The socialist newspaper the Morning Star popped up in my Facebook stream last week. The post involved a report criticising Paul Nowak, General Secretary of the TUC, for not putting the boot into the Labour Government for its decision to means-test the winter fuel payment for pensioners. Tellingly, some other media publications didn’t report Paul Nowak’s stance at the TUC conference. Instead, they interviewed long-time critics of the current Labour Party instead of the TUC leader, or used edited video footage to make it look as though Paul Nowak was in accord with those perennial ‘protestors,’ some of whom I’ve never forgiven for urging their members to vote for Brexit. I like Paul Nowak, he’s a modern, pragmatic, and progressive trade unionist.
Anyway, this isn’t meant to be a political comment on the see-sawing of media bias. Seeing the Morning Star post reminded me of a British Guild of Travel Writers conference in Tenerife.
As writers who lived on the island and specialised in Tenerife, we were asked by the Tenerife Tourist Board to attend a dinner for the visiting travel writers. It was held at a luxury hotel in Costa Adeje and each table of travel writers included a local scribe they could use as a source of insider information about the island.
Andy and I knew almost all the other local writers, but there was one we didn’t. Representatives from Tenerife’s Tourist Board introduced us, telling us who he wrote for, the Morning Star, which came as somewhat of a surprise given the purpose of the ‘do.’ The people from the tourist board were excited at having a new journalist on the island who regularly wrote for a national UK newspaper and seated him at the top table with the most prestigious members of the guild. They obviously didn’t research the Morning Star, otherwise they would have known travel writing didn’t figure in the paper. Its politics might have made them a tad nervy as well.
Why the journalist accepted the invitation in the first place, I don’t know. He was clearly out of place and his depth. Not only did he not know about travel writing, as a new resident he didn’t know anything about the island. How little became annoyingly evident later.
As the evening wore on, a carnival theme creating a totally tropical party atmosphere, he became more and more drunk, knocking back the complimentary wine as if it were … complimentary wine.
When the evening was drawing to a close, a rep from the tourist board asked us if we would give the political journalist a lift home. He lived in Santa Cruz, 80km away, and had no means of getting back there. It was a lack of forward planning on his part. Luckily for him, we had to drive past the city on our way back to Puerto de la Cruz. It was an inconvenience, but only that.
Unfortunately, by the time the dinner ended around midnight, the journo was virtually incoherent. That in itself wasn’t an issue, we poured him into the back seat of our car, and he snoozed pretty much all the way back to the capital. The problem arose when we reached Santa Cruz and asked him where he lived. He was too drunk to remember his address. The best he could do was direct us roughly to the area where he thought he lived.
At one-thirty in the morning, with the only other vehicles around being mainly Guardia Civil patrol cars, we drove around and around the still sultry streets of Santa Cruz while an inebriated journalist tried to focus out of the window, verbally putting a slurred X against apartment blocks that weren’t his, or at least he didn’t think they were. After what seemed an interminable time, he spotted a block which looked familiar. His choice was questionable as all the buildings in the area looked more or less the same. We dropped him off, and he staggered his way homeward … hopefully.
We never met him again, but every time I see the Morning Star, I think of the political journalist who couldn’t even find his way home. It shouldn’t do, but the incident coloured my view of the both quality and professionalism relating to the paper.
