A great deal of time, money and energy has been expended on ascertaining exactly how deeply embedded in the British press phone-hacking used to be. No clear picture has emerged. Unless, that is, you disregard the investigations of the police and the courts, and do before-and-after comparisons of the newspapers themselves. Titles that once splashed on celebrity scandal day after day, their stories setting febrile agendas that seemed hard to escape, now quite often have to content themselves with news, politics and sport. One of those titles, of course, doesn’t even exist any more.
“Celebrity culture” trundles on. But it’s a much less dominant and unruly force than it was at its peak. Private lives stay more private. “Superinjunctions” have stopped being the supposed legal menace that they were previously portrayed as being. “This is so much none of your business that we’re not even allowed to tell you that it’s none of your business,” the champions of the cheap press once thundered. Now, exclusives revolve around amazing facts such as a tennis player going out with a man who used to go out with another tennis player. There’s speculative gossip, but there’s not much exposure of real lives and relationships in actual meltdown. And that’s a good thing, because it’s seldom edifying, and seldom involves an angry and frustrated outburst that isn’t regretted.
Willing victims do still come along though, offering object lessons in how quickly media exposure can make a bad situation worse. Karen Danczuk was until recently no more familiar to me than the spouse of an MP ought to be – which is not at all. Then news stories started appearing, reporting that the former Rochdale councillor posted lots of selfies on Twitter, which featured cleavage, gaining lots of followers. There was only one possible conclusion to be drawn: this woman had breasts, and people like looking at breasts. I jest – the one possible conclusion that could be drawn was that Danczuk craved some attention and found it on social media.
Sure enough, tutting all the while about how dreadful it was to crave attention on Twitter, the media obliged by giving it to her as well. But with that familiar twist the press loves, Danczuk was to be taught that she should be careful what she wished for. The attention was largely judgmental and negative.
Plenty of people believe that, having attracted negative media attention, they can turn it round to “do good”. Danczuk was one such. She told the Sun that her selfies were a hard-won celebration of sexual attractiveness, something she had become able to express only after years of therapy. Danczuk said that she had been abused and raped by a “family friend” between the ages of six and 11. Her husband, Simon Danczuk, is the Labour MP for Rochdale, and is routinely described as “a maverick”. He is well known as a campaigner for the investigation of historic sexual abuse in his constituency, and co-authored a book about Rochdale’s former MP, Cyril Smith, whose sexual abuse of young boys was fully acknowledged by the establishment only after the Jimmy Savile scandal.
One of Karen Danczuk’s brothers, Michael Burke, has been arrested twice, first after a complaint by Danczuk herself, then again after two other women came forward with allegations of sexual abuse. Burke denies all allegations and has not been charged. But consequences in the home lives of the Danczuks have been more fast-moving. The couple have separated, and Simon Danczuk has announced that he is withdrawing from his work on historic abuse, saying that the strain of it has caused depression and alcohol dependency.
Ill-advisedly, they had “taken to Twitter”, as the papers say, while their marriage fell apart, each accusation and insult gleefully repeated in the press. One Mirror columnist, having described every detail of the saga except the involvement of either partner in historic sexual abuse in any way, beyond Simon Danczuk being “obsessed with downing paedophiles”, accused them of serving up “more of the same self-serving saccharine, slush-puppy emotion that passes for true feeling in the world of social media”, and of being “unintelligent idiots so selfish they are innately unsuited to the selfless role of parenthood”.
How astounding. I can’t imagine what it’s like being a wife trying to support a husband knee-deep in testimony about child abuse at the best of times, let alone in circumstances like these. Sure, neither of the Danczuks have dealt with the situation in an exemplary fashion. I doubt many people could. Yes, social media can be a quick, easy and unreliable way of gaining a feeling of personal power and validation. But the mainstream media certainly wasn’t thinking of the children when it decided to highlight Danczuk’s use of it. Likewise, Danczuk is berated because she is “reportedly top of Channel 5’s wishlist” for Celebrity Big Brother. The person who put her at the top of this wishlist seems to be willing to exploit another person, while Danczuk is exploiting only herself. I know which I think is worse.
Nobody has to hack the Danczuks’ phones to find out all this stuff about their personal lives. The couple’s mistake is in interpreting prurience as positive interest. They are naive to trust the media, social and otherwise. But at the heart of it all is a woman who may have good reason to be damaged and needy, who has waived her anonymity and spoken.
All the media seems to have to offer in return is contempt, knocker-shot galleries and a slot on a TV freak show. One could argue that the couple brought it all on themselves. But as the phone-hacking revelations taught us, you don’t have to actively seek the attention of the media for them to riffle through your laundry basket and pronounce it in need of a wash. Unless, of course, it’s laundry so dirty that nothing could ever get it clean. Simon Danczuk knows what it’s like to sort through that. I doubt he foresaw that it would end with self-promoting idiots calling him a self-promoting idiot. The Danczuks may be messy. But things do get messy when you’re facing sheer depravity every day of your life.
