PJ: Sarah Palin is a fraud, and perhaps that is why so many people have tried to unmask her. Her Christian beliefs seem to go only so far as to ask her fans to pray for her, her abstinence only soapbox is actually quite rickety, her 'qualifications' are only smoke and mirrors and a pretty facade, she holds herself up as some kind of perfect model of civility while casting stone after stone against her opponents, she attacks the media while doing all that she can to garner their attention...but does that mean that she is fair game for any muck-racking journalist?
The Guardian
Raking up old allegations? Not even Sarah Palin deserves that
We don't want the media constantly recycling lurid stories about what politicians might, or might not, have done in their youth
What with the eurozone tottering and threatening to collapse on the rest of us and a UN habitat buff intervening in the Travellers eviction dispute in Essex, you may not have had time today to see that Sarah Palin is in trouble again.
This time, a biography is alleging that she used drugs and had a long affair with her husband's business partner. Those hockey moms, eh!
The Guardian didn't make much of the story in the dead tree edition of the paper – the printed version we all still cherish – though you can find Chris McGreal's online account here.
Sensibly, the paper's editors preferred to find space for the more serious/less raunchy problems surrounding the presidential ambitions of that other populist now seeking the US presidency Michele Bachmann.
She's had to apologise to Governor Rick Perry, the populist from Texas, for forcing health-threatening vaccines on teenage girls in the state. McGreal's report – it was a busy trailer-park day for him – is here.
I have a problem with stories like the Palin one, which has topical British resonance to which I will return. The allegations are made in The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin, written by the veteran crime and politics reporter, Joe McGinnis, who wrote his first such bestseller about Richard Nixon's White House triumph as long ago as 1968.
What they boil down to is that the former Alaska governor and Republican vice-presidential nominee allegedly smoked marijuana with her prof as a student, snorted cocaine off an oil drum while snowmobiling and had an affair with a former business chum of her husband, Todd Palin.
Oh yes, the book also alleges that she liked to sleep naked on school field trips and may – it's denied – have enjoyed a one night stand with Glen Rice, a future black basketball star, in her sister's dorm room at the University of Alaska.
Some of this stuff has surfaced, pre-publication, in the National Enquirer (what the snooty mainstream US media usually calls a downmarket tabloid that people buy at the supermarket checkout, usually run by Fleet Street emigres too), and in leaks to Gary Trudeau's Doonesbury comic strip (which makes it OK with card-carrying liberals).
My problem is that the wretched woman didn't do all this last week or even on the campaign bus with Senator John McCain, who might well not have noticed if she did.
It all happened years ago, in her teens and 20s. As David Cameron might have said (actually he did say it in 2005): "We're allowed to have a private life before politics in which we make mistakes and do things we should not."
Quite so. I think Palin is a flaky lightweight who is in way above her head in the governor's mansion – but doing what millions of other American voters of her generation have also done, and doing it long ago, is no reason to throw stones at her now. We should leave that sort of thing to the Iranians.
Stewart Lawrence has a piece on Comment is Free suggesting that she is still a contender, albeit undeclared, and could even run as a third party – ie Tea Party – spoiler in 2012. That would, of course, clinch Barack Obama's re-election. I stand by my personal guarantee to all readers: Sarah Palin is unelectable as president of the US (and a good thing, too).
But we should pause here and look at our own dirty habits, which seem to be spreading to France as the socialists' internal battle for the presidential nomination gets dirtier. Political "love triangles" used to be private in France, but the internet, Twitter and the DSK affair have put an end to that. As always, it's a mixed blessing.
On Monday, a colleague asked if I would write a commentary on the resurfacing of a British coke and sex scandal. Oh really, which one? This one was from ABC News in Australia.
As you may have heard by now, it's the one about the sex industrialist, Natalie Rowe, and the future chancellor, George Osborne. The pair were more than good friends and, when this story first surfaced in 2005, she claimed he took drugs "on a regular basis" – and she alleges it again now. Osborne and his friends have emphatically denied it.
