sun fayre: send a hack to rock up on someone’s doorstep, get a bit persistent and in the target’s face, fire off a few suitably aggressive questions, fail to take foot out of door until answers are forthcoming, make sure plenty of noise is made so the target says something, anything, to make the hack go away for fear of upsetting the neighbours, and there it is - job done.

And if Arantes and his Mum live in central Porto - like a lot of the city’s residents do - there will be plenty of neighbours to upset. But hold on a moment - we’ve forgotten about something - like the Coronavirus pandemic. Which has affected every country in Europe to a greater or lesser degree. And if we in the UK think we’ve had it bad with lockdown - well, it’s been of a degree stricter in Portugal. Including getting in to the country.

How so? Well, when the country locked down back in March, Portugal’s borders were closed. As in closed completely. International flights have almost ceased - except for air cargo. Land borders have been closed, except for freight traffic. There has been some easing of restrictions in the past few weeks. But the border with Spain remains closed.

Which brings us to the doorstepping. The name on the by-line of today’s Sun front page lead is Ben Leo, who has demonstrated that he is of less than perfect courage by locking his Twitter account. So when the Sun tells that it doorstepped Arantes, it has to be assumed that Leo was the one who did the doorstepping.

How did he get to Porto? OK, perhaps he was in the country anyway - Leo’s name is on the by-line of a raft of stories about recent developments in the McCann abduction saga - but even so, travel within Portugal has, during the lockdown, been restricted to movement within one’s own community area (you live in Lisbon, you’re barred from travelling outside Lisbon without permission). And the McCann story is centred on the Algarve.

In other words, the very south of Portugal. Porto is several hundred Km north of there. So even if Leo had been in the country, he would have had to obtain permission to travel from the Algarve all the way north. Otherwise he would have been breaking the law.

There are, of course, two other possibilities: One, that a local reporter went to doorstep Arantes, in which case It Was Not The Sun Wot Done It and the Murdoch goons have lied to their readers, which is possible and not surprising. Or, Two, that the interview had been done at some other time and had been under wraps in that legendary safe.

However, the paper asserts that Arantes made his admission “last night”. Either way, the Sun has been indulging in breaking Portuguese lockdown laws, or the paper is lying when it claims that it did the doorstepping. It will be interesting to hear the explanation.

The Sun - out of the frying pan and into the fire. Once again - Don’t Buy The Sun.

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