The Brown ‘bullying’ allegations are a nightmare for good journalists. They are also a dream for bad hacks who simply repeat every smear and concentrate on the process instead of substance.
It’s a cracking yarn of psychosis at the heart of government and manna for radio phone-ins and online forums. But if you were, for example, to watch Monday’s BBC Ten O’Clock News followed by Newsnight you would be hard-pressed to extract any factual basis for the narrative.
People who responded to my tweets last night drew diametrically-opposed conclusions from exactly the same reportage. This reflects their politics, but also the difficulty of reporting what is a ‘rumour’.
It seemed that the BBC’s political editor and the Observer’s Andrew Rawnsley do not believe Gus O’Donnel, Britain’s most senior civil servant, when he denied having warned the Prime Minister about his ‘bullying’ behaviour. (And don’t get me started on how the word bullying has come to mean any instance of rudeness or disagreement).
The charity that was cited in evidence has been shown to be shaky at best and ill-motivated at worst. Rawnsley can’t name anyone to back up his allegations. And Robinson seemed to spend a lot of his air-time quoting people like Mandelson who rubbish the story. Dear Viewer, Confused? I am not surprised.
Here’s the odd thing. I am sure that Rawnsley and Robinson’s hunch/narrative is correct. I have the advantage that at least one very senior person has confirmed to me first hand knowledge of the kind of uncontrolled, vindictive, violently abusive behaviour by the Prime Minister. I have heard a lot of corroborating testimony, too.
I don’t particularly care that the country’s leader loses his rag sometimes. But this behaviour does seem systematic and a direct influence on policy and political mismanagement. So it does matter.
The real conundrum is for journalists like Rawnsley and Robinson who can’t get sources to go on the record. If they don’t report these things then they stand accused of keeping secrets in the cozy club of the lobby. If they use journalistic conventions then they face the bluster of people like Prescott. You decide.
“I have the advantage that at least one very senior person has confirmed to me first hand knowledge of the kind of uncontrolled, vindictive, violently abusive behaviour by the Prime Minister. I have heard a lot of corroborating testimony, too.”
“The real conundrum is for journalists like Rawnsley and Robinson who can’t get sources to go on the record.”
So you have evidence to back up both Mrs. Pratt and Andrew Rawnsley. I take it as read that your source won’t go on the record either. I dare say that others in your position have similar stories to tell, so there is plenty of evidence to suggest that what Mrs. Pratt and Mr Rawnsley have published is substantially true.
Have you ever come across the old saw ” All that is neccessary for evil to prevail is that good men do nothing”?
‘The real connundrum (sic) is for journalists like Rawnsley and Robinson who can’t get sources to go on the record. If they don’t report these things then they stand accused of keeping secrets in the cozy club of the lobby. If they use journalistic conventions then they face the bluster of people like Prescott. You decide.’
Rawnsley claimed to have knowledge of a private conversation between two people. In effect he named his source as Gus O’Donnel, who else could it be?
Do you believe this for a minute?
I don’t.
By the way, Rawnsley brought Prescott’s wife into the argument for no good reason other than personal abuse. If he had tried the same with me, he would have been picking his teeth up off the floor.
Andrew Rawnsley is all too typical of the public school, Oxbridge mafia that fills up the opinion pages of the once quality press. He is no journalist, he is a jumped up gossip columnist.
Mrs Pratt says Gordon Brown was not involved in the bullying. She says she doesn’t even know if he knew about it Mrs Pratt does. There’s first-hand evidence straight from the horse’s mouth – and willing to be quoted. But it doesn’t match the narrative some people desperately want to be heard. So the truth gets ignored even when its out there in plain view.
Have you ever heard the old saw “A lie can be half-way round the world before the truth has got its shoes on.”?
Pete
I’ve caught Andrew Rawnsley a couple of times on some sort of ITV clone of “The Andrew Marr Show” and he strikes me as pretty obnoxious himself. Rather like a cut-price, inferior Paxman – and I’m no fan of Paxman’s either. (Although, to be fair, Monday’s Newsnight was fairly entertaining.)
I also used to have dealings with Gus O’Donnell years ago and – unless he has seriously lost the plot (I hope not!) – it seems odd that he would have told someone as second-rate/potentially leaky & unreliable as Rawnsley the kind of things Rawnsley was implying he did on Newsnight. At best, this would be a very clumsy way of getting something into the public domain.
By contrast, there’s nothing odd at all about the shameless rebuttals from Prezza and – particularly – Mandelson.
People I trust have had dealings with Gordon Brown and there is no doubt in my mind that he’s foul-mouthed, arrogant and rude.
But that’s not the same thing as being a bully. I’ve worked for a REAL office bully and they were charming & smarmy in public/ with their superiors, but utterly snide and abusive in private. Always conniving behind your back, failing to support you/undermining you in meetings and elsewhere if their previously agreed line was attacked, altering requests endlessly, keeping key information to themsleves to make you look stupid, giving you and others (especially women) bad reports no matter what your contribution was… etc etc etc. :<
Nothing was ever thrown, nor was there ever any physical threat or violence of any sort, no swearing and very little shouting. Yet everyone knew this was someone you should avoid working for at all costs if you knew what was good for you.
I’ve also worked with plenty of “difficult” people. Yes it can be stressful, but nothing like as bad as working for a genuinely abusive bully. There is a very big difference.
I have no idea whether Gordon Brown is just an unpleasant and difficult Mr Sweary or a *genuinely* abusive bully, but there is something about this whole Andrew Rawnsley/Nick Robinson/Gus O’Donnell story which seriously doesn’t make sense.
LOL – I can imagine fevered conspiracy theorists trying to work out some reason why NuLabour has set up Rawnsley to make the (formerly?) efficient and proper O’Donnell look really bad so they can get rid of him before………
I generally adhere to the cock-up theory myself but I’m blowed if I can figure out what’s going on here!
Judging by his increasing bulk, Andrew Rawnsley’s modus operandi seems to be taking a variety of politicians and civil servants to expensive restaurants with the Observer picking up the tab. Once there, he plies them with overpriced food and wine and in return receives the latest tittle-tattle, rumour and malicious gossip.
I believe this is known in the trade as ‘meticulous research’.
I suggest you go to
http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/andrewrawnsley
and see if you can find one piece written by Rawnsley that would necessitate stepping outside of the Westminster bubble or meeting a genuine member of the public.
As I said, Rawnsley is an elitist who has has gone from public school to Oxbridge then to the Observer without ever experiencing real life. No wonder he can’t write about it.
Resistor, I don’t think it matters whether Rawnsley is a public school elitist of not. It’s self evident that the man is a complete dipshit.
A failed Paxman clone, but not quite nasty enough to ape Wheelan and McBride. And so thick it’s taken him 13 years to realise “The New Dawn” never happened and, worse still, that inequality, poverty, religious segregation, scientific illiteracy, creationism in schools, civil liberties, political engagement, the BNP, adult education, Iraq, Afganistan, NHS patients left lying in pools of their own faeces (etc etc etc…) have all got worse.
Par for the course then, that at the very last minute he decides to try and cash in before what little he’s gleaned from all this tittle-tattle becomes totally time expired.
I bet he doesn’t have lunch with Gus O’Donnell again for a very long time… 😉