Hack

by Graham Johnson

  Today we were looking at bushes, rather than creeping around them. In the gardens at Kensington Palace in West London. For once, we weren’t trying to get a pap picture of Princess Diana. Alistair had got a tip that ‘guerilla gardeners’ were using Di’s backyard to grow cannabis. As soon as he told me, I thought it was a bit moody. I suspected that it was a stunt-up but I carried on drinking my plastic cup of tea, and looking at the rhododendrons, waiting for the dopey horticulturalists to turn up.

  Lo and behold, shortly after we got there, as if on cue, a sneaky villain straight from central casting started crawling out of the bushes into the car park, holding a bouquet of skunk leaves and wearing suspiciously familiar mirror shades. Not only that, he was glancing from side to side, like he was looking for Germans in The Great Escape. Are you joking or what?

  Give him his due, Alistair did his best to feign astonishment, jumping out of his seat and simultaneously bosh-bosh-boshing with his Nikon through the blacked-out windows. The piss-taking gardener slithered on his belly right past the van, before he stood up just like that and melted into the crowd of tourists.

  ‘There’s one. Look at that. Got him red-handed,’ Alistair beamed. ‘That was fucking lucky, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Deffo,’ I said, trying not to laugh.

  The story was clearly a stunt-up. Only this time it wasn’t me doing it, but another journalist. I was suddenly faced with a subtle dilemma. Do I go along with it? Or do I take the moral high-ground and front him? If I go with the flow, then it’s a risk, because it’s a stunt-up that for once isn’t under my control. And it was such a blatant spoof that everyone back at the office would get on to it as totally phony. Alistair had clearly none of the production values that made my own stunt-ups so believable. Shameless. What a fucking amateur, I thought.

  By raising the issue, I’d have to play the goody-two-shoes super straight reporter, who would never dream of telling fibs. That would have a tactical advantage of double-bubbling everyone away from my previous stunt-ups. But I couldn’t grass him up – that would be unforgivable. I decided to test the water and see where it went.

  ‘Fuck off,’ I said. ‘Are you mad or what?’

  At first, he tried to bluff it: ‘What are you on about? That’s a great story – good tip, worked out, what are you trying to say?’

  Then he did his best to hide his embarrassment. He was shamefaced because he was spoofing and because it was such a poor effort.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ he asked, trying it on again.

  ‘You fucking know what I’m talking about – that pile of bollocks that’s just happened. I’ve seen some fucking spoofs – but that takes the biscuit.’

  After realising that he couldn’t blag a blagger, Alistair went on the offensive: ‘Listen, you can talk, some of them stories that you’ve been getting away with recently looked a bit skewwhiff.’

  I was fucking outraged. How dare he? The cheeky twat. Him trying to pour shit over my stories. I fronted it out and parried the attack, my face not giving anything away.

  ‘Those stories are all straight up,’ I said.

  He smiled knowingly. ‘Listen, I just thought you’d be up for it, that’s all. You’re right, it’s a moody story. The cannabis man in the Barbour jacket is just a mate of mine.’

  For a moment I held his fate in my hands, and he didn’t know whether I was going to bell Ray and call in an airstrike on his career. Quickly, he launched into a talk round, a compelling mix of self-pity and bravado. First, he played wounded because he knew that I held his life in his hands – if I bubbled him to the Picture Desk then he’d get the sack immediately. But he knew how to play a reporter.

  ‘Listen, if you don’t want this story, then I can give it to another reporter. There’s plenty on News who’d like an easy by-line.’

  To back up his claim and make me see it as a competition, he then mentioned the name of a very senior reporter on the paper, who went on to be a big shot at another Sunday newspaper. Alistair claimed they regularly worked on spoofs together. It was the first time that I had first-hand testimony about a culture of fabrication at the News of the World. Another photographer later backed this up. Two other names were also mentioned and a series of spoof stories were cited as evidence. Wow – I would never have guessed. One was a great tale about a modern-day grave-robber and another one was about a big-time money forger. Strangely, it felt like a relief. I no longer felt so ashamed inside, so alone, so dirty. I also felt jealous that if I were to knock Alistair back, I might be giving away a free story to a rival reporter. Alistair knew what buttons to press.

