My relationship with the Week magazine has changed since I became a Head Master. For those of you who don’t know the Week Magazine, it is a weekly journal that aims to summarise what the media had to say about the most important news stories from the UK and around the globe in the week gone by. I used to not like it very much, thinking that the articles were all written in too similar a style to be satisfying. I far preferred the idiosyncrasies of individual writers in the broadsheets. But I find it much harder to find time to read the newspapers properly these days and have found the week magazine an excellent read. We subscribe to it as a family at home, as I know the library does; and if you decide you like it, maybe you could do too.
Today’s core value is integrity and rather than preach to you too much about integrity, I thought I would read some bits from the week and let you draw your own conclusions. You have just heard the first story. Jack Straw and Sir Malcolm Rifkind, two of our most highly respected MPs on opposite sides of the house, asking for and taking considerable sums of cash in return for introductions to their high powered friends. But what did the newspapers say, as reported in the Week magazine? The Times did not condone such action, but neither did it out right condemn it: “Straw and Rifkind may not have broken the ambiguous rules on MPs’ outside earnings, said the Times. MPs are allowed to make money as long as they declare their interests, and do not act as a paid advocate in parliament. Straw argues that he was merely exploring options for his future: he stepped down as an MP this year. Rifkin says that he was only offering to make introductions. Nevertheless, both men make undertakings that clearly fail the smell test of propriety”. The Guardian is much more emphatic. “This shows how far the rot of paid-for-politics has spread, it says. Where politicians expect to be rented out, there is bound to be corruption”. The Telegraph takes a rather phlegmatic approach. “Of course all this looks very bad, said Philip Johnston in the Telegraph. But it does raise genuinely difficult questions. Do you want a professional cadre of career politicians with no outside interests or people with jobs and connections in the real world beyond Westminster? Ideally you’d want the latter group to become MPs, but it’s not easy to encourage that, whilst also preventing them from hawking the contacts they’ve made in the past”. The independent offers a solution. “t is quite simple. If you want good MPs who aren’t tempted to strike dodgy deals for money they should earn more; but that’s one idea that no-one wants to hear”.
Turn over the page in the Week magazine and you get a completely different and seemingly unconnected story. “The Daily Telegraph’s reputation suffered a body blow last week when the paper’s chief political commentator went public with a devastating resignation letter. Writing on the website “open democracy” Peter Oborn claimed that The Telegraph’s editorial judgement was being distorted by commercial considerations. Journalists were obliged to do the bidding of the advertising department, with thinly veiled plugs for films or holidays run as editorial. Worse, genuine new stories had been suppressed to avoid embarrassing advertisers. Its recent coverage of the HSBC scandal, said Oborn, was so negligible as to constitute a form of fraud on its readers”. The allegation was that, because HSBC paid so much to the Telegraph in advertising, the Telegraph decided not to investigate the bank’s tax evasion strategies in any great depth.
The link between the Straw and Rifkind story and the HSBC story is one of integrity. In the first case, two MPs undid all the good work that they have done in years in parliament; it was in fact a very sad story in many ways, unless of course they had been doing it for years. These politicians were very well respected, but the loss of their integrity will be almost impossible to win back. The HSBC story and the Telegraph’s non-reporting of it is more problematic. The Telegraph’s integrity became an easy target for other newspapers, and most chose to go on the attack. Simon Jenkins in the Guardian, however, was braver than that and wrote that “all newspapers are hypocrites. They stick their moral noses in the air while they themselves rest on festering heaps of deals, perks, bribes and at this without which they wouldn’t exist”.
Which brings me back to the Week magazine. Even the Week is highly selective. It is of course very likely to have its own preferences and opinions. For the moment it seems to me that maybe because of its bland and uniform style it holds on to that precious commodity of integrity. Integrity is hard won yet easily lost; but it is undeniably true that you can only ever have lasting success by preserving your integrity intact.
