#OxfordMidSummer before and after Sue Grey Report

 Just notes

Meeting in pub happens on Tuesday evening and tomorrow.

Tuesday there is some concern about comments on Met . There is reporting in Guardian and statement by Mayor of London.

The notice of Mirror reporting on James Slack and Sun. How much detail is available? The journalism aspect starts to get more obvious. Slack links to Mail and Sun are observed. Why did they not know more about things at an earlier stage?

Abba Party still a mystery. Curiosity about Lee Cain and Dom Cummings. Might they be connected?

#OxfordMidSummer Speeding up , bodies in June, background needed for part two

 #OxfordMidSummer is becoming more about journalism, not just Partygate itself. How has it been reported? The Labour supporting newspapers as they may be regarded, Guardian and Mirror, have accepted #Beergate as a news value. the Matthew Syed article in previous post notices how the latest 50 fines have not been a story. Why? Again as previously I think the Sun /Mail / Express / Telegraph now want to keep #ShapeshiftingCreep in place to avoid questions about lies and #Brexit.

For the fiction around the off duty police in or near Oxford this means more in part two . The background will include journalism and finance. the country lanes where the hit and run happens are very close to a big house. who owns it? How did the associated cottages come to be sold so cheaply to journalists / academics ? the students who can no longer talk were interns the previous summer as liason between Treasury and various media.

Plan A is still to make part one creative commons so anyone can do a version of it. Part two will need more work and possibly some legal insurance. It will be on offer first to ITV as they know about this sort of format.

Conservative shift on Brexit / Partygate as background

 There may be a change in how Conservatives regard Brexit. Last week there was another Daily Express attack on Chris Grey. Twice now they have misrepresented his blog. With reference to text from Lord Frost he has noticed a change in presentation. There are some doubts around previous claims. Express readers have posted numbers of comments mostly hostile. But Chris Grey has not claimed that any Brexit supporters are changing direction, just a shift in the text.

What to make of Matthew Syed in Sunday Times? Will the Express do a story on him? Maybe not as this is behind a paywall. It is the blog scene that can be easily trailed for offensive copy. But what Syed is claiming, Sunday Times May 15th page 23 is that although the ERG is still straight ahead, the "Vote Leave" part of the Conservative Party seem to have doubts.  For example Michael Gove and Rishi Sunak may be "unhappy" about ripping up the withdrawal agreement. The variety of briefing on Northern Ireland may have been a cunning plan ahead of elections to float "red meat" that then vanishes in diplomacy. But maybe there are just a variety of views. Time will tell.

Just as interesting is a claim towards the end that rule-breaking has become so "normalised" that another 50 fines for No10 lockdown breaches are scarcely newsworthy. I am not sure it works like that. Most of the time the newspapers support whatever #No10Sources tells them. The same newspaper has lots on #Beergate. They have put #Partygate on hold but I think the public are still interested. Sunday Times can afford some space to try out dissenting views but Sun / Telegraph / Mail / Express are so far into Brexit and #ShapeShiftingCreep that they cannot afford a situation where the public assumed everything has been lies. Sections on "Cakeism" in the Syed article explain where the main tensions exist.

Newspapers are very strange, it will take days to study

 Partly because I am busy with other things I will not be tweeting as much today as I might. From paper reviews and recent examples i think the London journalists are more off track than ever. Partygate follows from Brexit as a set of lies from Conservatives. Journalists unable or reluctant to report on either. They are coming up with all sorts of nonsense about anything else.

More next week.

( Twitter seems very unstable by the way. Nothing to do with the staff, just the financial system around it. So I will do more of working through old tweets to make some sense outside it )

#OxfordMidSummer First Body

 This is fiction, a drama draft. Do not confuse with reality.

For new readers the play has turned out to be a murder mystery, offered to ITV. Started with BBC papers review but ITV has a better grasp of Partygate news. The "chorus" has been a pub garden discussion with off duty police officers, now including some journalists. The story includes how it is reported.

I am doing this as a blog sort of in real time. It will be edited later or used as basis for improv.

Today the first body arrives. Students have been playing games on a bridge and dropped one student into shallow water. Concussion and drowning. this may have been an accident. The students were pretending to be "whips" having read some stories about the commons. The police discussion in a couple of days time will conclude this was a genuine accident. But the audience may think more will follow.

( Background the whips activity in Commons was the first time Met Police were called on. Later it was said that new MPs just did not understand how whips operate and there was nothing unusual )

Sir Keir Starmer Dumps Newspapers

 Following a series of attack in newspapers Sir Keir Starmer cancelled an event yesterday at which newspaper journalists would be present. Instead there was a press conference with three journalists from television - Beth Rigby from Sky , Ben Wright from BBC , and Libby Wiener from ITV.

There was a tweet from a print journalist

However this may indicate a future when politicians prefer television where the regulation requires some balance. The regulation of newspapers is a matter for discussion.

The Sky version is on YouTube.

Some would say that Sky should continue to ask the first question. The BBC is seen by some as very close to #No10Sources .

Previously Sir Keir Starmer had written for the Sun. He made efforts to communicate with print journalists. Jeremy Corbyn never took the risk of excluding print journalists. Perhaps things have changed with social media.

Some Dialogue #OxfordMidSummer #BeerGate

 The project is getting more complicated as it turns out to be about journalism, not just the parties. #Beergate adds a lot of aspects. So the group of police meeting in garden pubs somewhere near Oxford quickly include some journalists in the conversation. They may be drinking not too far away.

I am still not sure about characters. For improv I do not need to provide a script as such. For Down Stage Write they specify a number of characters and time length in a call so I will wait on this. Below are bits of dialogue from a pub lunch earlier today-

This could go wrong.

I wonder where the Telegraph get their information?

Is it normal to tell te journalists before the politicians?

Not sure, looks like Durham and London are different. Here in Oxford we would talk about it.

In the movies we always check the sound levels before we kick the door in.

Thing is the lies are still in the Minister Code. Starmer can't back off this whatever they have got on him.

The Guardian has quotes on what happened in Durham with Cummings. this could be a problem.

Don't worry. Nobody reads it.

What if other journalists pick it up? These people are always looking for an angle.

More likely Cummings will hand himself in. the fine won't come to much and he can put the confession statement in his blog.

#OxfordMidSummer Durham Update

 This evening a meeting includes some sympathy for police in Durham. There is criticism from Conservatives but hard to tell what the basis is. Also from Nazir Afzal ( see Guardian 3 May ) on how Dominic Cummings had nor been investigated in as much detail as possible. 

Debate on how the photo of a police car came to be in the Mail and Sun. Possibility that Met Police helped with this but this idea is rejected. Agreed it was just students who were passing by / following Labour.

Some puzzle on why Met Police kept quiet about fines though #Beergate has been widely reported.

I think about half the characters should be Brexit supporters still and accept the Mail theory on Starmer. I will try to keep the dialogue in sync with Twitter and I am getting a lot of apparent Mail support.

Nadine Dorries is a feature, not sure how to represent this.  UK may be heading for parallel universes of truth as in USA. But so far the group of police in play are cohesive, mostly just sympathetic to police in Met and Durham but a bit puzzled on procedure choices.