  ‘OK.’ I said. ‘I’ll write it up and make it sing. But next time, just tell me beforehand, OK?’

  ‘Nice one,’ said Alistair, clearly relieved. ‘What shall we call cannabis man?’

  ‘What about Will Brereton?’ I said, naming the cannabis man after a kid I knew at school.

  ‘Spot on!’ he said. ‘We’ll fuck off home for the rest of the day – I won’t tell the Picture Desk what I’ve got until the close of play.’

  Headline: ‘Dopes Grow Cannabis in Di’s Back Garden. NoW investigation.’

  Strapline: ‘Hash gang reap fortune at royals’ Kensington joint.’

  Picture caption: ‘Taking his leaf– grower Will creeps off.’

  Intro: ‘Evil drug barons are growing cannabis in Princess Diana’s backyard at Kensington Palace.

  Best made-up quotes: ‘It’s ideal,’ he bragged. ‘The soil’s good and the undergrowth protects plants from the wind and rain.’

  The files of the British Association of Journalists trade union tell a story of fabrication right across the industry. A senior executive forcing reporters to make up stories about young women as a pretext to get pretty pics of models into the paper. An exec who threatened to sack staff if they didn’t falsify drug dealing stories dubbed ‘special assignments’. Another boss who bullied staff into stunting-up at four national newspapers, as well as fabricating his own. Bullying was common to all cases.

  One of the reasons I and others were able to get away with lying was that part of the News of the World was one big lie. Some of the corporate culture was healthy and natural, but a lot of it was constructed on lies that were kept in place by the sheer force of will of the News International commissariat. One example of this was that editors actually believed the News of the World was a serious paper. Execs were convinced that members of the public thought the paper was a credible organ. Most people thought it was a scandal sheet full of nonsense and dirty vicars and took the piss out it. Another example was that they were very serious about some very unserious people. The powerful NoW elite had a very simple view of working-class people in as much as they thought they loved soap operas. They would run Corrie and EastEnders storylines – weddings, fights etc – as though they were real. One day Stuart Kuttner came up to my desk to print something off and he said: ‘Do you ever watch The Bill?’ He then went off on one saying it was the greatest thing on telly and beautifully made and how it was clever, and that its clear line on cops and robbers was an education. I was like: ‘It’s only a TV show, mate, calm down.’ But that’s what they were like – their lives and beliefs were full of bollocks. When you see so much bullshit everyday, everything becomes relative and I thought: ‘Well if that’s all bullshit, one new piece of bullshit won’t do any harm.’ That was my attitude. Not right, but that’s an accurate account of how I felt. It reminded me of a story I’d read about soldiers during the Vietnam war. Disillusioned infantry were forced to go out on patrol even though it was dangerous and futile. But in order to tick the boxes, they simply walked out the gate, walked 200 yards down the road and stayed the night in the comfort of the local village. They radioed in to say that they were in the middle of the jungle and fabricated body-counts. I understood that mindset.

  Another one of the reasons that enabled me to get away with spoofing was that there was a phenomenon, common to many tabloid newsrooms, that I called ‘suspended d
isbelief. Like most switched-on people, reporters and editors have good bullshit-detectors – in fact they are trained observers and professional human lie-detectors. However, often when faced with a pile of bollocks, editors will turn a blind eye or let it wash over them for the sake of expediency – they have 96 pages to fill every week. No one wants to challenge anything as it interferes with business and they don’t know where it will lead.

  Some editors deliberately spoof. Former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie was notorious for his tongue-in-cheek, take-the-piss spoofs. ‘Some stories are too good to check,’ he said.

  On a couple of occasions I was rumbled for spoofing. One day I stunted-up a scare story about counterfeit alcoholic drinks. I was getting sloppy – to make the ‘props’ I simply poured antifreeze into bottles of orange juice. I drove an actor – dubbed Neil Williams – along the M62 from Liverpool to Leeds so that I could ‘drag him out’ for a snatch.

