The Lost World of Michael Bywater: Poison press

The house is clean as a new pin. Bright as a button. Cats healthy and cheerful. Keys left with the neighbour across the road because she's not here. Off with her mother for a week. No reason anyone shouldn't be off with their mother for a week, but this isn't like that. She's off with her mother for a week until perhaps, until hopefully, until it all dies down.

She was, as we call it in the trade, 'exposed'. Hadn't done anything wrong. Hadn't sought the limelight. Done nothing you and I haven't done. And next thing you know, a young man from the most malignant institution in the country was on the doorstep with his notebook. A smart-ish young man, rather excited, probably looking forward to ringing his mother and telling her what he'd done, how he'd succeeded that day.

I'll make the call for him. Mrs Whoever-you-are: your son just drove another mother from her home. Single mother, three children, doing her best, doing, actually, rather well at it all: built herself a sort of haven, did her job, got a life. On her own. They can't forgive that, people like your son, Mrs Whoever-you-are. Could you tell when he was little that one day he would get up in the morning, go out, and ruin people's lives? In this case, a person who can be of no possible interest to the public except in the context of some psychotic misogyny, the urge for pure destruction, for some sort of cheap, low-rent revenge in the name of some childhood slight I cannot possibly imagine. Only someone who is himself a psychopath can think it is reasonable that someone can, for money, go out to do things " get up and shave and make an early start and go out to do them " which he knows will distress and quite possibly destroy other people's lives and be proud of it.

There are hundreds of them, thousands, tens of thousands of these flat- eyed, hair-gelled rats, but it's only in Britain they have institutional power. We used to fear Astarte, Apollo, God, the King, the law; now we fear the press, in the asymmetry of its power, the infantile capriciousness of its vengeance, the greedy, limitless pandering of its editors. Even prostitutes " even? " have things they will not do. The press, the sort of press I am talking of here, knows no limits. It's like the worst sort of snake-oil preacher- man, hectoring about morality with one hand in the till and the other in an acolyte's knickers.

The worst thing is being part of it. I am rightly proud of this newspaper and I admire many of my colleagues; but for me and your son, Mrs Whoever- you-are, to be regarded as part of the same trade is as if child molesters and gynaecologists were considered as being in the same line of business. I can just about see why the Blairs and Blunketts, the Spices and Beckhams and indeed the daft, cloth- headed Prince Thing (the name escapes me and quite possibly escapes him, too) should be subject to public scrutiny and, where necessary, die by the sword. But a citizen in his or her private life? I hate to confess bemusement, but I confess I am bemused.

In the end, it seems mostly, where private citizens are concerned, and particularly where they are female, that this section of the press is largely driven by a fear and loathing of women. What disease in our culture allows us to sustain it, drives people to read it, rewards those who peddle it? What the hell has gone wrong? Or has it always been like that?

Or is it simply that most pernicious of human catastrophes, an utter failure of imagination. Can your son, Mrs Whoever-you are, exulting in his byline, imagine the life of this woman who has done nothing wrong, whom he has publicly humiliated and quite possibly ruined, picture the neighbour feeding the cats, the small boy at the door wanting to walk the dogs (who aren't here; they're with her mother, until...), the polished floors, the knick-knacks, the Memos To Self chalked on the blackboard in the kitchen, the glasses clean in the cupboard if friends come round, the wireless network so that the children can have broadband in the house, the garden umbrella out but not yet assembled because all this happened on the first really nice day of the year, the lawn mowed, the larder stocked, the bills paid, the hob cleaned, and nobody here now? Can he? And if not, why not? Next time he calls to boast, Mrs Whoever-you-are, why not ask him where the hell you went wrong? And see if he'll write about that. n

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