Mayoral Wars

Peter Oborne is not one of my favourite commentators, but The Telegraph columnist has a valid point here if you ask me, as he gets stuck into Roy Greenslade and The Guardian over a book published by the former Labour Mayor of Doncaster, Martin Winter. 

For goodness sake what Martin Winter had to say about Labour and Ed Miliband was widely reported in the local newspaper, the Doncaster Free Press, as you'd expect.

Why does Roy Greenslade appear to be doing Labour's dirty work?

Come on Roy, you can do much better than this


Roy Greenslade Photo: REX FEATURES



By Peter Oborne - The Telegraph

One of the most telling manifestations of the pathetic self-indulgence of modern journalism is the phenomenon of the "media commentator." This is a lofty figure who does not write about events in the real world, but prefers to comment on the journalists who do.

Roy Greenslade, who was briefly editor of the Daily Mirror in the 1990s, is perhaps the most eminent media commentator in Britain. He holds a hugely distinguished academic post as Professor of Journalism at the City University.

He writes regular and well-informed articles for the Guardian. He is a cheerful figure and I don’t know of any newspaper editor who would refuse to pick up the telephone if rung up by Professor Greenslade.

This reputation is well-deserved, yet this was not always the case. Scarcely ten years ago the Professor was held in contempt though most of Fleet Street. This was because he was the leading apologist for Tony Blair’s propagandist Alastair Campbell.

Whatever Alastair Campbell wanted published, it seemed, Roy Greenslade wrote it. He launched vicious and lurid attacks on those Mr Campbell disliked (as I know to my cost because I was one of them). He boosted Mr Campbell’s friends. He repeated Mr Campbell’s lies and falsehoods.

The relationship was so close that it often seemed impossible to tell them apart. Some people referred to Roy Campbell-Greenslade, a composite entity which could be relied upon to spin New Labour’s party line.

Eventually the stress of being Mr Campbell’s sycophant and alter-ego told on Professor Greenslade. He fell out with the New Labour spin-doctor over the Iraq War, and relations cooled. This was greatly to Professor Greenslade’s credit.

Fleet Street is a tolerant and forgiving place. We quickly forgot that the Professor had been a Blairite stooge and regarded him once again as a respectable and independent authority.

Sadly it now emerges that Professor Greenslade’s reformation was skin deep. Yesterday Roy Campbell-Greenslade was back in business with a disreputable attempt to trash the reputation of the Mail on Sunday political editor Simon Walters.

Mr Walters has produced a front page splash based on the serialisation of a book written by Martin Winter, the former Mayor of Doncaster (and Britain’s first directly elected Mayor).

Shortly before the 2005 general election Gordon Brown (then chancellor of the exchequer) rang up Martin Winter and asked him to bring about the selection for the safe Labour seat of Doncaster north for one of his protégés.

A few days later Ed Miliband turned up. He lived with Mr Winter for nine weeks and proved an incompetent guest, on one occasion setting fire to Mr Winter’s office. (A carpet was badly burnt, and the future Labour leader bizarrely bought him a Muslim prayer mat as a replacement.) Mr Winter nonetheless arranged matters to Gordon Brown’s satisfaction, and Ed Miliband became the local MP.

The account contains a number of insights into the character of Labour’s candidate to be Labour prime minister, but the most important story concerns the crash of 2008.

Mr Winter says that Mr Miliband told him that Ed Balls knew of an impending global crash in 2007, adding that this was why Mr Balls was so eager to hold a general election that year.

This is a sensational story, of first-class political significance. Yet when this allegation was put to Labour by the Mail on Sunday, a party spokesman dismissed it as "ancient history". Only later did Labour issue a weak denial.

There is no question to my mind that Mr Miliband made these remarks, all the more so because they were reportedly uttered in the presence of Mr Winter’s partner.

It is completely understandable that Labour felt that it desperately needed to do everything it could to discredit the Mail on Sunday story. Alastair Campbell is now reported to be working once again with Ed Miliband. Shortly after the paper was published Mr Campbell tweeted out his verdict: "Mail on scumday. Desperate desperate stuff."

Mr Campbell’s tweet was the signal for Roy Campbell-Greenslade to enter the fray. In yesterday’s Guardian article he turns his fire first on Mr Winter, who he denounces as a "political nonentity".

Then he takes aim at Mr Walters, accusing him of publishing "uncheckable tittle-tattle" and of "character assassination". He concludes his assault with the following withering assessment: "I have a lot of time for the MoS’s political editor Simon Walters but it was sad to see his byline on this confection of unsupported allegations and pathetic innuendo. He is better than that."

I ought to declare an interest. Mr Walters is a friend of mine and a former colleague from the days when we both worked on the Sunday Express. Nevertheless this attack is unfair and, I believe, politically motivated.

