Bypass bliss to Pompey

THE London to Portsmouth road will from this week finally consist entirely of bypasses.
When the Hindhead Tunnel opens on Wednesday car drivers will travel on dual carriageway all the way from Putney Heath to the Portsmouth ferry terminal. Their only inconveniences will be two roundabouts.
The opening means that the London to Portsmouth road has now been completely moved off the route it originally took when it was first designated as the A3 in 1923.
It also means that the A3 now spends all its time avoiding places rather than going to them. The historic towns, whose centres were all pretty near wrecked one way or another by car traffic, are now deviations off the main road rather than stops on it.
Kingston-upon-Thames, Esher, Ripley, Guildford, Godalming, Liphook, Petersfield, and Cosham were all towns that once had thriving businesses based on the through transport of the Portsmouth Road. The various bypasses have restored some of the peace to their centres, but often the historic travellers’ staging posts have been lost.
Now Hindhead joins the list of places saved from the blight of the A3 – and the common and the Devil’s Punchbowl can once again be enjoyed in all their glory.

Messy morals of investigative journalism

Investigative journalism has always been amoral. The end justifies the means and is itself justified by being in the public interest. The judge of that is ultimately the public. There are no moral or legal considerations about it.

Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World died not because it behaved immorally, but because it failed to satisfy anyone that its use of the techniques of investigative journalism was in the public interest. Its farewell edition in many ways demonstrated the history of the abuse of those techniques.

The Guardian, its editor Alan Rushbridger and reporter Nick Davies, have rightly been applauded for exposing the NotW’s phone hacking. The Guardian rightly had brickbats hurled at it when, in 1983, it failed to protect Sarah Tisdall, a source who was judged to have acted illegally in providing the paper with information which it chose to publish.

It’s not a right-wing or a left-wing thing, investigative journalism; it’s a messy thing, and most newspapers are wary of it. But when it works - and on very occasional moments in its 167-year history the NotW made it work exceptionally well - the public is served by journalism at its best.

Public interest is of course a concept that orthodox tabloid journalists struggle with. They tend to confuse it with what they think the public is interested in. Rod Gilchrist, a former Daily Mail man in New York and deputy editor of the Mail on Sunday once summed that up as “they’re interested in how much money people have got and who is having sex with who.”

The difference between the two is not particularly tricky as moral mazes go, but NotW editors Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson blundered badly in the hedges. As a result hundreds of their employees lost their jobs, millions of people can no longer buy what was the most popular newspaper in the UK, and the Murdochs have closed an institution that occasionally defended the public interest.

Fit and proper?

MPs and the public are outraged by the immorality and illegality of the NotW’s phone hacking, and the surge of that hostility has led to the ending, possibly temporarily, of the Murdoch bid to take over the whole of BSkyB. I’m slightly worried to find myself thinking that this leaves the Murdochs further away from the stuff they are not so bad at, ie serving up the TV circuses of football and movies, and still totally in charge of the stuff they are pretty grotesque at, the News International newspapers, The Sun, the Times and the Sunday Times.
Another worrying thought is that the Murdochs could construct a very solid looking defence against any regulator’s application of a fit-and-proper-person test around just two words: Richard Desmond.

Declaration of interest: I was sacked from The Sun by Murdoch for refusing to cross printers' picket lines in Wapping in 1986.