Review
by
Neil Harris
THERE’S not too much separating the
capitalist world from the underworld – the “criminal classes”. In the end,
criminals are lazy capitalists; the mentality is much the same, it’s just the
work ethic that’s missing.
They tend to have
similar tastes when it comes to leisure activities too. So hanging around the
sports events, casinos, restaurants, nightclubs, bars and hotels favoured by
the rich, you’ll find an entertaining mixture of petty criminals, informants,
bent coppers, journalists and the occasional spy: all on the lookout for a good
story to sell.
In the 1970s and
1980s, Ian Cutler was up to his neck in all this as a staff photographer for
Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World
newspaper. Cutler made a fortune as a “snapper” but had a knack of annoying
powerful people; corrupt police officers and gangsters all took violent revenge
on him and he became well acquainted with prison food in his time.
Fallen on hard
times now, Cutler has been reduced to selling his self-published memoirs; Camera Assassin II, but your local
library isn’t going to be stocking this one any time soon. Ghost written by
Eddie Chapman, the burglar, con-artist and wartime double agent, this is a
foulmouthed insight into working life at the News of the World. Luckily
for New Worker readers, we’ve
carefully read through all the sordid tales of debauchery and excess so that
you do not have to.
It wasn’t his
first attempt to enter the literary world – he was involved with the
legendarily decadent Simon Regan in producing Scallywag, a ruder, cruder and poorer version of Private Eye magazine. Scallywag got sued out of existence by Prime
Minister John Major’s caterer although some old issues are still to be found hiding
in the murkier areas of the internet.
Cutler now
dishes the dirt on his former colleagues at the News of the World and a very grubby world it is too; a lying,
boozing, fraudulent world of prostitutes, long liquid lunches and inflated
expenses claims that earned the pre-Wapping “Fleet Street” its nickname of “The
Street of Shame”. Most of his colleagues seem to have been so preoccupied with
getting drunk and having underage sex that they had to resort to making up
stories for the paper. Above all, he revels in exposing the hypocrisy that
allows “newspapers” like the Sun and
the Daily Mail to claim that they
stand for press freedom.
There is no
indication that Murdoch approved of what went on but he was happy with the
circulation figures and the front pages. Occasionally, he would get involved
with the paper’s agenda and then their lying became political to supply him
with the features he craved.
Murdoch is
alleged to have been pre-occupied with “welfare scroungers” and Cutler details
how stories were made up for him using models and prostitutes photographed to
illustrate how people were working while claiming state benefits. “Every last
one of them was a setup. We’d go out, set up a picture, then (Ray) Chapman
would invent a story to go with them….”.
The left was
always a target for Murdoch so Cutler and his gang were happy to oblige. Ted
Knight, the Labour leader of Lambeth Council was a victim: “In efforts to
expose ‘Red Ted Knight’, (Ray) Chapman and Cutler paid black models to pose as
council workers moonlighting in council time with council equipment”.
The state-owned
British Leyland was another battlefield of class struggle and Cutler came up
with a fabricated front page story of workers sleeping on the job. Titled “The
Goodnight Shift”, this 1979 story was well timed to discredit the Joint Shop
Stewards Committee and was one of a number of “stories”’ used to smear the communist
chief shop steward, Derek Robinson and to justify his dismissal and
victimisation.
Usually it was
the vulnerable, the young and the poor who were their victims, with Cutler and
his colleagues sniggering at their misfortunes. This culture of sexual
exploitation and abuse is one that Jimmy Saville and his circle would have felt
at home in and probably were.
This was the
world of the capitalist media of the 1970s and 80s. Homophobic, sexist, racist
and revelling in sexual violence, these well paid scumbags created the
justification for the belittling and domination of more than half of the
working class – those who were female, gay or from ethnic minorities. That made
it all too easy to for them to take on the remainder: it’s called divide and
rule.
And then the News of the World moved to Wapping,
leaving behind the old Fleet Street, its drinking culture and 3,600 victimised
printers. It was now using new technology with a non-union workforce and the
papers were providing a steady stream of cash to fund Murdoch’s worldwide
ambitions. The new generation of media bosses running the propaganda machine
were sober, efficient people like Rebekah Wade and Andy Coulson but that’s
waiting for another book and a different author.
The book, written by Ian Cutler and
Eddie Chapman, has now been updated as Camera Assassin 111 and it can be downloaded
in Kindle or PDF format for just £2.95 at http://www.cameraassassin.co.uk/. Print copies
are sometimes available from website mail-order booksellers.
