Then came Princess Di’s funeral. Of course it was a massive deal. I was sent down there as an unaccredited roving reporter to see if I could dig up any cranks in the crowd. The problem was, there were hundreds of thousands of them. Ghouls from every part of the planet, who’d come to cry over a woman they didn’t even know. I was genuinely confused. It was one of the few times that I lost all faith in the British public. Maybe I’d got it wrong – maybe they were actually peasants who deserved to be fed a diet of royal romps and skateboarding parrots. Maybe Rupert Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks were right about them and John Pilger was wrong. I used the funeral as a test of my blagging-into skills. To see how many restricted access areas I could infiltrate. For most of my career as a reporter, I never carried a press card or ID. I didn’t need one. If you didn’t believe me, so fucking what? You’ll soon know about it come Sunday.
A week later, the big Di splash that the Editor was planning fell down on Friday night. Nightmare. We needed another to fill the void quickly. Phil Hall sent around a memo: ‘We need a splash. Ring around your contacts.’ I was determined to impress him. I stayed up all night phoning people, desperately trying to drum up a story, preferably one with a Di angle. Then I got a lead – Paul Samrai phoned back and told me about a con he’d been inside with. Multi-millionaire Benham Nodjoumi was a big time arms-dealer who had been jailed for rape and fraud. On the hoof and not expecting a reply, I sent him a letter-headed fax, in the name of a phony export company, asking whether he could supply banned landmines. Anti-personnel devices had been Princess Di’s last big campaign before she died. Astonishingly, the Mr Fixit faxed back last thing at night. Saying that he could get hold of 46,500 landmines at £10 a pop. Bingo! Splash about evil landmine-dealers that’d have Princess Di spinning in her grave – even though she hadn’t been buried yet. Next day, Phil Hall stopped me in the corridor on the way to get a cup of tea. ‘Great work,’ he said. ‘Well done.’ I was elated.
The mad thing about all this is that it’s all complete and utter bollocks. Not that it was a stunt. Just that it wasn’t done to help Lady Di. Or the little kids in Cambodia or Rwanda with no arms or legs. But all done just to help us. To get a story in the paper. Total fresh air. Princess Di’s ‘ban’ on landmines. Tony Blair’s ‘ban’ on landmines. All 100 per cent propaganda. They’ve got more chance of banning Page 3. Or enforcing ‘no ball games allowed’ signs on the estates where the NoTW’s core readership dwell. For almost another decade the RAF was still using the BL755 ‘multipurpose’ cluster bomb. Not really a bomb at all but an air-dropped landmine. The BL755 explodes into dozens of little spider-shaped mines. Children are especially prone to stepping on them.
The leaves turned and I carried on turning over people at breakneck speed. All the usual stuff, but at the beginning of October one story stuck in my mind. It was just a bog standard investigation into car-ringing. Posing as Scouse car-robber, I got into a ‘crooked mastermind’ called Francesco Pisanu. Pisanu had developed a fail-safe stolen car racket in which he could fake the identity of cars twice – and pass off twice as many write-off car wrecks as new. By spinning the reg of a red BMW M3, that Pisanu was trying to sell me, I was able to find out that the original chassis had been obliterated in a car fire years previously and then rebuilt with stolen parts. No big deal but it worked like a dream.
One Sunday shortly afterwards I got an abusive phone call from a heavy. It was connected to a story that I’d written. The anonymous caller said: ‘Your mother sucks cocks. We’re going to find you . . . etc.’ All the usual stuff – this happened frequently – and I brushed it off nonchalantly whist watching the Sunday afternoon war film on the telly.
‘Yes, mate, of course you are,’ I intervened now and again. The last one came on about five o’clock just as the depressing Songs of Praise period kicked in.
‘You fucking cunt etc.’ He said that they’d get me outside work and break my arms. His parting shot was something like: ‘You’ll never write another fucking word in that rag again.’ I don’t know why, but it always stuck in my head.
21
Beast of Bodmin: The Build-Up
I was stood at a grey, deserted desk not far from the Editor’s office, worriedly flipping through some dailies. Saturday evening, the paper put to bed. Newsroom eerily quiet. But I didn’t fancy going home – the stress levels in Watford had now reached the same as at work. My relationship had broken down and I was desperately waiting to do one into the new Dockland’s pad that I was buying.
