While attention for the past few weeks has focused — with good reason — on Rupert Murdoch and the News of the World phone hacking scandal, the UK is in the midst of another press embarrassment as well: the case of Johann Hari, boy wonder of The Independent. Hari admitted to mixing into interviews he conducted words lifted from his subjects’ printed works. Why prod an interviewee for a good quote when the mot juste is already to be found in black and white? Hari’s problems have not ended there, as the Telegraph‘s Damian Thompson and others have uncovered the possibility that Hari has been using a false identity to edit his page (and those of his critics) on Wikipedia.
Hari was the brightest young thing in respectable British lefty journalism. Indeed, he has been the recipient of the Orwell Prize, the UK’s top award for political writing. But now it looks like he’s going to have it revoked. The Orwell committee has put off announcing a decision while the Independent conducts an internal review, but blogger Guido Fawkes believes the verdict has already been reached. Why wait? Presumably to spare the Independent the indignity of being scooped on its own scandal.
sak magundi 
Orwell is good. He is important. But he is still overrated. Not least, his depiction of Wigan is still resented in the town to this day. His famous remark about the goosestep was just plain wrong, like many of his others. And everyone should read Scott Lucas’s The Betrayal of Dissent, London: Pluto Press, 2004, ISBN 0-7453-2197-6.
However, Orwell’s patriotism, his social conservatism and his anti-Communism are vitally important in reminding the British Left that those are indispensable, and indeed definitive, aspects of our own tradition. All three, though perhaps especially the last, make him a particularly significant figure when set alongside Christopher Hill and E P Thompson in rescuing demotic culture from what Thompson called “the enormous condescension of posterity”, even though Orwell himself was not above condescension.
So any prize in his honour should be awarded for contribution to the patriotic, socially conservative, anti-Communist Left that was the best of him, and also, therefore, to ensuring that demotic culture is taken with high seriousness. Would Johann Hari, who has at least recanted his support for the Iraq War, and who wrote a very important and really quite paleocon denunciation of Dubai, win such a prize? I only ask.
There was recently a question on my blog, asking if, since Johann Hari had made his name “pretending” (not my word) to have seduced a male neo-Nazi at a convention and a male Islamist at Finsbury Park mosque, he had ever also seduced “the pro-life, pro-family, pro-worker and anti-war voice of an economically social democratic, morally and socially conservative patriotism towards the North of England, the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth and Christendom”? I was, and am, happy to confirm that he has never seduced this one. Nor, to the best of my knowledge, has he ever “pretended” to have done so.
But there is more going on here. Militant atheism is fine. Extreme social liberalism is fine. Highly politicised homosexuality is fine. But to be a repentant and recovered neocon, and an articulate critic of the Coalition’s neo-Blairism, is on much the same level as to be a pro-life, pro-family, pro-worker and anti-war voice of an economically social democratic, morally and socially conservative patriotism towards the North of England, the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth and Christendom. Which is to be on much the same level as a neo-Nazi or an Islamist.
Isn’t it…?