Mr Winter may seem to be "political nonentity" to grand media commentators like Mr Campbell-Greenslade. Yet he was mayor of Doncaster, one of our great northern cities, for seven years. The fact that he later fell out with Labour and declared himself independent is neither here nor there.

Let’s now try a thought experiment. Let’s imagine that three months before the 2010 general election the Guardian (the paper for which Roy Campbell-Greenslade writes) had gained access to a book written by the chairman of the Witney Conservative Association.

Let’s imagine that Norman Lamont, the former Tory Chancellor, had rung up the chairman of Witney to fix the seat for his protégé David Cameron. Let’s imagine that Mr Cameron had stayed in his Witney home for nine weeks, during which period he had set fire to an office.

Let’s imagine that Mr Cameron had confided to the constituency chairman great secrets of state which showed that a Tory government had known in advance about an impending financial crisis, yet done nothing to avert it.

Let’s further imagine that the constituency chairman, having broken with the Tories, then wrote an account of Mr Cameron’s visit. Would the Guardian would have turned such a manuscript down? Of course not.

It would have published it with great glee, and would have been completely right to do so. What is more, I am quite certain that the BBC would have given prominent coverage to this Guardian exclusive, and that one of the first people to air his penetrating views on the significance of the story on the Today Programme would have been none other than Professor Roy Greenslade, with Alastair Campbell following closely behind.

Instead the BBC has followed the example of the Guardian and ignored Mr Winter's testimony. This is wretched. The fact is that over the next few months Ed Miliband is making a job application for the most important position in this country. We are surely entitled to know every available scrap of detail about him. The testimony of the man in whose house he lived for two months, and fixed him his parliamentary seat, is of vital national significance.

So congratulations to Mr Walters and the Mail on Sunday for securing a first-class scoop. There is said to be more to come next weekend: I shall be reading it avidly and so should everyone else who wants to make an informed decision come the election.

As for Roy Campbell-Greenslade? Come on Roy, you can do much better than this.


Ed Miliband denies claims made by former Doncaster mayor in new book

Doncaster Free Press - Martin Winter.

Ed Miliband and Ed Balls have flatly denied claims they wanted to hold an early general election in 2007 because they knew the economy was about to “fall off a cliff”.

The allegation is made in a new book by former mayor of Doncaster Martin Winter, who helped the Labour leader secure his Commons seat.

Mr Winter left the Labour Party in 2008 following internal arguments over whether he could stand for a third term.

According to extracts in the Mail on Sunday, Mr Miliband is said to have confided in Mr Winter and his partner Carolyne Hunter two weeks after Gordon Brown abandoned plans for a snap poll.

He reportedly told them: “Ed Balls was desperate for us to go now ... The simple fact is the economy is going to fall off a cliff and this was our best chance of winning.

“The economy is going to get a hell of a lot worse over the next two or three years and we’ll get the blame for it; so it was either going now and risk losing or wait and know that we’re going to lose.”

Mr Brown ruled out an election in October 2007. The scale of the economic crisis engulfing Britain became clear the following year.

A spokesman for Mr Miliband dismissed the claim. “This report is untrue,” he said.

“It is tittle-tattle, a third-hand report of a conversation more than seven years ago. Complete nonsense.

“No-one had any sense of the scale of the global banking crisis which emerged in 2008.”

A spokesman for Mr Balls said: “Everyone knows Ed Balls wanted an early Election in 2007, but the economy was nothing to do with it.”

But Chancellor George Osborne told the newspaper: “The political cynicism and opportunism of Ed Balls and Ed Miliband has been exposed.

“This first-hand account shows Balls and Miliband were more interested in saving their own skins than saving the British economy.’

The book also describes a nine-and-a-half-week period when Mr Miliband stayed with the couple and their children while trying to become the Labour candidate for Doncaster in 2005.

Mr Winter, who said he is speaking out because he has lost faith in Mr Miliband, said he was “patronising” to the children, accidentally set fire to an office, and locked himself in a house by mistake.

Giving his assessment of the Labour leader - who was an aide to Mr Brown at the time - Mr Winter said: “He is arrogant, untrustworthy and procrastinates over everything.

“He is ignorant of the real values of ordinary working-class voters and holds his nose at their lifestyle.”

The report claims that for nine and half weeks between March and May 2005, when the Winter family took the young Miliband into their home and orchestrated his election as MP for Doncaster North, the future leader almost set himself alight, bought a prayer mat to cover scorch marks to his office carpet and was out-negotiated by the Winters’ three young children.

Mr Winter is quoted as saying: “People are entitled to know the truth about a man who wants to be Prime Minister.”

Winter, 52, was feted by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown after he rescued the last Labour Government’s flagship scheme to introduce US-style directly elected mayors.

Blair believed they would root out town hall corruption – and nowhere was it worse than Labour-run Doncaster.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, more than 20 councillors were convicted of fraud and half a dozen were jailed in the ‘Donnygate’ scandal, one of the widest-reaching incidents of town hall corruption in British history.