This great tradition of grassing on your friends and enemies to the nearest diarist has sadly nearly died down. An odd beast covering too much ground and preferring the nudge and a wink approach to straightforward scoops, the diary was always going to find it hard to move online with everything else. A good diary also needs a small army of elves despatched to all corners of the city every night, which is something newspapers in financial ill health can do without. Social media has also had its part to play in the diaries’ downfall, as why send a tip to a column when you can tweet it instead?
The Guardian had a diary column until it hadn’t, and so did the Telegraph and the Independent. The Mirror and the Sun have one each but both focus on showbiz, which just isn’t the same. The Times had one then didn’t and has one again, and the Express, the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday still have them, but they aren’t as relevant as they once were. This is partly because they now have more competition (and we’ll get to that in a minute) but also because, well, they won: diary columns stopped being special because everything became a diary.
‘Diaries took over the world,’ says Francis Wheen. ‘Lots of papers don’t have diaries any more for that reason, because the sort of things that used to be diary stories are now on every other page as well. In the eighties, they started spreading to other bits of the paper. […] Before then, it was regarded as not a proper story if you simply ran a speculative thing saying, “There are rumours …”, and I think it’s much more common in political news these days to write that. At the time, political coverage had much more to do with what was officially said at briefings and what was said in the chamber, rather than just vague gossip in the members’ lobby. Places like The Times and the Telegraph used to have a whole page every day of just straight Hansard-type gallery reporting. And then there would be one weekly political column usually, where the political editor or the columnist might be a bit more speculative and say, “Friends of Mr Heseltine have not ruled out the possibility …” but it would all be fairly vague and dressed up so it didn’t look too gossipy.’
With a lot of political reporting now more speculative and – dare we say? – mischievous, the humble old diary column has lost its spot in the sunshine, at least for now. It isn’t all over for salacious gossip lovers, however: someone else has picked up the mantle already, and is causing trouble in their own way.
FUN, FUN, FUN
Popbitch was launched in the early 2000s. It is a weekly email newsletter that is focused on gossip: serious gossip, silly gossip, salacious gossip, gossip about footballers, gossip about politicians, gossip about TV celebrities. Gossip, gossip, gossip. It didn’t really cover Westminster when it started, and still isn’t entirely of that world, but every instalment will usually have at least one political item, which generally tends to be true (or at least hard to disprove).
One of its favourite features is the cock spot, which probably doesn’t require any further explanation, and relies on men of Westminster glancing around when in urinals then telling their friends about what they saw.*
Rumour has it that legal advice they got means that they only publish stories about the, erm, luckier male MPs among us, but this is only partly true: Popbitch doesn’t do items on Westminster’s smaller appendages because it would feel too mean-spirited. Still, the ones they publish aren’t for the faint-hearted. They once remarked that former Lib Dem MP Lembit Opik had ‘a cock like a swan’s neck; occupied both of his hands’. Jeremy Paxman’s, meanwhile, was like ‘a bull’s heart on a tube of Pringles’. It is also something they take very seriously; they once described Nigel Farage’s penis as possessing ‘choad-like qualities’, but corrected themselves later after someone with first-hand experience of the situation got in touch to say it ‘actually more closely resembles a pepper grinder’.
It’s not just cock-and-balls stories, however. They also run more innocent politician sightings (from 2014: Vince Cable spotted at Bloomberg ‘stuffing his face at the free buffet. He couldn’t get it in quick enough’). Meanwhile, other stories can be gossip with a purpose. Take this tale from 2017:
‘Members of a northern branch of the Labour Party became increasingly frustrated at the sporadic appearances their constituency MP was making at local party meetings, never letting anyone know if he was planning to be there or not. It was only when they discovered that a “beautiful, plump lass” he was “pals with” kept her Twitter geolocation settings turned on. Every time the Party members saw that she was tweeting from their city – lo and behold! – he would be around to turn up to meetings. And when she was elsewhere, weirdly, so was he. FYI: It’s not Danczuk, but the seat isn’t a million miles away from Rochdale.’
It’s a fun little story, and it is anonymous, but if you are in Labour circles, it can’t have been hard to find out who this was about if you didn’t already know, and if you did already know, it provided you with an excuse to share it around. On the other hand, our lusty MP will have found out eventually that he’d been outed by Popbitch, and would have perhaps taken it as a cue to start acting a bit more professionally. After all, if you strip the salaciousness away from this story, it remains mostly about an MP neglecting his local party. It never was picked up by a more mainstream outlet, but chances are that the item made life slightly worse for that MP, which he arguably deserved.
Others are more straightforward. In 2016, it published this blind item: ‘Which married SNP MP developed an enormous enthusiasm for Iceland – angling to become an ambassador to the country in the wake of independence so he could continue shagging two Icelandic women?’
Again, it wouldn’t be hard for people in or close to the SNP to figure out who this was about, including people in charge of deciding which MPs gradually become more senior, and which ones remain exactly where they are. An MP cheating on his wife with two Icelandic women and pushing for a position enabling his shagging is not illegal, but it could turn into a scandal if found out, and is generally indicative of that MP’s character.