A slight tension gripped my shoulders – I hadn’t had a story for a week, the last one being the car-ringing gangster. A recurrent viral infection, triggered by stress over the last six months, had also been making me angry and depressed. When the delirium hit, I got confused – and manically horny, for some reason. ‘What the fuck is going on?’ I’d complain, but no one would listen.
‘How’s it going, Graham?’ she cooed, like a Warrington-version of Jessica Rabbit. The fragrant Rebekah Wade was stood at my side. Panicky, I stood to attention.
‘Much on?’ she asked, flicking absently through a roughed-up copy of that day’s Daily Telegraph on the bench.
On paper, Rebekah Wade should have been sexy. Tall and slim, an English rose with a killer streak, deadly as nightshade. But in the flesh she was strangely sexless, her femininity scraped barren by a corporate zealotry incongruous with her alabaster skin and floral prints. Rebekah Wade was, in my view anyway, the type of person who gave capitalism a bad name.
Not that I was perving off her. When being addressed by Rebekah, it was essential to mask whatever thoughts you had with the ‘right attitude’. Free thinking, reflection and creativity were put to one side. A narrow set of News of the World views was acceptable – an unnatural process that led to mental turbulence. Brainwashing the polite and professional way is the subject of much research in Jeff Schmidt’s book Disciplined Minds. It takes a critical look at salaried professionals and the soul-battering system that shapes their lives. In this unusual one-to-one with Rebekah, the right attitude was obedience. Servile gratitude that she had singled me out for her pet project.
‘I’m trying to work up some good investigation ideas for next week,’ I replied, trying to look busy. Rebekah pointed at a page lead in the Telegraph. ‘What about this?’ she said. ‘A sighting of the Beast of Bodmin Moor by 15 Cornish councillors on a bus.’
‘Wow!’ I said, marvelling at her genius for spotting it. ‘Great story!’ Speed-reading it, but like an exam question that won’t go in, getting nervous in proximity of power. Worried in case she thought me unworthy, I immediately began blagging her that I happened to be a bit of a Beast expert.
‘Yes,’ I announced, ‘when I worked at the agency, one of the snappers got a picture of a big cat down there, silhouetted against the moonlight and all that. Big story – the Sun splashed on it.’
The flames in her eyes roared up like gas jets. Of all the desires that consumed Rebekah’s extreme ambition – that’s what she craved most. Editorship of the Currant. But first she had to impress Rupert. Prove that she could handle the warm-up Sunday hot seat. Before being let loose on the cash cow that had serviced his acquisition debt for 30 years. Bankrolling BSkyB. War-chesting his imperial campaign in the US. No one could be allowed to fuck that up.
‘The Hound of the Baskervilles,’ she said. Thin lips curling up at the end like the Joker. ‘Fog rolling across the moors, mysterious howls in the night... I like it.’
‘Yes, the smuggler’s caves, Agatha Christie, pirates,’ I babbled. ‘I know Cornwall well. I did my training down there for a couple of years – spooky place.’
Bigging up my authority but digging a hole at the same time. All true by the way – I’d started off my journalistic career as a £90-a-week trainee at the tiny Falmouth Packet newspaper, whilst doing my NCTJ course at Camborne College near Truro. The question was – was it about to end down there as well?
‘I want you to go down to Cornwall,’ Rebekah suddenly ord
ered, ‘and do a story on the Beast. You never know . . .’ She smiled knowingly. ‘There could be something in it – these are councillors after all, so they’re hardly nutters. And look at this picture of a paw print,’ handing me the Telegraph. And sure enough, there was a moody pic of a shape in a bit of mud.
‘The councillors might have been pissed,’ I said. Silence, like a Cheshire frost settling over the upmarket village she’d been brought up in. I’d clearly exceeded my banter.
Rebekah then mentioned a series of pieces that the paper had done on UFOs, a kind of real life X-Files.
‘Our readers loved it,’ she went on, as though she had unearthed some hidden truth about the workers that Karl Marx had overlooked.
