Post by Teddy Bear on Mar 8, 2014 23:50:30 GMT
Two recent stories about the lives of 2 different families, both who had contributed greatly to our society, but devastated by the actions of the BBC.
One is about Andrew Sachs, the much loved Manuel in Fawlty Towers, that since the Brand/Ross disgusting prank phone call sanctioned by the BBC, there has been a huge rift.
The other concerns the late Tory MP Alistair McAlpine who spent the last year of his life fighting the accusations that a false report by the BBC started.
His daughter speaks of her disgust for what she saw happen.
The worst is that the public are forced to pay for this scum organisation.
One is about Andrew Sachs, the much loved Manuel in Fawlty Towers, that since the Brand/Ross disgusting prank phone call sanctioned by the BBC, there has been a huge rift.
The other concerns the late Tory MP Alistair McAlpine who spent the last year of his life fighting the accusations that a false report by the BBC started.
His daughter speaks of her disgust for what she saw happen.
The worst is that the public are forced to pay for this scum organisation.
Why did cruel Sally Bercow and the lying BBC ruin the last year of my father's life? Lord McAlpine's daughter breaks her silence on Twitter smears that shattered him
On January 17, my father, Alistair McAlpine, died. He was many extraordinary things: politician, author, builder, gardener, collector of tribal flags from Africa and renowned bon viveur. To me he was my father.
To the rest of the world he was Lord McAlpine, the Tory grandee who was smeared by the BBC in the worst possible way.
So much about his death pains me – that we will never take me out for lunch again or compliment me on my shoes; that I had three missed calls from him in the days before his death and that I had not got round to calling him back.
I thought I was too busy. I was wrong. It pains me that my son Aeneas, now 18 months old, will never really know his grandfather.
It pains me to think that the last year of my father’s life was marred by lies and smears. And now it feels as though that scandal is all that people want to remember.
Just over a year ago, he was wrongly implicated as a paedophile by the BBC. Although the news report, which claimed that a senior Tory politician had abused boys in care in the 1970s and 1980s, did not name him, it might as well have.
The BBC, instead, fed his name to tweeters and bloggers, setting him up for trial by social media. Within hours, if you googled ‘Alistair McAlpine’ you got ‘paedo’. Even now I find that excruciating to write. It makes me feel sick to my very core.
Aged 70, retired and living a quiet life in the depths of Southern Italy, he found himself at the centre of a media storm the likes of which I could never have imagined.
Through no fault or action of his own, he became the subject of hatred and abuse. It was like some kind of hideously surreal nightmare.
I was just out of hospital, with a baby boy less than a week old, and he was on the front page of all the papers for all the wrong reasons; reasons so wrong that my friends didn’t pick up the phone to talk to me about it because they didn’t know what to say.
Some people still haven’t mentioned it and it looms like an ugly elephant in the room.
His name was cleared and the BBC, ITV and a number of high-profile tweeters such as journalist George Monbiot all issued formal apologies.
Others, like Sally Bercow, who when she defamed my father’s name had 56,000 Twitter followers, did not and treated it with a distasteful flippancy.
The mind boggles at such insensitivity and cruelty. My father spent the last year of his life in litigation, something he should never have had to do and that was far beneath what he deserved.
Apologies or no apologies, the damage was already done. A cloud of suspicion hung around him, indelible and poisonous.
Two days after he died, I stupidly checked Twitter. People who had never met him said that they were pleased that he had died. And worse.
He was a courageous man. Although he must have been terrified – I know I was – he complained not once. Utterly steadfast, he refused to give up on what he knew to be right and went on to make legal history with a libel case against tweeters who had perpetuated the libel.
That was so him. He acted with the same honour and dignity with which he led his life.
His spirit was unbreakable. As Margaret Thatcher’s treasurer and deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, he was high on the IRA hit list.
In 1990, my parents and I were at our home in London, with the television on in the background when he saw a house on the screen that he liked the look of. It took him a moment to realise it was his. Then the phone rang and it was Scotland Yard.
The IRA had placed 20lb of Semtex (the Brighton bomb was 6lb) under my bedroom window at West Green, our home in Hampshire. As far as he was concerned, that was the end of one chapter. And so began another.
We moved to Venice. I went to a local Italian school and he embarked on yet another collection. This time it was antique Venetian glass beads, of which he had tens of thousands.
Previous collections had included antique garden implements, police truncheons and stuffed birds. His passion for collecting was fuelled by a love of learning, rather than by a desire for possession. He would buy and learn, sell and move on.
In the 1960s his interest in contemporary sculpture was enough to keep the industry going. When he moved on to the next thing, he donated his entire collection, including works by Sir Anthony Caro, to the Tate.
He loved art for art, not as an investment. He bought works by American painter Mark Rothko, enjoyed them and sold them for a few thousand pounds. When they sold again for millions, he couldn’t have cared less.
Always pragmatic and unsentimental, he never indulged in drama, even in the most difficult of circumstances. In 1984 the IRA bombed the Brighton hotel where Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and most of her party were staying for the Tory conference.