Oh, and this should go without saying, but even if you are not in a position to influence the career of that MP in any way, it is still a very funny story and makes for a very entertaining read, and you can then pass it on to fellow politically-minded friends down the pub.
In any case, there is (slightly) more to Popbitch than salacious stories any other outlet would stay well away from. The best people to explain the ins and outs of the outlet are probably the people who work for it, so grab a beer, sit down, and enjoy this conversation between founder Camilla Wright and her right-hand man Chris Lochery – and get ready for some colourful language.
Wright: It was really pop that started it; it was stories about people and pop music. That was the very, very first thing. It was a time when pop stars seemed to be more fun, the world was easier to misbehave in; pre-smartphones, pre-social media. But then, well, everybody enjoyed gossip, so very quickly you had journalists, people in PR, getting in touch, and therefore it was probably two or three years in before we did any stories that were politics-based, but by then it felt quite organic. And then you realised that it’s the same people gossiping about all those things.
Lochery: People find the sex lives of politicians to be fascinating, and not just the sex lives – we get a lot of stuff about politicians’ dicks and balls.
W: MPs are unlikely to want to leak saucy stories to us, but the people who work for them throw it out there. Sometimes their gossip is probably not right for us, it’s too specialist, too behind the scenes, it’s too much like inside baseball. So we don’t often use it, but we find out a lot about that world by listening to it and then work out if there’s a filthy story somewhere. […] We’re determinedly non-partisan. You could probably work out roughly our politics from it, but people don’t, so there’s a sort of defence there: all parties could be covered without us being necessarily partisan.
L: We’re more interested in whether each story is unusual, funny or something that you won’t read elsewhere, rather than trying to
protect anybody’s interests, or bring anyone down. The reservations we have with politics is that there are people trying to spread rumours to get one over each other; there’s much more of a competition with politicians so you’ve got to be a lot more wary of the motivation of people leaking, whereas you know when people are leaking about Girls Aloud or whatever, it’s no huge issue. I also think there’s something in the fact that since Popbitch started, and this isn’t anything to do with Popbitch specifically, but the nature of politics appears to have become a bit more pop culture-lite. You know, you have people like Ed Balls on Strictly Come Dancing. The people that would have originally given us stories are now coming into contact with politicians a lot more, because they’ll come out with Ed Sheeran and talk about whatever. The pool of regular sources have a lot more to do these days with politicians, and now those worlds are bleeding into one another, pop culture and politics.
W: The lines are much blurrier, that’s right. People now just think of it all as conversation and gossip, and it doesn’t really matter who it’s about. Anybody who is in the public eye is fair game. And if it’s someone in a suit and tie, and he looks like he should be quite puritan, and you find out that they’re doing something …
L: Like Michael Gove doing the Wham Rap! or something like that. It wouldn’t be weird if, you know, Mick Hucknall had done that when he was interviewed in front of some schoolkids. You’d be saying, well yeah, it’s Mick Hucknall. But to watch Gove do it – there’s something excruciating about it. And to even know that he knows the lyrics to the Wham Rap! …
W: Yeah, I think that’s the idea. It’s the weirdness of the blurring of the lines.
[…]
W: I don’t think we would sit down and try and construct a public interest defence, except that things that happen in popular culture inform a debate and inform the culture we’re in, and therefore I think are in the public interest. I think there should be a much wider definition of public interest than there is. But generally we publish things if we think they’re true, they’re not massively mean, and they’re funny. Quite often, not everything. Or that there’s a reason for doing it, there’s actually a point to be made.
L: I think it’s largely led by whether we find it interesting or funny. I mean, we have to also think of it as true or it’s come from a good source. But even if something comes to us that we think is true, it’s not always for us. It’s not like we have to fill any of the newsletter with politics if we don’t want to, so it has to fulfil a secondary brief of being interesting, funny, or within Popbitch’s remit, which is sort of salacious.
W: The story for us is not always the story, it’s the story behind the story. Why is this coming out? Who’s trying to push it? Can we trace a route? Can we tell people how these stories come out? Why it’s come out now? So you’re trying to illustrate the wheel of the organisations. Why is Damian Green in the firing line? Why is this newspaper after him? Who’s been paid to do this? That’s the story for us. And I think that sometimes stories come to us because people know we’ll set it in a context that people will understand. We’ll only do politicians that the wider population has heard of.
W: I guess we’ve always said that we, Popbitch, exist in the gap between the public image and the private reality. It’s not really just about who’s having an affair, who’s doing what, who’s horrible to whom, but where there’s a dissonance between what people market themselves as or what you think of them, and what they’re really like. And politicians are great for this, because so much is hidden. You want to be elected so you’re going to behave like this, but behind the scenes you’re all raving shaggers. Therefore, that’s why I think we’ve moved into that space a bit, in that it’s just there, and not many people want to cover it in a family newspaper or because it suits them to not publicise that people who share their political views are X or Y. We don’t give a fuck.