‘Remember your spooky vampire story, on the front – I think we were up that week.’ Meaning that circulation figures had risen. ‘People loved it.’
The first thing you learn about news executives is their complete ignorance of their readers. Readers, disparagingly referred to as punters, were imagined to be peasants with very basic levels of reason. No one really knew, because Wapping was cut off from the rest of the world, and reporters ate their sandwiches at their desks. The Chief Executive Les Hinton lived in a fairytale enclave of Wapping known as ‘deep carpet land’. Where the wages were just as unbelievable. The waistcoats had colourful patterns on them. And the corporate slack flowed in abundance. Below him, the Editor moved between his subjects, on the other side of the high camera’ed-up walls, in a chauffeur-driven limo.
However, what was thought to be known was that punters were to be titillated with royal stories and celebrities. And distracted from important issues that affected their lives by unexplained phenomena such as UFOs, ghosts and phantom beasts. Confused by what Marcus Aurelius described as ‘miracle-workers and jugglers’ who talked about ‘incantations and the driving away of daemons and such things’. Horoscopes and make-overs bulged out of the new lifestyle sections. Of course, the biggest distraction of all was the sport on the back pages. The Premier League was the modern equivalent of what the Roman’s called ‘bread and circuses’. The gladiators and chariot races that superficially appeased shallow citizens. But the irony was that readers were still the biggest single mystery to the management. Even to the New Labour-style focus groups that the Soho agencies were billing them for.
Rebekah piped up again with another stroke of genius: ‘I want you to get dressed up as Sherlock Holmes and I want you to investigate these unexplained mysteries. I want you to go to the Himalayas and find out about the Yeti. Has the trail gone cold on Lord Lucan? Is he still alive? I don’t know. I want to know. Is there a monster in Loch Ness? I want you to go there and see. And whereabouts is Shergar? Is he still alive somewhere?’
Shergar? The Derby-winner that was kidnapped by the IRA. Machine-gunned to death in a stable and turned into dog food. No, he was definitely not on this plane. But she was on one – there was no stopping her now.
‘Firstly, however,’ she said, ‘I want you to go to the moors in Cornwall and do a number on the Beast.’
Who was going to tell her that these things aren’t real? I looked around. A few weary reporters had come back from Henry’s Wine Bar, after the customary pint between off-stone and first editions’ dropping. They had had their heads down. No one wanted to break the bad news – Father Christmas didn’t exist.
‘What the fuck was that all about?’ Hadn’t noticed, but Ray had been nervously eagle-eyeing us Goodfellas-style from behind his venetians. But not having the bottle to interrupt us. When the coast was clear, he darted over.
‘What was she saying to you?’ he half-whispered. Shadily, looking from side to side, like a street dealer in one of my stories. For the first time I could sense vulnerability in him.
‘She wants me to go down to Cornwall and take a look at the Beast of Bodmin.’
‘Fuck’s sake,’ he seethed, backing up. It was obvious that Ray was deeply fearful that Rebekah was taking too much of a shine to my good self. But I didn’t play him for it. I was still an office politics Bambi. And in the jungle, Ray was still a big beast.
‘The Beast of fucking Bodmin. Are you taking the piss?’ he wretched.
‘No, and I’ve got to go dressed up as Sherlock Holmes, with a cape on and all that.’
‘Oh for fuck’s sake.’ More emotional this time, shaking his head in denial. As though I’d told him that the economy was collapsing or something and that we’d all have to head for the mountains. ‘What the fuck is that all about?’
‘I don’t know. She said it’s part of a big series – she wants to send me to the Himalayas to investigate the Yeti. Go after the Loch Ness Monster, Shergar, Lord Lucan – the works, mate.’
The word ‘mate’, a little slight assertion of my new status.
‘No way – you sure?’
‘Yes way,’ I said.
I allowed a measure of gloating to rise to the surface. Rebekah was putting me in the know instead of him. Was she teaching the Great Raymondo a lesson? Had he fucked up in some way that I wasn’t aware of? Either way, in Fleet Street terms, this was my big break. Even though I found the whole idea of dressing up as Sherlock Holmes for Rebekah gimpish and humiliating. There was a whole history of arsehole reporters dressing up as chickens or Mr Blobby or whatever for daft stories. I was always of the opinion that it demeaned the status of my illustrious profession. Especially me – I was a serious, hard-hitting investigative reporter. Booting in doors. Taking names. Crusading for Truth and Justice. Not some fucking work experience kid in a panto costume
‘Well, who the fuck’s going to be Dr Watson then?’ asked Ray.
