THE DAILY Mail this morning describes Colin Stagg as ‘the man cleared of murdering Rachel Nickell’. Get that? Not ‘the man wrongly arrested and prosecuted for murdering Rachel Nickell’ or even ‘the man fitted up for murdering Rachel Nickell after a shameless police honeytrap operation’; just the man ‘cleared of’ the crime. Nice.
As a journo myself, may I offer forthright professional admiration for the pure technique on display here? There’s just enough careful ambiguity to leave the matter in doubt while staying on the right side of the libel laws. Who says reporting isn’t a craft?
What’s more, this is the ideal first par to cue up a veritable barrage of moral outrage at the news that Stagg has been awarded £706,000 compensation for the 13 months he spent in custody and the years of subsequent speculation that he is not entirely innocent; speculation, you’ll note, that Paul Dacre is happy to sustain in Britain’s bestselling tabloid.
Inevitably there follows an unfavourable contrast with the £90,000 Ms Nickell’s son got for the trauma of seeing his mother murdered, while a dependable rentaquote Tory MP is rolled out indignantly to remonstrate that servicemen injured in Iraq and Afghanistan are also paid little by comparison.
What is not mentioned is the £4.3m recently awarded to young Manchester United hopeful Ben Collett, after a high tackle sustained in his first game for the reserves put an end to a potentially promising career.
Stagg is not a sympathetic character, of course. He is described – as was Barry George – as ‘a loner’. Perhaps the letters he thought he was writing privately to the undercover policewoman, detailing his own most intimate fantasies, reveal him to be what we in the everyday vernacular refer to as a sick puppy.
But that isn’t the point at issue. The point is that what the police did utterly destroyed his life. He spent more than a year behind bars, and has not been able to work since leaving prison. Stagg claims to have attended countless job interviews over the last decade, but unsurprisingly, has yet to find an employer willing to hire someone with his degree of infamy.
To use the same yardstick applied to Collett, £706,000 sounds about reasonable for loss of lifetime earnings. Colin Stagg deserves the money.
Posted at 14:12, 14 August 2008
Comments (7)
Dave
I agree with everything except the word "deserves" in the last line.
I'd go with the slightly more Daily Mail "is fully entitled to".
You're probably right, Miles. That's a more considered formulation.
No sooner have you rightfully condemned the art and artifice of the Daily Mail's coverage then you're off on one yourself taking all the prejudicial reporting to generate your consensus description of Staggs as a "sick fuck".
If he can't get you not to rush to judgement then what chance for the rest of the sick fucks out there?
I don't find anything about his social/personal circumstances reported in the Mail piece for you to come to your conclusion. Indeed, the reverse is true. If anybody else had this pile of shite thrown over them could they have survived it in a relatively diffident, thoughtful, unembittered state of mind.
I doubt it.
My recollection, from a BBC documentary, that most of the really revolting stuff in the correspondence was provided by WPC Honeytrap. Stagg's replies indicated that he was rather bewildered by the whole thing but he persevered gamely in the fond hope of a shag.
The Fuzz, egged on by some Cracker wanabee, had decided that Stagg was guilty and carried on with the business despite the fact that the evidence indicated they had a lonely eccentric who rather fancied himself as a dangerous Byronic character on their hands rather than a cold hearted killer. Personally I thought the poor chap deserved every penny and I'm rather surprised its taken them fourteen years to hand over the cash.
How do you stop the rozzers imprinting on the first oddball they come across and trying to fit him up rather than sifting the evidence impartially. It does seem to be a fairly recurring pattern in cases of this sort.
I'm so pleased for him, he was actually bewildered that he received more than tuppence.
Of course he deserves the money.
Ben Collett also deserves the money as his career was ruined, although it was a lot easier to calculate the potential damange to Ben's earning than it is calculating the damage that 13 months in prison and the baggage that came with it does to a person.
Excuse me, how about the £11,000 awarded to a woman who was raped?!
And she had to fight for that, after the inital award was reduced because she was drunk and therefore somehow culpable.
Both these blokes' payouts dwarf that little one.
Details here: http://stroppyblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/womans-drinking-not-to-blame-for-rape.html