Strange case of John Junor who added fuel to the fire and ended up in contempt of Parliament

Sir John Junor, legendary editor of the Sunday Express, was  a forbidding figure. The hooded eyes spelt menace and the florid complexion hinted at seething Presbyterian rage.

 

We did not see much of him on the Daily Express floor and when we did, it usually meant mischief was afoot. Mischief was his stock-in-trade. It ran through his newspaper like a geological layer.

 

JJ used it to remind the high and mighty of the duty and responsibilities that went with power.

 

Sometimes, his readiness to call out hypocrisy and injustice got him into trouble. And never more than during the Suez crisis of 1956. The skirmish closed the Suez Canal and cut off the flow of oil from the Middle East.

 

Petrol rationing loomed. Well, for ordinary folk, anyway. MPs decided they did not come into this category.

 

JJ found a letter, sent to all political parties, which made clear that, while the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker all had to get by on tiny rations of fuel, MPs were awarding themselves gallons of the stuff.

 

He was outraged by their entitlement, their privilege, their disregard for fair play.

 

“The small baker, unable to carry out his rounds, may be pushed out of business,” bellowed a Sunday Express leader. “The one-man taxi company may founder. The parent who lives in the country may plead in vain for petrol to drive the kids to school.

 

“But everywhere, the tanks of the politicians will be brimming over.”

 

The piece was trenchant and pulled no punches. But it was also measured and reasoned and true. It is hard now, 68 years later, to understand what all the fuss was about.

 

Angry MPs summoned JJ to appear before the Commons Privileges Committee. He was allowed no legal representation and was given no advice, says his daughter Penny in her book Home Truths: Life Around My Father.

 

“There followed not so much an interrogation as an inquisition,” she writes, “by a group of men each of whom JJ realised looking round the table, he had attacked at some time or another in [the] Crossbencher [column].”

 

Were they driven by revenge? Or the desire to put an uppity editor in his place? Whatever, the arrogance was breathtaking.

 

Junor would not apologise for the leader because he felt there was nothing to apologise for. It was fair comment.

 

So the committee found him guilty of serious contempt and he was called to the Bar of the Commons at 3.15 on January 24, 1957.

 

The night before his ordeal, he took calls from two political friends. Dick Crossman, a Labour Minister under Harold Wilson, urged him to speak up for freedom of the Press; Manny Shinwell, also a Labour Minister and a champion of the unions, told him to say sorry.

 

But JJ waited in vain for the one call he really wanted … from Lord Beaverbrook. He craved the support of his proprietor but it never came and Junor suspected it was because the old man feared the same fate as his editor.

 

Once before the MPs, Junor did apologise but he added: “At no time did I intend to be discourteous to Parliament. My only aim was to focus attention on what I considered to be an injustice in the allocation of petrol – namely the allowance given to political parties in the constituencies.

 

“In my judgement these allowances were a proper and indeed an inescapable subject for comment in a free Press. That was a view which I held then and hold now.

 

“But I do regret deeply and sincerely that the manner in which I expressed myself should have been such as to have been a contempt of this House.

 

“I have nothing more to say, sir. I now leave myself in the hands of this House.”

 

He was escorted back to the office of the Serjeant-at-Arms where they asked if he wanted anything.

 

“Yes,” he replied, “I would like a pot of tea, three rounds of toast and some cakes.”

 

But before they arrived, he learnt that the House had accepted his apology and would take no further action.

 

He emerged a hero, says his daughter. But still there was no word from the Beaver.

 

*****

 

The pollsters got it wrong again. Sometimes I think they just rummage around in a bran tub to come up with their conclusions on what the nation is thinking.

 

They were miles off the pace at the General Election – so wildly wrong that it is hard to see what purpose they serve.

 

They put Labour ahead of the Tories by 20 points. They weren’t. The margin was 10 points. This is fake news, misinformation on a grand scale.

 

Such levels of inaccuracy are no longer an aberration. The polls were also hopelessly wrong in 1992 and 2015.

 

It threatens to harm democracy and even skew an election result by encouraging group-think, so that some voters just follow the herd. Others might see the result as a foregone conclusion and not vote at all.

 

So, wouldn’t it be more honest just to ban opinion polls?

 

I have never fully understood how these polls are compiled. It is a bit like economics: scientific, but really not. Too many unknowns.

 

Back in the Eighties, if you were subbing a story for the Daily Express about a poll the paper had commissioned, not only would you have the editor making helpful interventions, you might also have a chap called Bob Worcester leaning over your shoulder, saying things like: “No, no, it doesn’t mean that.”

 

American-born Worcester, who became Sir Robert, ran Market and Opinion Research International (MORI) and was extremely finicky about how you may and may not interpret his poll findings. As a Right-leaning paper, we were sometimes a tad optimistic about what they meant for Tory hopes.

 

Daniel Finkelstein took the pollsters to task in The Times last week. He chided them for not announcing an inquiry to find out what went wrong.

 

“The entire narrative and reporting of the election would have been different,” he wrote, “if Labour had been correctly understood to be supported by about 35 per cent of voters rather than 45 per cent.

 

“The gap with the Tories was about 10 percentage points rather than over 20. My interest here is not in the political impact of the polling, rather on the truthfulness of reporting.”

 

Obviously, in any poll the questions are key. But how do you choose whom to pose them to? And what if whole demographic groups – young black men, for example – decline to join in? Does that make the whole process invalid? Answer: very possibly.

 

So, whom do they benefit? Well, mostly the pollsters. They are expensive and only TV stations and the posher newspapers can afford to commission them now.

 

For newspapers, the polls are a life raft: a story for a slow news day, data in a world of guesswork, light entertainment, an indicator of which direction the coverage should take.

 

But none of this is worth the risk of jeopardising the democratic process. An exit poll is fine because the results are not revealed until after the polls have closed and so cannot affect the outcome.

 

But the constant drip of sometimes misleading and inaccurate information in the crucial days of an election is wrong. It is undemocratic.

 

From the moment the starting gun is fired for a General Election, polling should be banned.

 

*****

 

Didn’t your skin crawl when TikTok lawyer Akhmed Yakoob surfaced like a shark’s fin in the shallows?

 

He spoke to journalists outside Rochdale police station about the violence at Manchester Airport during which an armed police officer kicked a man in the head and then stamped on him.

 

Yakoob, 36, who drives a Lamborghini and stood for election as Mayor of the West Midlands, was trying to own the narrative. It was creepy to watch, opportunistic. And it told me that there was more to this than met the eye on social media.

 

The airport punch-up was filmed on phone cameras and inevitably went viral.

 

Yakoob complained of police brutality, claimed the “victim” had a cyst on his brain and suggested that “the people who were assaulted by the police are members of a police officer’s family who is currently serving in the Greater Manchester Police force.”

 

This officer, he claimed, was now afraid to go to work because he was “fearing for his own safety”.

 

Was he just playing the race card? If so, it was reckless and dangerous. Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham was already trying to damp down unrest among British Pakistanis.

 

Then the whole truth was revealed after the Manchester Evening News obtained a video that showed the events leading up to the police officer’s kick. The “victim”, Muhammed Fahir, 19, was involved in a violent assault on officers trying to detain him and his brother Amaad over an earlier incident.

 

In the brawl that followed, a woman officer had her nose broken. One policeman was held in a choke hold. The assailant was brought down with a taser.

 

Yakoob has now stepped back from the case but says: “I will be keeping an eye on this.”

 

So will those of us who want justice to be done.

 

*****

 

“He was so depressed he tried to commit suicide by inhaling next to an Armenian” – Woody Allen

RICHARD DISMORE

30 July 2024