Daily Mail - Righteousness Versus Reality

As the Mail titles, and a motley convocation of their overpaid minions, attempt with little hope and even less success to bend reality to their will and create an equivalence between alleged Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson’s serial lawbreaking and Keir Starmer having a takeaway while campaigning, the gaping chasm between press claims and grubby reality has been exposed for the whole world to see.

Stop using my f***ing photo, right, c***?!?!?

While the inmates of the Northcliffe House bunker tremble before the boiling rage of the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre, who has tried to string out “Beergate” a little longer by putting unfunny and tedious churnalist Richard Littlejohn on the case, and LBC’s Gammon Emeritus Nick Ferrari is told by International Trade Secretary Anne-Marie Trevelyan that Durham Police should do what she wants, the house has fallen in.

The Mail is now being roundly ridiculed for using a stock photo of Starmer eating a curry, cropping out Frank Dobson (who died in 2019), and presenting it as evidence of wrongdoing during lockdown. Worse, while Mail and Sun droids are jumping up and down over whether Durham cops are going to reopen the case, news comes that they aren’t.

Pippa Crerar of the Mirror has told simply “Labour sources confirm to me that Durham Police has *not* been in touch with Keir Starmer about beer pic”, before adding “Slightly begs the question why he didn't just say so - police statement may say they're not reinvestigating but need to be 100% clear given circumstances”. Well, indeed.

And then it happened. That falling of scales from onlookers, that ending of all doubt, that realisation that it was the same old Mail, that those who believed the press had got this one right realised they’d been had. It was the City of Durham’s MP Mary Kelly Foy who blew the whistle on the Mail’s two-faced, hypocritical, sanctimonious claptrap.

“As an MP, engaging with journalists is part of my job and theirs. But the way my staff and their families have been targeted is unethical and borders on harassment. A [Daily Mail] journalist doorstepped the 14-year-old child of one of the members of my staff”. Wronged? Proven to be right all along? Pull the other one. It’s the same old nasty Daily Mail.

There was more. “The reporter asked for information about their parents, without an adult present, and only revealed their identity afterwards. This behaviour is despicable and a clear breach of journalistic ethics … I have written to the editor of the Daily Mail and the editors of other outlets demanding they cease hounding my staff and their families”.

Someone talked of complaining to IPSO. But IPSO won’t say boo to the Vagina Monologue and his modern-day stormtroopers. As one Tweeter put it, “It's amazing that the tabloids (and in particular the Daily Mail) have managed to fill an entire week's news cycle with things that Angela Rayner and Keir Starmer didn't do. At the same time, the dozens of real Tory scandals barely got a look in”. Another Tory MP resigned today.

In any case, Mary Kelly Foy and her staff got off lightly. When it really gets serious, our free and fearless press summons blaggers and those with access to places the press shouldn’t go (Police National Computer, NHS records, bank details, phone records).

The Mail told you all what it was like. You should have believed it the first time.

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