BY STEWART SLATER

So, it was Huw. To be fair, for all the drama of Mrs Edwards’ statement, it was hardly news. For, after several days of drip-fed “revelations”, whether by exploring those parts of the internet less concerned with libel laws, or by a simple process of elimination, everybody knew, even if, technically, nobody “knew”. As soon as the news dropped, the caravan started to move on, as it always does (the Phillip Schofield affair may seem like ancient history, but it is less than two months since his resignation). But, before we turn our minds to loftier matters/start looking for the next scalp, there are questions raised by the whole sorry saga which are worth exploring.

On the face of it, “man in late middle age does something silly with much younger person” is a story as old as time. The Roman general Scipio Africanus in later life conceived a passion for one of his slave girls which lasted several years. His wife gained much respect under the conventions of the time for the tolerance with which she treated the affair, freeing the girl after her husband’s death and arranging for her marriage. The first question we might ask, therefore, is if such events are so common, is any of them really news?

There was certainly a sense that some members of the journalistic fraternity thought not. Jon Sopel argued that the, then unreleased, identity of Mr X was, contra Jeremy Vine, “none of our business”. Once it had been made public, he said he hoped the statement would give “some cause to reflect”, the implication being that the story should not have been told. Robert Peston, in a tweet which meandered for almost as long as one of his infamous lockdown questions, wondered whether the story was in the public interest.

Both Sopel and Peston were colleagues of Edwards’ and his wife edits the latter’s eponymous show (let no-one say the media world is incestuous) so the cynical might wonder whether there was an element of wagons being circled or mates looking out for their mate.

But, turn the question on its head. Why would revealing Huw Edwards’ behaviour not be in the public interest? If he were a politician, it certainly would. Imagine the reaction if Boris Johnson had been found messaging young women (and we can all imagine Boris Johnson messaging younger women). The press would have talked of nothing else. The Financial Times is running a series of stories about Crispin Odey, a high profile hedge fund manager. Revealing their personal behaviour is deemed to be in the public interest, so why not Edwards’? If the job of journalism is to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable”, are we really to believe that a man paid over £400,000 a year is not fair game? The BBC certainly thought the public had a right to know about the travails of Phillip Schofield, a man whose daytime TV show attracted just 1mn viewers compared to the 26mn who watched Edwards front the corporation’s coverage of the Queen’s funeral.

If anything, Sopel and Peston’s reaction merely confirms the sleight of hand played by members of Matthew Goodwin’s “New Elite”. As I noted at the time, the first rule of “New Elite Club” is to deny being elite, the preferred method of doing so being to restrict the definition so it excludes oneself and one’s colleagues. But while there are elites of power and elites of wealth, neither of which journalists belong to, there are also elites of influence, those who shape the national conversation, who decide what stories are brought before the national conversation, and which are ignored. They may not make the decisions, but they set out the boundaries within which those decisions are made. Is it really not in the public interest to know what sort of people they are?

If the reaction of some in the media tells us about the way journalists see themselves, Edward’s own reaction tells us about wider society. The statement issued by his wife made no mention of the substance of the allegations, still less an admission of them, or an apology for them. It informed the world that he was seeking treatment for long-standing  mental health issues which had worsened over the previous days. The only suffering it alluded to was that undergone by the alleged perpetrator and his family. Enough about you, let’s talk about us.

In doing so, it genuflected to two of the modern world’s more baleful gods, victimhood and mental health. By concentrating on the effect of the weekend’s coverage, the statement attempted to position Edwards and his family as victims – they were suffering and so deserved sympathy. Even the hardest heart would grant that to his wife and children, but Edwards himself? He is, surely, the author of his own misfortunes. If he is suffering it is because his misdeeds have been revealed, the gap between who he is and who he told us he was laid bare. Assuming the allegations are true, is it not right that he suffer? Like a figure in a Greek play, he has been brought down by his own flaws, tragic perhaps, but not deserving of much sympathy and certainly not a victim.

But whereas a figure in Greek tragedy might be torn limb from limb by a horde of drunk women, Edwards checked himself into a hospital, far from the first star to do so when suspected of some indiscretion. The cynical might see a stint in rehab as the modern equivalent of penance, an activity undertaken to cleanse the unclean, albeit with less whipping than was sometimes expected. After a certain amount of time, the wrongdoer can re-emerge into public, their sins washed away and with some mental health problem having been discovered which explains their behaviour. For it is never the individual who errs, it is their “issues” which lead them astray, a diagnosis playing the role of malevolent spirits or demons in less sophisticated times. Why blame oneself when a traumatic childhood/alcoholism/depression are there to take the rap. It was not Huw Edwards who did those things, it was depressed Huw Edwards, and that is a totally different person.

But if Edwards is not perfect, nor are we. The nation has spent the past several days gossiping and speculating, baying, like the crowd in the Colosseum, for a spear to be rammed through a man’s livelihood. Now that he has been finished off, we know there will be another show soon enough, and we know we will be there to watch it. 

Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.