Steve Coogan: The media are like the mafia. It's just businessAt the Leveson inquiry, Marina Hyde hears actor Steve Coogan explain how, thanks to the press, his closet is now skeleton-free
Steve Coogan arrives to give evidence to the Leveson inquiry
Steve Coogan arrives to give evidence to the Leveson inquiry at the high court in London. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images
Some call it a kiss-and-tell; Steve Coogan calls it "a dispassionate sociopathic act by those who operate in an amoral universe". They say potato, he says potahto. "It's like the mafia. It's just business," the actor and writer told the Leveson inquiry of the manner in which tabloids can wreak devastation, under the guise of a bit of fun.
"The truth about the man blamed for 'leading Owen Wilson to the brink of suicide'," ran one giggle of a Mail story about Coogan, who debunked it on Tuesday with sarcastic reference to those legally required quote marks. "Their defence is basically punctuation. Because of the stories that have been run about me, my closet is empty of skeletons," he went on.
"So unwittingly, they have made me immune in some ways."
Revenge attacks still come. A recent Newsnight appearance, in which he had criticised the Mail editor, had been coincidentally followed by a routine monstering by Melanie Phillips and Amanda Platell, the paper's routine monsters.
Tuesday's most emotional testimony came from the parents of a murdered girl whose only other child had been so disturbed by coverage of the matter that he killed himself with the offending articles clutched in his hand — a tale of gothic horror undimmed in the 20 years since the couple began a humble, endlessly ignored campaign for standards.
Then there was footballer Garry Flitcroft, the household name that wasn't, convinced that press hounding in the wake of his overturned superinjunction had contributed to his father's suicide.
Fittingly, in those circumstances, Coogan was adamant that this was not "the Steve and Hugh show". In fact, if jaw-dropping tales from the world of showbiz were what you were after, far more dramatic fare was provided by Elle Macpherson's former brand manager. In her account of how she was "bullied" into a totally unnecessary five-week spell in rehab, Mary-Ellen Field reminded us that celebrity can be another country. They do things differently there. Field has a nice line in tart incredulity, at one point suggesting, almost apologetically, that the tale sounded "like a B-movie". But in truth the story that unfolded could function with barely a tweak as a biting showbiz satire. It goes like this: when presumably phone-hacked stories about Macpherson's disintegrating relationship began appearing, the model wrongly suspected that her business associate – who worked for accountancy firm Chiltern – had been loose-lipped. Her reaction? An intervention.
"She [Elle] put her arms around me and cried," Field told the inquiry, "and said that she knows what it's like to be an alcoholic." Field alleged Chiltern went along with Macpherson's solution – to send her to the wildly expensive Meadows clinic in Arizona. Despite not being an alcoholic, and having a severely disabled son, she gave into them, in fear of losing her job.
"Elle had made out like it was a spa or something," Field observed of the Meadows, "but it was a grade 1 psychiatric facility with men with guns in holsters who were parading around the place." Her so-called "intervention" had been "like one of those CIA renditions, except they don't hold you in chains". After many days of what sounded like psychological assault, the clinic accepted she was not an alcoholic. Nevertheless, both Macpherson and then Chiltern sacked Field after her return.
Despite the fact that Macpherson's account amounted to a minuscule fraction of the firm's total billing, one couldn't help but suspect they signed up to the pantomime for reasons not dissimilar to those that had previously seen Field's male CEO readily agree to Macpherson being given office space under their roof. "It took him about three nanoseconds to make up his mind that it would be a good idea," Field observed, to laughter in the courtroom.
And yet, while there's no denying Elle Macpherson looks good in a bikini, ought that to confer upon her the power to effectively section people?
The question is of course not meant seriously, not least because the unsparing Field admitted she was "an idiot" and "mad" to collude in this bizarre scheme. But perhaps it says something about the power of celebrity that supposedly rational corporate entities are so apparently hypnotised by it that they will genuflect before its most eccentric whims. It may go some small way to explaining the post-rational, post-moral, post-human lengths to which newspapers were willing to go for information.
• This article was amended on 23 November 2011 to remove two paragraphs that stated the Sun had sent a reporter to the home of a junior counsel to the Inquiry and any suggestion that there was an intention by the Sun to show a lack of respect to the Inquiry or Lord Justice Leveson.
Guardian
