Appropriate Expectations

One of Jeremy C Hunt's less illustrious predecessors has been telling the Leveson inquiry what an awful experience it was to be treated the way New Labour thought fit to treat the public. Tessa Jowell, who hurriedly estranged herself from her husband while the latter was having his collar felt over some dealings with Tony's chum Silvio Berlusconi, said that she "kept on reading [newspaper] stories and could not understand where they had come from." Although she said this in reply to the question whether she thought there were stories which could only have come from phone hacking, Jowell made haste to tell the Evening Standard that she meant it in answer to "a more general question about other newspapers". She also told the Leveson inquiry that, as a secretary of state and a "very tough and seasoned elected politician", she did not wish to be a focus of public sympathy, before adding the characteristic New Labour note of sanctimonious self-pity: "you sort of have zero expectations of fair treatment." As a former minister in the snooping, renditionising, database-statist administrations of the Reverend Blair and his Glorious Successor, the fulfilment of those expectations is no more than she deserves.