  Headline: ‘Alcopop Poisoner Peddles Death.’

  Strapline: ‘Fake hooch is made of antifreeze.’

  Intro: ‘Evil bootlegger Neil Williams is risking kids lives at Britain’s music festivals – peddling lethal fake alcopops.’

  Best made-up quote: ‘I’ll be making up two or three loads soon – but most of that will be going with me to the Glastonbury Festival.’

  The only problem was, when I checked in with the office, Ray Levine asked me to take the hooch to get tested, so that we could get an official line in there. I took the bottles to the public analyst’s laboratory at Liverpool University. The £300-per-hour chemist went ballistic. During tests, the white-coated boffin discovered that they contained 22 per cent ethylene glycol that could cause serious damage to the respiratory system and kidneys. Alarmingly, he declared them a risk to public health. And sent out a national warning to police, customs and trading standards.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ I said. ‘What did you do that for?’

  ‘Got no choice,’ he crowed. ‘It’s the law – strict procedure.’ I didn’t want coppers or snoops sniffing around my house of cards. The exchange was awkward. The public analyst started asking me questions and I could tell he was on to me. ‘Fuck him,’ I thought. Grabbed the samples and raced off.

  I suppose I never lost sight of the fact that tabloid journalism was simply a business. At the end of the day the News of the World was a vehicle designed to carry revenue-generating adverts. My copy was simply a device to draw the reader’s eye in, in the hope that then they would briefly brush their gaze over an ad for a new video from Currys, or a turkey roast from Iceland, on the opposite page.

  Up until the 1920s and ’30s, newspapers were a heady mix of spoofs, speculation and guttersnipes. Ironically, this allowed many reporters to ferociously attack the establishment. The great Irish muckraker Claud Cockburn summed up their mischievous dissent when he said, ‘Never believe anything until it’s officially denied.’

  But following the growth of mass consumer markets, newspapers had to smarten themselves up in order to appear respectable to advertisers. Dissenting voices were quietened in order to appease corporations. Instead of self-generated lies, spoofs were now provided for them by PR firms. The tobacco industry paid feminists to smoke so that cigarettes became ‘torches of freedom’. Communist menaces were fabricated in banana republics like Guatemala to pre-empt regime change. Reporters were encouraged not to lie for themselves, but only if the lies benefitted commercial or powerful interests. Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays invented the profession of public relations to rationalise this process. In 1928, Bernays said PR was as ‘an invisible government which is the true ruling power in our country thanks to ‘the intelligent manipulation of the masses’. His secret weapons were ‘false realities’ which then became stories. The objective was to spread commercial propaganda. The lies were made elaborate in order to fool consumers into buying sponsors’ products. Now, I was just the latest in a long line of spoofers.

  12

  Close Shave

  A few months later, I had another close shave when I ‘exposed’ a prostitute protection racket in a Liverpool red light district. The local delinquents used to throw bricks at kerb-crawlers to deter them until the working girls gave them a cut of their wages, after which they’d obviously quieten down. I paid my mate’s niece to pose as a brass in a skimpy top and short skirt, and her younger brothers to play the part of the racketeer hoodies.

  The story made a decent page lead. But on Tuesday, the shadowy Ukrainian Associate News Editor Greg Miskiw waltzed over with a fax from a Liverpool solicitor. The fax stated that the kid’s mother had blown her top after seeing the pics of her daughter in the paper, and that she’d found out that I had orchestrated the story and paid the kids – all massive and sackable transgressions of the PCC code. Oh dear! She was now suing us and threatening to blow the lid on stunt-ups. I imagined the solicitor sitting there in his snake-skin shoes rubbing his hands. Don’t ever have a Scouse compo lawyer lock on to you. They are vicious, meddling, greedy bastards who single-handedly invented Britain’s out-of-control compensation culture.

  Then the vice squad from the Toxteth section of Merseyside Police called up. The officer also said that the story sounded like a load of bollocks to him and that he’d never heard of such a nonsense protection racket in all of his 15 years of busting johns, hookers and clippers on the mean streets of Liverpool’s red light area.