‘Elementary, mate – you are.’ I knew I was pushing it. But it’d been a gruelling Saturday and taking the piss was fair game.
At least he laughed. ‘Fuck off. It’ll have to be Ricky,’ he said.
Ricky Sutton was a contract freelancer who’d just been poached from the Sunday Mirror. He went on to get famous for being the reporter who got into Blue Peter presenter Richard Bacon on a night out. Then turning him over for cocaine.
‘OK, I’ll talk to Ricky. You hire the costumes. And talk to Pictures to see who they’re sending.’
22
Upholding the Claw
The train edged out of Paddington. The shuddering start to our journey. Into the heart of darkness. A real-life Boy’s Own adventure. To find the Beast of Bodmin Moor. Bankrolled by the most powerful media conglomerate in the world.
First class. Feet on the seats. Snug in our carriage. Smug in the way that only those cocooned within the corporate belly can be. The phony life-support system of our age. Sat opposite, Steve Grayson was making the most of the free tea. An unusual decision to assign the Senior Investigative Photographer to a fluffy feature involving fancy dress.
‘It came right from the top,’ Steve explained, as the scratchy greenbelt of Outer London melted into the rolling racing green of Wiltshire. ‘The Picture Editor told me that Rebekah had asked for me personally.’ Shaking his head. The caper clearly well beneath him otherwise. Or thats what I thought anyway. Steve would never knowingly look down his nose. Dressed in high-waisted jeans, belted-up over a cheese cloth shirt, Steve’s momentary pang of professional arrogance jarred with the pair of old women’s glasses that hung from a lanyard around his neck. A crafty touch of the effeminate. To deflect away from his inner cunning. Only occasionally did the battle that raged beneath the surface, a titanic struggle between humility and pride, well up like bubbling oil. But that was just my first impression. Functional fixation, focusing on the parts of him that the News of the World brought out.
‘I was supposed to be doing a big drugs investigation that was all set up with Scotland Yard this week. Catching Mr Big and all that. Guaranteed spread. But at the last minute I got pulled off it, to do this.’ Steve wasn’t happy. But he was professional enough to let it go. ‘Rebekah’s in charge this week,’ he then reminded us ominously. ‘So she is obviously desperate for this load of b
ollocks to work.’
Freelancer Ricky Sutton, the junior member of the team, was sat at a table on his own. Get-the-teas-in insecurity written all over his face. What the fuck is he doing here anyway? Oh yeah, I forgot. Dr Watson to my Sherlock. I made a little show of contemptuously turning down one of his beers.
‘I’ll have a drink later,’ I snarled. ‘Tonight, after we’ve taken care of business.’ A little suck-up to Steve. To make sure he approved that I was the don. Serious as cancer, even on a panto story. Steve reciprocated in the unsaid. Letting me know that I was the top dog on the job. As least on the scribbler side anyway. Our bonds from the Waterson MP job recalibrating seamlessly, like switches on the railway beneath.
Then something unusual. Just as we were about to pull into Bodmin Parkway, after a ball-aching five-hour journey, Ricky got a call from Ray. The boss told him that he was getting pulled off the job – even before it had started. Another story was bubbling up in London, so said Ray. Extra bod needed back at base, PDQ, I’m afraid. Ricky, the disappointment visible. To be missing out on the hijinks. The career-lucrative Editor’s Special slipping off him like loser’s luck. Cosy glances between me and Steve. Our group-think solidifying just nicely thanks.
I couldn’t resist a sly gloat on top – that I was no longer the arse-wipe junior. Run-ragged at will by the Desk. Jerked between pins on a map by posh, piss-taking executives. Like doomed Tommies in the trenches. Finally, someone had taken my place as the Screws non-person. Ricky, who’d not yet passed that magic, unseen line to respectability, was now the new knob-head.
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