Within hours of the explosion, he had arranged for the local branch of Marks & Spencer to open so that other delegates who had also survived the attack and lost all their possessions could be dressed and ready in time to open the conference as planned.
I remember him telling me that he hailed a black taxi and asked the cabbie to drive around Brighton picking up anyone who he might see wandering around in their pyjamas and return them to the M&S store, where Daddy stood waiting with a large wodge of cash, paying off the taxis for everyone.
There were few problems that he couldn’t solve, few obstacles he couldn’t overcome. He was not a conventional father, any more than he was a conventional man.
When I begged for a hamster, he gave me two zebras. He thought that they would make more interesting pets. When I wanted a wendy house, he insisted that I consult an architect for its construction. I think that I was seven at the time.
He wrote a play for my puppets and had it bound in a leather book, with illustrations by the Venetian artist Ludovico de Luigi. My doll’s house was Victorian and the desk in my nursery was a Fornasetti collector’s piece.
He wasn’t one for school plays and parents’ evenings, but even at the age of four he would take me for lunch with the photographer Terence Donovan or grandees of the party, such as Norman Tebbit. He believed that was the best education he could give me.
He had a wicked sense of humour and relished situations that others might find awkward. Once, I persuaded Mrs Thatcher, when she was Prime Minister, to play hide-and-seek with me at West Green. We went in to the garden and she hid. I was seeking.
We didn’t tell anyone what we were doing and when the detectives in charge of her protection couldn’t find her, they raised an alarm.
He had a wicked sense of humour and relished situations that others might find awkward. Once, I persuaded Mrs Thatcher to play hide-and-seek with me. We went in to the garden and she hid. I was seeking
Daddy was tickled pink. So was she. They had a shared love of mischief and were great friends, as well as colleagues. We spent many Christmases with the Thatchers, sometimes at Chequers, sometimes in London or Venice.
My parents gave Sunday lunches that became legendary: he would ply guests with extravagant wines and Albert Roux would cook the food.
Anyone from Sidney Nolan, the Australian artist, to Bruce Oldfield, the fashion designer, to half the Cabinet, to someone with a particular interest in poultry (Daddy also collected rare breeds of chickens), would gather round the table.
As with everything he did, he cooked on a grand scale: he would scramble an egg with the same sense of occasion and enthusiasm as he would roast a whole goat on the spit and open fire in our kitchen.
My life is, in so many ways, the polar opposite of my father’s.
I live in a flat in South London above an Eritrean restaurant with my husband Anthony, who works in finance, and our son.
I write a blog, From My Dining Table, in which I share my recipes and stories, and try to recreate the charm and wonder of the meals of my childhood.
A plump chicken for roasting, fresh fruit for the table or a jug of overblown pink peonies – these are all things that I do today. And they make me think of him.
So much of who I am I owe to my father. But above all, I owe to him the belief that if you give all, you win all. Because that is what he did. That is why I miss him.
- ormer MP was libelled by false allegations of paedophilia on social media
- Writing for The Mail on Sunday his daughter says the hurt is still raw today
- She remembers a courageous man who survived high placing on IRA hit list
On January 17, my father, Alistair McAlpine, died. He was many extraordinary things: politician, author, builder, gardener, collector of tribal flags from Africa and renowned bon viveur. To me he was my father.
To the rest of the world he was Lord McAlpine, the Tory grandee who was smeared by the BBC in the worst possible way.
So much about his death pains me – that we will never take me out for lunch again or compliment me on my shoes; that I had three missed calls from him in the days before his death and that I had not got round to calling him back.
I thought I was too busy. I was wrong. It pains me that my son Aeneas, now 18 months old, will never really know his grandfather.
It pains me to think that the last year of my father’s life was marred by lies and smears. And now it feels as though that scandal is all that people want to remember.
Just over a year ago, he was wrongly implicated as a paedophile by the BBC. Although the news report, which claimed that a senior Tory politician had abused boys in care in the 1970s and 1980s, did not name him, it might as well have.
The BBC, instead, fed his name to tweeters and bloggers, setting him up for trial by social media. Within hours, if you googled ‘Alistair McAlpine’ you got ‘paedo’. Even now I find that excruciating to write. It makes me feel sick to my very core.
Aged 70, retired and living a quiet life in the depths of Southern Italy, he found himself at the centre of a media storm the likes of which I could never have imagined.
Through no fault or action of his own, he became the subject of hatred and abuse. It was like some kind of hideously surreal nightmare.
I was just out of hospital, with a baby boy less than a week old, and he was on the front page of all the papers for all the wrong reasons; reasons so wrong that my friends didn’t pick up the phone to talk to me about it because they didn’t know what to say.
Some people still haven’t mentioned it and it looms like an ugly elephant in the room.
His name was cleared and the BBC, ITV and a number of high-profile tweeters such as journalist George Monbiot all issued formal apologies.