  ‘Fuck.’ I thought. ‘Word is getting around fast.’

  I quickly got on the phone to my stunt-up fixer Samy: ‘Do us a favour. I want you to go around and see the ma of those kids and shut her up – double-quick, mate. It’s coming on top badly etc . . .’

  Samy: ‘OK, no sweat. She’s a single mum – she’s probably trying it on for a few quid.’

  Me: ‘Exactly. Give her three-ton and talk her round. Get her to phone that meddling Scouse brief and close him down before he gets on one.’

  Samy: ‘OK, mate – I’ll sort it.’ And he did. We paid her off. Persuaded her that telling tales was the equivalent of ‘grassing’, which is still a serious taboo in many working-class communities up north. End of story.

  I suppose that one of the reasons that I told lies was that I never really wanted to be a reporter. Consequently, I never had any sense of journalistic heritage. Many decent reporters have often wanted to be journos since they were kids. Devouring newspapers and editing school rags while I was out smashing up phone boxes and picking magic mushrooms. They revered newspapers as though they were Shakespeare plays.

  Me, I couldn’t give a fuck. I had an A in English at O-Level and that was about it. I was driven by fear of not having a job – any job. In our house, tabloid papers didn’t happen. Everybody was busy working all the hours God sent and we instinctively knew they were full of total bollocks anyway – Princess fucking Diana and Freddie Starr and Coronation Street. Got better things to do. At weekends we used to swap our Mail on Sunday for next door’s News of World. As a horny, spunk-soaked teenager I was secretly titillated by the naughty stories in the problem pages of young lads shagging older women. To me, that’s all that the papers were – wank.

  I only ever read and respected one journalist – that is the eminent John Pilger, often described as the greatest living newsman in the world. When I first became a national newspaper reporter, I used to go home at night and devour his writing. I was blown away at how he tackled massive stories such as the miners’ strike, the Liverpool dockers’ dispute and the Israeli-Palestine conflict. Using simple tabloid language, that he had learned on a strict, adjective-free training course in his native Oz as a cadet reporter. Before honing his style as feature writer on the Daily Mirror for 23 years, to reveal the truth about complex, agenda-driven stories. Straw men were not on his radar. Pilger attacked real power which took real courage.

  The contrast came when I went to work the next day at the agency, steeled with a new determination to be John Pilger. But I may as well have had an ambition to be a spaceman. I wrote about Camilla Par
ker Bowles shagging Prince Charles, Mr Blobby, lottery winners, Myra Hindley’s day out to Cornwall with her lesbian mate, transvestite bus drivers, real life – ‘I was attacked by a swarm of bees’ or ‘My wife ran off with a Turkish waiter’. In the end I thought: ‘What’s the fucking point?’ What’s the difference between the shite I write and outright lies. Nothing much.

  Long before I’d got to the News of the World, I’d started stunting-up daft stories for the agency. I got a dog owner to dye her Dulux dog pink, saying that she did it after watching the Flintstones movie. I also got my flatmate in Bristol – a Phd student – to say that he was maniacal fan of The Flintstones. He dressed up like a caveman and said that he’d been to see the film 100 times. A couple of poor students pretended to say that it was love at first sight after meeting in the queue to buy lottery tickets. It made a Sun splash. Another couple said they broke up because one loved Oasis and the other Blur. When Batman was popular I persuaded a man to say that he’d invented a Bat Torch which was going to make him millions. Countless phony vox pops and case studies.

  I used to pay a party stripper girl to say that she did themed kiss-o-grams on whoever was in the paper that week. For instance when Major James Hewitt was demonised for being a cad, she said that she was doing booming business in Hewitt-o-grams. During Comic Relief I’d paid her to pose up in a bra made of big Red Noses that motorists put on their cars. Sounds daft but stories like that sold like hot cakes. To get the job at the agency I pledged to the owner that I’d contribute more to his fixed costs than any other reporter on his books. And I did. When I left to go to the Screws, he told me that I’d made more money than anyone he’d ever employed. It paid to fabricate stories.