L: Or I suppose that byline journalists don’t want to get a reputation for outing people and being indiscreet.
W: So people who want the stories to come out, but can’t because they’re beholden to special interests, whether it’s politics or film, or anything that breaks the code, that comes to us. And that’s why politics is a part of the mix.
L: Information is power in this industry, in a way that, for example, in the film industry it’s not quite the same, in the music industry it’s not quite the same. There’s no real currency to information per se. People who are drawn to it also have a particular cocktail of personality traits that lend themselves to risky behaviours from time to time. Not everybody obviously, but there is a certain type of person that is very ego-driven, very self-centred, to the exclusion of common sense sometimes.
W: So you end up with the sort of stories that we’re drawn to because of the peculiar human interest side of it, plus it’s important and powerful people doing it, plus it’s not really getting anywhere. It’s one of those things that is kind of celebrated in the world of rock ’n’ roll, this kind of excess, but it happens in politics too, and it’s more scandalous in politics because of the nature of the people doing it. That makes it perfect for us, in that sense, because it just has that extra punch when it’s somebody who was dressed in a suit and tie and sitting down on Andrew Marr.
One interesting aspect of this conversation is their utter lack of shame regarding their pursuit of explicitly salacious stories, which is entirely to their credit as they are the only ones really doing it. As we saw earlier, tabloids do enjoy the occasional sex scandal, but tend to get all high and mighty about them. We know they’re publishing it to titillate their readers, they know they’re publishing it to titillate their readers, but it is a family newspaper and they will only print shagging stories if they can throw in a layer of judgement and puritanism. This is fair enough, but makes it less fun. Diary columns, on the other hand, tend to avoid sex stories altogether. There is no immediately obvious reasoning behind this, apart from the fact that it seems to be a convention. The ‘Londoner’s Diary’ never covered society shagging, and then editor of the Sunday Express John Junor once said that according to his paper’s owner Lord Beaverbrook (yes, him again), ‘all fucking is private.’
Had they launched earlier, Popbitch would have had one competitor when it came to covering the sex lives of the great and powerful: Private Eye.
THE ALL-SEEING EYE
‘Well, we don’t not do sex stories,’ says Adam Macqueen of Private Eye, ‘but the sex has to be relevant to something. Sex can be quite a big factor in things, sometimes, but just sex for sex’s sake is not necessarily very interesting.’
This wasn’t always the case – Francis Wheen, the deputy editor of the magazine, explains what happened: ‘When Richard Ingrams was editor, he was terrifically keen on the sex scandal stories. A lot of the stories were … well, some of them were true, and some of them were possibly less true, to say the least. We got into trouble though with some of them, and even when they were true sometimes he managed to get them wrong. There was one about Cecil Parkinson when he was a cabinet minister, who had impregnated his secretary, Sara Keays. Ingrams ran a story saying that Parkinson’s secretary was pregnant but saying that she had got pregnant by another Tory MP, Sir Marcus Fox, so he had to apologise to him.
‘But anyway, when Ian Hislop took over, he let it be known that he wasn’t so keen on “leg-over stories”, as he put it. So if you want to get a sex story in, you have to somehow persuade him that it’s not purely prurient “Oh, look who’s having an affair”. There’s got to be somewhat further justification; he tends to recoil from those sorts of things.’
While his predecessor Richard Ingrams was ‘once heard to say that he thought all his readers should have access to the gossip available to the upper middle classes’, Hislop has a different view on what counts as worthwhile gossip. ‘I thought society gossip was outdated,’ he once explained to the Guardian. ‘It was just leg-over constantly. I’d always thought the thing that defined the Eye at its best was investi
gative journalism and jokes, and I suppose what I’ve put in place of society gossip is professional gossip – people talking about how their industries, businesses, professions work, rather than saying the Duke of Cumberland was seen in White’s with someone who wasn’t the Duchess of Cumberland.’
This is a sad state of affairs for the lowbrow among us (author included), but it doesn’t mean that Private Eye doesn’t have anything to write about. Between journalists’ bad behaviour, MPs’ hypocrisy and murky dealings between the two, the Eye has been the go-to for gossip for decades, and its influence shows no sign of waning. While most other organisations have had to drastically evolve to get used to the online age, the Eye retains a largely useless website, mostly encouraging visitors to subscribe to the print magazine.
If anything, it hasn’t really changed since its first issues in 1961, when a lawyer was asked to check one of them to see if any of the stories in it were libellous, and it turned out all of them were. These days, just under a quarter of their turnover is apparently set aside for potential libel settlements, which is as good a statement of intent as any. It might seem excessive, but makes sense when you pick up an issue of the Eye; the quote about publishing things someone somewhere doesn’t want printed being journalism and everything else being PR might be a tad overused, but it does apply to the magazine.
The Eye tends to go where a lot of places won’t, and delights in publishing what others have tried and failed to put in the public domain. One brilliant example of this comes from 2016, and involves a Conservative minister, an affair with a dominatrix and several cover-ups:
Haven't You Heard Page 16