Have you heard? Do you know? Are you, as they say, ‘in the loop’? When the Mail on Sunday said a ‘sensational affair’ between ‘high profile figures’ close to Cameron had ‘rocked’ No. 10, did you have the faintest idea what it was talking about?
I did, but then I’m a journalist. Friends in the lobby filled me in on a story which had been doing the rounds for months. I even know which law stopped the Mail on Sunday following the basics of journalism and giving its readers the ‘whos’, ‘whats’, ‘whens’, ‘whys’ and ‘hows’. (Although with most affairs the ‘whys’ are self-evident. It is the ‘whos’ and, for the voyeuristic, the ‘whats’ and the ‘hows’ that stir the blood.) I cannot say any more in print. I cannot even tell you which restriction on freedom of speech is stopping publication. If I did, you might just be able to work out the names of the lovers.
If I or another journalist or lawyer met you in a pub, however, we would gossip, as people do. You would discover that the Mail on Sunday exaggerated, and the affair is not ‘dynamite’. It does no more than confirm existing impressions about the tawdriness and narrowness of our elite.
This is the way it always was before the web. By the time the rumour had run its course, a few thousand people would know the truth. The authorities could not have punished miscreants if they had tried. To prove that X had whispered to Y about the infidelities of Z, they would have needed spies in every bar and bugs on every phone. The surveillance required would have not only been illiberal but beyond the capacity of the state.
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