Thursday, June 14, 2012

Kenneth Clarke and Lord Bonkers on the way newspapers have changed

In his evidence to Lord Leveson's Inquiry, the Guardian reminds us, Kenneth Clarke recalled his days as a student Conservative, when Harold Macmillan was prime minister:
"Everybody in politics, even a minor parliamentary candidate, knew that the then PM's wife had been having a torrid affair with a backbencher for at least 30 previous years. Not a word of this ever appeared in public print."
Funnily enough, Lord Bonkers said much the same thing back in 1992:
In my young day ... it was common knowledge in political circles that Bonar Law maintained a second household with a large white rabbit called Mabel; yet, while my Varsity chums and I would sit in the front row at his meetings, hold up our hands on either side of our heads and wrinkle our noses throughout his speech, not a breath of the affair ever appeared in the Press.
The moral, he tells me, is to read Lord Bonkers first.

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