Friends in high places

You are a loving mother and your daughter, on the other side of the ocean, is in deep trouble, possibly facing criminal charges and a prison term. You are rung at home by a reporter. Do you suddenly pour out your heart to him?

I don't think so. I find it hard to believe Marie Turner spoke so movingly to the London Evening Standard last week without the prior knowledge of someone close to her daughter Ruth Turner, the Downing Street aide arrested in the cash-for-honours inquiry.

True, Turner senior lives in America, where there is a presumption in favour of free speech and journalists are more trusted than they are here. But her comments seemed a little too well-rehearsed: "She has ... absolutely nobody to talk to at all ... She cannot even discuss with her parents what is going on ... Right from day one I have never discussed the job [with her] ... I was unaware of the importance of what she was doing."

We've got the message: the mother knows her daughter is honest, lovely and kind and that she is now completely isolated and under "heavy stress". Yet so mindful is Ruth Turner of the rules on talking about government business that, in the greatest crisis of her life, she hasn't talked to her mother.

I have no evidence the interview was arranged by the Turner camp, or that Ruth Turner herself had knowledge of it. But clearly some kind of briefing war is going on, as happens routinely during political crises. The police apparently started it, leaking regular and tantalising details of their inquiries. Those under suspicion, or their associates, have followed suit. After so long, the police are likely to want at least one scalp and several people, including Turner and Lord Levy, the PM's fundraiser, fear their names are marked, and that the others will conspire to isolate them.

So "friends" have burst into the newspapers, as they did during the great Blunkett-Quinn and McCartney-Mills wars. As well as the mother, the Standard quoted an old friend of Turner's. "She might be prepared to sacrifice herself," he confided anonymously. "She is so dedicated and so loyal." Several papers reported Turner had been "in tears" after talking to Levy about the police investigation last summer.

But Levy's friends want us to know he is human too. Neither he nor his wife can sleep, they revealed to the Times. Nobody had "lifted a finger" to help him, complained one. He's "going back to his roots", said another. This apparently meant his local synagogue, whence a rabbi emerged to tell Channel 4 that anti-semitism was to blame, a suggestion that fell, to put it mildly, rather flat.

All this, lest we forget, concerns a serious criminal inquiry, not some squabble about who moves up or down the cabinet rankings. The attorney general might have a case for arguing we should put a lid on it, given the dangers not only of prejudicing court proceedings, but also of unjustly blackening the reputations of the suspects, several of whom may soon need new jobs. But Lord Goldsmith, as I wrote last month, has tolerated reporting about terrorism suspects (much of it inaccurate) that goes far beyond legal conventions. When it's a Muslim living in a Birmingham terrace house, the press is allowed to tell us (or invent) anything short of how often he changes his underpants.

Yet now Goldsmith springs into action, appearing at the high court every five minutes to seek injunctions to stop the BBC and other media, including the Guardian, from publishing details of a note written by Turner. He largely failed, as he deserved to. All he did was give the media a better story. After a rough few months, the papers love the chance to pose as defenders of ancient liberties, quoting rousing passages from Milton.

You may think that, in opposing Goldsmith's injunctions while demanding more restrictions on the reporting of terrorism suspects, I am guilty of inconsistency. Very well then, as Walt Whitman said, I contradict myself. I am not sure I accept the comparisons with Spycatcher or the Pentagon Papers, which were attempts to cover up state secrets rather than potentially prejudicial material about criminal inquiries. But it is impossible to have detectives popping in and out of Downing Street without giving the public some information as to what is afoot, particularly given suspicions the police or the Crown Prosecution Service might go easy on such distinguished miscreants. If any inquiry needs to be in the full glare of publicity, it is this one. In any case, Downing Street aides are better equipped to look after themselves than poor Muslims from Birmingham, who seem to lack garrulous friends.

And that is the nub of it. I am not privy to whatever tortuous reasoning led Goldsmith to seek his injunctions, and the high court still refuses to allow the proceedings against the BBC to be reported. But I suspect Goldsmith's actions betray an establishment mindset. What we, the little people, get to know about our rulers is to be carefully controlled. However, when we, the little people, are in trouble, almost anything can be said and written about us.

Still in hot denial

A rather good article in the latest British Journalism Review explains why the media took so long to give the threat of global warming the credence it deserves. Faced with a complex issue - and climate science is exceedingly complex - the media's instinct is to pit adversarial "experts" against each other, even though one represents a view shared by nearly all the world's scientists, and the other a view taken by fewer than a dozen mavericks.

What changed the media view, the BJR authors argue, was the Treasury report on global warming costs from Sir Nicholas Stern. It's a thought experiment, rather than a compilation of hard facts, but journalists treat economics with "meek credulity". We have reached, the article announces, "the end of an era".

Alas, no. The only real changes are in the Murdoch papers, following the greening of Rupert's son, James, and in news pages generally, where it is now accepted science reporters will take the non-sceptic view, which produces rather good scare stories.

But the Telegraph, Express and Mail stables still give ample space to global warming deniers. Even the green Independent features the über-denier Dominic Lawson, though he is really filling the court jester's position.

Most deniers now accept the fact of warming, but have latched on to a theory that it's caused by solar radiation, not by humans. This theory was outlined in a Channel 4 film last week and several papers gave it big feature treatment, on the implied principle that, if Channel 4 allows it 90 minutes, it must be serious.

The Guardian columnist George Monbiot also presented a Channel 4 film on global warming last week, arguing a quite different case. For some reason, we didn't hear so much of that one.