RIP The News of the World

I should declare a certain vested interest. I had two run-ins with the paper during the early part of my career. First, I applied for a graduate trainee position there. Fuck knows what I was doing. The interviewer - a thoroughly pleasant bloke of old-school ink-stained fingers and morbid obesity stock - was quite high up at the time the hacking was going on, and for all I know he'll be doing time in chokey by the time I've churned this out. He turned me down, but was lovely about it, and said I'd go far. Possibly not the last lapse of judgement he ever had.

Then later, in about 2007, I was approached by the NoTW regarding a story I was researching. The deal they put on the table was pretty simple: betray all, or some, of your contacts, possibly leave them facing prosecution, and in return you'll get a front page, £20,000 and some shifts. You don't want to be a poverty striken freelancer all your life, right? You want to work for the BEST paper in Britain, right?

I did contemplate their offer, and I came up with an answer: stick it up your arse. Well, that's not quite accurate, I blustered about how generous the offer was, and about how I feared the repercussions and...I'd actually barely got the excuse out of my mouth when I was ushered out of the room. They were already thinking about the next story.

So let's be quite clear: I hated the NoTW. Absolutely fucking hated everything it stood for. I once spoke to Tom Newton Dunn, former hack, now Sun Supremo and King of the Sentient World, on the phone, and I asked him if he thought what his paper produced was detrimental to society. His response was that I was taking 'an incredibly patronising attitude.' 

'We're only giving the public what they want.' If it's tits and football they want, who are we to stop them having it? Just because your values don't correlate with theirs, why should we feel guilty about what we produce?

And my response is pretty simple: because you fucking should, you disingenuous cunt. You, XXXXX, schooled at public school, Oxford and City University London, who have had access to art, culture, nuanced political thought - you have a moral imperative not to use those benefits - none of which, let's be honest, have been in any way earned - churning out reams of vacuous shite. Make something better than that. Make something constructive. If it's a tiny blog about cricket with a readership of about three, sporadic freelance features in little-read magazines and a critically-well-received book which won't make back its advance until about 2075 and certainly won't advance your own career in any way whatsoever then I'm afraid that's the way the cookie crumbles.

So yup, to quote Richard Peppiatt's rather majestic letter to Richard Desmond: 'You may have heard the phrase, "The flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil sets off a tornado in Texas." Well, try this: "The lies of a newspaper in London can get a bloke's head caved in down an alley in Bradford."' I was living in Portsmouth when Rebekah Wade set the population of Paulsgrove firebombing paediatricians' houses and all the rest of it, so I knew from a relatively early age about the long-range impact of tabloid journalism, of stories designed to appeal to the emotions rather than the intellect.

Because that's the crushing irony which a lot of people seem to have missed here. This became a story largely because of the Milly Dowler/7/7 victims/army relatives angle. As the world and his dog have said - it's nauseating. But - and this is undoubtedly rather callous-sounding - why is that so much worse that celebrities' or politicians' phones? Because they're 'ordinary' people? Please. As if someone who acts or gets their tits out in front of Mahiki is somehow elevated to the level of emotionally invulnerable ubermensch. 

No, what really got the public upset was the heightened emotional resonance that such names and cases carry. That charge gives rise to the utterly reasonable but still incredibly strongly-felt demand that such people be treated with respect and decency. And where does this emotional resonance come from in the first instance?

Right first time. The very tabloid values that the News of the World, in no small part, did its utmost to create. And the other irony: that very defence of only giving the public what it wants - essentially the free market argument - well, you can't then be too upset when a ruthlessly commercial decision (and that's what the closure is, above all) leaves you out of a job.

Very interesting, CC. You don't like tabs. What the hell has all this got to do with cricket?

Well, it brings me to this. Thing is, it's possibly the most important cricket exclusive ever written, and certainly in the last 20 years. It was a story that so many of us knew about, but Cronje apart, never thought would see the light of day. We'd heard all the murmurings for years, but finally, here it was, brought out into sharp relief. That image of a foot, a foot past the white line. Everything we'd allowed to go wrong in our game, captured right there. Was it motivated entirely by commercial interests? Clearly. Was there a slightly uncomfortable. whiff of entrapment in the methods deployed? Possibly. Were the repercussions, on a purely cricketing level, tragic? Of course. I'd give my left bollock to see Aamer steaming in next week. But was it ultimately a good thing? Without question.

When Blair described the newspapers as 'feral beasts' he was closer to the truth than he knew. Rabid dogs or headless chickens would be nearer the mark - wheeling around, knowing everything and nothing, chancing their arms left right and centre, constantly overstepping the line - and sometimes, just sometimes - they hit the mark. We have a remarkably free and diverse press, and this is the price we pay. On Twitter the feeling seems to be that good has triumphed over evil. For me, it's hardly surprising that one feral beast has finally torn another to shreds.

So yes, I'm sad tonight. I'm particularly sad for the journalists who, it appears, lost their jobs. So no hard feelings to those guys who shunted me out of their boardroom four years ago. Just an honest, heartfelt thanks for your little contribution to our game.