Get on yer bike
Beijing style, and
remember the kitchen sink
Alison Prince
TT racing on Arran?
SR Extra
The gold stars forgotten by the Glasgow Science Centre
Click here
for David Harvie
Michael Elcock
Today’s banner
An autumn day in Peebles
Photograph by
Islay McLeod
Tommy Sheridan
should be released
a week tomorrow
Kenneth Roy
Tommy Sheridan with wife Gail
www.bobsmithart.com
It already feels like a very long time since that early summer in the age of comparative innocence, when such leaders of society as Jon Snow, Robert Peston and Michael Gove left the now notorious all-night party at the Murdochs’ country residence. Within 48 hours, all hell had been let loose over the hacking of a dead girl’s phone.
Now that the floods of autumn are here and the snows of Christmas cannot be far behind, all has gone eerily quiet. Little is heard of the police investigation; after an impressive flurry of arrests, no charges have been brought to date. Most people have probably forgotten the name of the chief functionary, even if they will never quite forget her hair. Among the innocent guests caught in the headlights, Mr Gove is again in the news, but only with an advisory role in the Werritty affair, while there will soon be the annual story about Mr Snow’s refusal to wear a poppy.
Later this week, in the United States, restive shareholders of News Corp will attempt to expunge the name Murdoch from the company’s board, but it is unlikely they will succeed. Back in London, the plan to summon son James before a select committee to explain apparent inconsistencies in his earlier evidence seems to have come to nothing. A prime minister called Dave, the former employer of Coulson, has emerged from his various misadventures of the year with barely a scratch.
Ah yes, the prisons may be full, but not with the providers of the high-season diversion. It is easier to bang up the odd looter than to nail this lot.
Or, come to that, the odd Tommy. One of the supreme ironies of the year (so far) is that the only person doing time because of his association with the Murdoch empire is not any of the friends of that discredited dynasty, but its most bitter enemy. Tommy Sheridan found that the price for crossing Murdoch was three years.
Of course, the charge was not ‘crossing Murdoch’. It was a bit more subtle. Mr Sheridan went down for committing perjury in his earlier civil proceedings over disobliging stories printed about him in the News of the World. Remember it?
When Mr Sheridan was bundled into a van to take him the short distance from the High Court in Glasgow to Barlinnie Prison, this ‘newspaper’ (as it was sometimes loosely described) was still a power in the land. Two or three million people – the precise figure is immaterial – bought it faithfully every week. But then, in the heat of summer, old man Murdoch decided that saving his own skin was more important than saving the News of the World. Here one day, it was gone the next. Its readers dispersed without protest to alternative sources of titillation. Never was a dead paper less lamented.
I wonder what has happened to the disgusting idea of putting Mrs
Sheridan and her daughter on the street. But let that pass. Here are
a few questions.
Kenneth Roy is editor of the Scottish Review
website design by Big Blue Dogwebsite development by NSD Web