Puns can be fun but they can be cruel too, as Vicky Pryce would have discovered if she dared to read today's national newspaper headlines: the Pryce of revenge, the price of vengeance, the Pryce is wrong.
Scores of pages were devoted to the conviction of Chris Huhne's ex-wife, with the Daily Mail going way over the top by giving the story 12 successive pages plus an editorial.
Calling it a "squalidly tragic saga of modern politics", the leader writer mused on the possibility of film directors queuing up to tell the story. In the event that they do, the Mail has provided all the source material they could ever want for a script.
Every element of a movie melodrama could be found in the Mail's coverage. The lives of Pryce and Huhne were excavated in enormous detail as the paper, peering down with disdain from its moral high horse, poured scorn on them.
Pryce betrayed her sex, her career and her children, wrote the Mail's Carol Sarler. Sure, there is something to admire in women who hit back at unfaithful husbands but what Pryce did "soiled" other women "by extension". Sarler wrote: "No other woman scorned has left us, frankly, ashamed of our own sex."
Huhne - "the sneering public school Trot" - was treated to even rougher treatment in a profile that accused him of several sins: a privileged background, overbearing self-confidence, pompous insubordination, grasping ambition, youthful radicalism, elitism. No brick was left unthrown.
The Mail even wheeled out the former perjurer, Jonathan Aitken, to give Huhne some unwanted advice on how to cope with his inevitable prison term.
But Pryce and Huhne were merely pawns in the Mail's favourite game of bash-the-Lib-Dems. This story played to its political agenda because its real target was the party that dared to go into coalition with the Conservatives.
Aside from two obvious large headlines - "A new Lib Dem cover up" and "Less than 1 in 3 Lib Dem voters still back the party" - the unmistakeable message of the totality of the Mail's coverage was its bitterness towards Nick Clegg and his party.
The only other paper to give anything like the same space to the story as the Mail was The Independent, with eight pages. Its leader argued that marital coercion, Pryce's defence, "should have no place in the British legal system."
A neighbouring article by Mary Dejevsky contended that it was not a criminal trial, but a divorce case by proxy.
Elsewhere, as with the Mail, papers took the opportunity to assault the Lib Dems. The Sun, which carried only two pages, saw the affair as part of "the stink of scandal" affecting the party.
The Daily Mirror asked questions about whether Clegg, his wife Miriam, and business minister Vince Cable had known, and therefore covered up, that Pryce had agreed to accept her husband's speeding points. Its headline, "Shame of the Lib Dem liars", suggested the paper had already made up its mind.
The Daily Telegraph's Allison Pearson concentrated on Pryce's actions, contending that she had "thrown her whole family on to the funeral pyre in order to bring down the man she once loved."
Echoing Sarler, Pearson wrote: "For those of us who followed the trial, the temptation to look away in disgust was strong… Were there any depths this woman wouldn't plumb to save her own skin?"
Zoe Williams, in The Guardian, was only slightly more sympathetic to Pryce's defence of marital coercion, but could not avoid concluding that her forthright public performances as an economist made that an almost impossible argument to maintain.
 |
| READ THE ORIGINAL POST AT www.guardian.co.uk |