Others, like Sally Bercow, who when she defamed my father’s name had 56,000 Twitter followers, did not and treated it with a distasteful flippancy.
The mind boggles at such insensitivity and cruelty. My father spent the last year of his life in litigation, something he should never have had to do and that was far beneath what he deserved.
Apologies or no apologies, the damage was already done. A cloud of suspicion hung around him, indelible and poisonous.
Two days after he died, I stupidly checked Twitter. People who had never met him said that they were pleased that he had died. And worse.
He was a courageous man. Although he must have been terrified – I know I was – he complained not once. Utterly steadfast, he refused to give up on what he knew to be right and went on to make legal history with a libel case against tweeters who had perpetuated the libel.
That was so him. He acted with the same honour and dignity with which he led his life.
His spirit was unbreakable. As Margaret Thatcher’s treasurer and deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, he was high on the IRA hit list.
In 1990, my parents and I were at our home in London, with the television on in the background when he saw a house on the screen that he liked the look of. It took him a moment to realise it was his. Then the phone rang and it was Scotland Yard.
The IRA had placed 20lb of Semtex (the Brighton bomb was 6lb) under my bedroom window at West Green, our home in Hampshire. As far as he was concerned, that was the end of one chapter. And so began another.
We moved to Venice. I went to a local Italian school and he embarked on yet another collection. This time it was antique Venetian glass beads, of which he had tens of thousands.
Previous collections had included antique garden implements, police truncheons and stuffed birds. His passion for collecting was fuelled by a love of learning, rather than by a desire for possession. He would buy and learn, sell and move on.
In the 1960s his interest in contemporary sculpture was enough to keep the industry going. When he moved on to the next thing, he donated his entire collection, including works by Sir Anthony Caro, to the Tate.
He loved art for art, not as an investment. He bought works by American painter Mark Rothko, enjoyed them and sold them for a few thousand pounds. When they sold again for millions, he couldn’t have cared less.
Always pragmatic and unsentimental, he never indulged in drama, even in the most difficult of circumstances. In 1984 the IRA bombed the Brighton hotel where Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and most of her party were staying for the Tory conference.
Within hours of the explosion, he had arranged for the local branch of Marks & Spencer to open so that other delegates who had also survived the attack and lost all their possessions could be dressed and ready in time to open the conference as planned.
I remember him telling me that he hailed a black taxi and asked the cabbie to drive around Brighton picking up anyone who he might see wandering around in their pyjamas and return them to the M&S store, where Daddy stood waiting with a large wodge of cash, paying off the taxis for everyone.
There were few problems that he couldn’t solve, few obstacles he couldn’t overcome. He was not a conventional father, any more than he was a conventional man.
When I begged for a hamster, he gave me two zebras. He thought that they would make more interesting pets. When I wanted a wendy house, he insisted that I consult an architect for its construction. I think that I was seven at the time.
He wrote a play for my puppets and had it bound in a leather book, with illustrations by the Venetian artist Ludovico de Luigi. My doll’s house was Victorian and the desk in my nursery was a Fornasetti collector’s piece.
He wasn’t one for school plays and parents’ evenings, but even at the age of four he would take me for lunch with the photographer Terence Donovan or grandees of the party, such as Norman Tebbit. He believed that was the best education he could give me.
He had a wicked sense of humour and relished situations that others might find awkward. Once, I persuaded Mrs Thatcher, when she was Prime Minister, to play hide-and-seek with me at West Green. We went in to the garden and she hid. I was seeking.
We didn’t tell anyone what we were doing and when the detectives in charge of her protection couldn’t find her, they raised an alarm.
He had a wicked sense of humour and relished situations that others might find awkward. Once, I persuaded Mrs Thatcher to play hide-and-seek with me. We went in to the garden and she hid. I was seeking
Daddy was tickled pink. So was she. They had a shared love of mischief and were great friends, as well as colleagues. We spent many Christmases with the Thatchers, sometimes at Chequers, sometimes in London or Venice.
My parents gave Sunday lunches that became legendary: he would ply guests with extravagant wines and Albert Roux would cook the food.
Anyone from Sidney Nolan, the Australian artist, to Bruce Oldfield, the fashion designer, to half the Cabinet, to someone with a particular interest in poultry (Daddy also collected rare breeds of chickens), would gather round the table.
As with everything he did, he cooked on a grand scale: he would scramble an egg with the same sense of occasion and enthusiasm as he would roast a whole goat on the spit and open fire in our kitchen.
My life is, in so many ways, the polar opposite of my father’s.
I live in a flat in South London above an Eritrean restaurant with my husband Anthony, who works in finance, and our son.
I write a blog, From My Dining Table, in which I share my recipes and stories, and try to recreate the charm and wonder of the meals of my childhood.
A plump chicken for roasting, fresh fruit for the table or a jug of overblown pink peonies – these are all things that I do today. And they make me think of him.
So much of who I am I owe to my father. But above all, I owe to him the belief that if you give all, you win all. Because that is what he did. That is why I miss him.