James Worron

Imagine if phone-hacking had been a scandal from the 1980s. The left-wing cultural grand narratives would be completely predictable: this is a result of greed; these are the kind of desperate lengths people will go to sell newspaper and make a profit in the so-called free-market. Just take a few steps back and it would all be Thatcher’s fault. Sooner or later someone will say that it actually is anyway.

Now feel free for a moment to establish your own narrative about how the culture New Labour years led “inevitably” to the phone-hacking outrages. It’s easy: when the government will do anything for a story are we surprised that the media are any different? When lies, character assassination and the breach of the privacy of, say, David Kelly, flood out ofWhitehallare we surprised when the poison spreads down Fleet Street? Insert your own examples from McBride, Mandelson, Moore and so on.

No, I don’t buy that explanation of the phone-hacking scandal. It’s cheap and self-serving, and people are, at the end of the day, responsible for their own actions. The zeitgeist does not send an instruction booklet.

However, what is astonishing is that the Labour party has any right to be heard whatsoever on the issue of the ethics of news. They presided over ropey ethical standards in government and the split from News International was certainly not their choice. Former Brown acolytes and discredited figures such as Prescott should not be on the rampage on this issue.

We need to wake up and realise that we are not fighting the Labour party of 25 years ago. The modern Labour party means business: when we pull a knife, they pull a gun.

 They have recognised that the phone-hacking story hurts us. This goes way beyond Coulson. The Conservative party de-regulated markets and allowed businesses such as the Murdoch empire to flourish. The moral failures of these businesses therefore reflect on us. This is a weakness in our brand. And Labour’s attack dogs know full well that brand is just posh for prejudice, and they know exactly how to exploit that.

 We need to fight back. The current Labour leadership have climbed on top of a dung-heap of nastiness and incompetence but their sins are already forgotten. This must be reversed or we will be vulnerable to Labour’s moral posturing in crisis after crisis.

First of all we need to address the Labour policy record: we were told last year that there would be a summer of scrutiny. There wasn’t. It is not too late to deliver that scrutiny. As we saw from this week’s announcement about the contract for Thameslink carriages going abroad we are still feeling the effect of Labour’s mistakes.

Then we need to scrutinise the weak points in how the New Labour government operated: the financial extravagance and indulgence, the treatment of staff and the media management culture. We need to use Freedom of Information, Parliamentary Questions, and where possible, the drive for greater government transparency, to leverage out the information about Labour’s own nasty streak.

Separately the right-wing press needs to carry out its own investigations, going over everything from Labour’s policies through it spinning to the professional and recreational habits of Tom Baldwin. This last process has already been started by Lord Ashcroft.  However, unless former Labour apparatchiks are caught red-handed in links to this crisis the most effective attacks will be after this story has died down.

Remember: we haven’t won an election in 20 years, and we won’t until we stop pulling our punches.