Newspapers like the Guardian, wary of intrusion into private lives and creeping tabloid attitudes, agonise over stories like this one. It's hard to get right every time. Sometimes I think we print stuff we shouldn't – and vice versa. As someone said to me only yesterday: "You lot weren't as hard on Piers Morgan's transgressions as you were on Andy Coulson's." Morgan isn't in big league politics, I replied, but my challenger had a point.
In this instance, the media correspondent James Robinson wrote a report angled on the fact that Rowe, a former escort agency boss, thinks her phone may have been hacked by News of the World staff before they ran a "spoiler" version of the Sunday Mirror story of October 2005 (for which the Mirror had paid her proper money).
It's what the trade calls a "way into the story", and what allows the wider allegations to be aired too. Phone hacking is a serious and topical matter – yesterday's paper reported a 7/7 victim's mother joining the long list of those suing – more so than what Osborne may or may not have done at the age of 22.
There was another "legitimate" way into the story, which ABC TV floated in Oz and other papers deployed in its wake – namely that Coulson, the NoW's then editor, soft-pedalled the story and was owed a favour. Hence Osborne's fateful recommendation to his friend, Cameron, that he appoint him as his street-smart, Essex-born media adviser. Geddit?
This, too, has been emphatically denied and – at the risk of routine accusations of naivety – I tend to believe the denials. On Monday, I declined my invitation to write about it all. We could see that Rowe, now 47 (the chancellor is 41), might have an interest in promoting her version of events again but – as with Palin – what happened years ago before either party entered politics seemed not to be fair game.
I am not aware that either she or Osborne has ever taken a hard line against drugs, something which might justify (at a stretch) charges of hypocrisy which are easily made in public life and easily aired via Twitter and across the internet.
My reaction on Monday was that the Vickers report on reforms of the banking system had just been published and that some slick City PR, keen to keep the Treasury on the back foot, had planted the story to distract and undermine Osborne, who says he wants to implement Vickers, albeit slowly.
A more sophisticated reading might be that ex-NoW staff now in search of work might be peddling what they have in old notebooks and shared memories of past exclusives, printed and not yet printed.
Someone with good contacts in Australia, Digger Murdoch's old patch, could have set it all up, as they are suspected of doing in Oz with the Charles and Camilla "tampon tape" all those years ago. Too hot for Britain? Leak it in Oz.
As I say, I don't know the answer, but it's a mucky business. Partly because this kind of dilemma keeps coming back in our gossipy holier-than-thou age, and the Palin disclosures reinforce the point.
Partly because the Rowe-Osborne saga has rattled away all week to the point that Matthew D'Ancona, the nearest thing the Tory party has to columnar royalty these days (ex-Spectator editor, ex-Fellow of All Souls, Oxford) wrote about it in his London Evening Standard column.
Here it is, wordly and wise – kind even – as usual. Osborne did deal directly with Coulson at the NoW over Rowe's claims and was impressed by his aggressive intelligence, says D'Ancona. The Murdoch stable was already committed to the Cameron-Osborne team in the Tory leadership contest. He recommended Coulson as a bruised "former victim, not as a man repaying a debt".
That sounds plausible, and D'Ancona is also right to suggest this storm in a coke bottle will not last long, unlike the wider hacking scandal, which is unfolding via myriad inquiries. The Levinson inquiry into media practices is collecting witnesses with axes to grind aplenty, while James Murdoch has been recalled by MPs to explain himself further. Like the Iraq inquiry, which burdens Tony Blair, this one will run and run.
But on a day when the Committee on Standards in Public Life (are its own standards slipping, I wonder?) is reporting that public confidence in elected politicians is again falling (pdf), we don't want the media constantly recycling lurid stories about what they might have done/not done or even worn/not worn in their youthful past.
I keep saying that intrusive and unjustified pressures on public life – the bits that may be a good read but aren't in the public interest – is shrinking the talent pool of those willing to stand for office or take on gruesome burdens.
You don't believe me? Well, just look at the failure of European leadership – again – this week, in what may become an existential crisis for its currency.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2011/sep/15/raking-up-allegations-sarah-palin
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