When did pleading ignorance become the most sure-fire way of getting yourself out of any sort of trouble that happens on your watch?
Every week at work, I hear people attempting to exculpate themselves from their cock-ups with the lines "I didn't know" and "nobody told me".
And my response is pretty much always along the lines of "that you didn't know doesn't get you off the hook because it's your job to know – so you not knowing is negligent."
I am a hard boss like that.
The former US president Harry Truman famously had a sign on his desk saying "the buck stops here" – the great and good of our time do not appear to subscribe to that principle.
Rupert Murdoch, David Cameron and various chiefs of the Metropolitan Police have all, one way or another, insisted that the buck does not stop with them in relation to the phone hacking scandal (and of course the associated but separate "corruption of public institutions" scandal), because they did not know what was going on.
Putting aside the obvious "my arse, you didn't know" response, let's assume they really didn't know.
That's not a kind of "oops, what am I like?" oversight. For example, it's been made clear that unnamed people at Number 10 were actively discouraging anyone from letting Cameron know about the infilitration of the Met by former NoTW staff, to not tell Cameron about it so as to not "compromise" him.
Either that's a rather sinister conspiracy of silence or a rather touching example of unnamed sources laying down their lives for their master. I can't help but think that Cameron should have been told though, so that he could make the right decision, even if a prior decision made in the absence of certain information was, to a degree, compromising. It would certainly have been a forgivable sort of compromise.
However, all these people – and especially the Prime Minister and the police chiefs – whether they knew or not what was going on, should have known. And to say that they didn't is not an excuse. It's an admission of negligence, incompetence or plain stupidity.
So what they have all been saying is "I'm not responsible, because I am too lazy, corrupt or stupid do to the job I am paid to do to an acceptable standard".
And as my answer to that excuse typically is: if that's the case, you should seriously reconsider whether you should be in the job at all.
Amen to that....
ReplyDeleteIt is obviously they are talking arse anyway....
Rupert Murdoch: Sometimes, I would ring the editor of the News of the World on a Saturday night and say, "Have you got any news tonight?" But it was just to keep in touch... Let me say, I did not really call him weekly, but I would have called him at least once a month, I'd guess.
Q280 Philip Davies: What would you discuss with them? If things like that were not on the agenda, what was on the agenda?
Rupert Murdoch: I'd say, "What's doing?"
Is there any need to comment on the above? I thought that the "willful blindness" charge is pertinent here, to government as well as NI. It is not an excuse. The reason that these people are given, or earn, great power and wealth is because they have higher standards to adhere to. The prison camp/Nazi arguments of "I was following orders..." & " I did not know..." should not & hopefully will not carry much weight (although Cameron seems to be getting by on it for now...)
I'm sure Murdoch didn't "know" in the sense of explicitly ever saying: "Hack into Milly Dowler's phone and delete the messages? Yeah, that's fine". However, the idea that he didn't know about/permit/allow to develop a culture where lawbreaking was perceived as something the bosses would be ok with and protect you for is absurd.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree about the "wilful blindness" in government. Hopefully that excuse will work as well for them as it did for Eichmann.
Totally agree... I do not think that Murdoch sat behind his desk and, Mr. Burns style, ordered specific and atrotious acts... but he is famed as as a bullying control freak who micro manages his titles, that he led and fostered the culture, practice and ethics is something which I am in no doubt about and simply requires "good" evidence.
ReplyDeleteDunno whether you saw Dispatches the other day but it contained an interesting testimony from an ex-NI Australian journo who said that someone from The Sun gave a talk about practices at NI conference. At the end of the talk the journo asked "Are there any ethics or morals at the London Sun?". The reply was "no"... Murdoch later attacked the journo and he was moved on, i.e. endemic and entrenched support for bad behaviour...
Finally I have railed against the Murdoch's for years (and boycotted their products). This may look like a teenager claiming that a boyband is theirs because they supported them before they were famous... but I mention it because I do not see "low level" criminality, such as phone hacking, as the most pernicious threat from the Murdoch's... it is their subversion of democracy in order to create a world that conforms to their ideals. The "going in through the back door" of No. 10 is brilliant just a metaphor, let alone that it is literally what they do... The Dispatches programme highlights a Blair policy change to support for the European Constitution after Murdoch threats (indeed he declared that it would not be in "our" interests, wtf would it have to do with him? An Aussie immigrant who emigrated to the US?) and MPs are freely, now, reporting times in which they have been told that if they do something that NI does not like then Brook's would make their lives hell... another reason for severe dislike would be the James Murdoch Aug 2009 speech in which he attacked the BBC for being unfair. What would be fairer is to disassemble the BBC so that Sky could come in and replace it with an far more expensive, partisan product with no public service remit.
There is a reason why Rupert Murdoch is the basis for a Bond villian... and even if the caricature is a little ludicrous in its literal depiction of a man wanting to rule the world there is a subtle grain of truth in that film.