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11-9-2002 Scotsman This time last year By Gethin Chamberlain For the Ford motor company, preparing to launch its new Fiesta model at the Frankfurt Motor Show, things couldn't have been better. A complete revamp of one of Britain's most popular cars was certain to secure a good few column inches, complete with flattering pictures, in broadsheets and tabloids alike. The company had lavished millions of pounds on the new model and was pinning its hopes on the launch. Then at 1:46pm, Mohammed Atta flew American Airlines Flight 11 into the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York. New cars were suddenly the last thing on anyone's mind. In the exhibition halls in Frankfurt, American motor executives gathered round the television to watch the drama unfolding. The show ground to a standstill. For Ford and other manufacturers hoping to use the show to launch their new models, it was a marketing disaster. The timing could not have been worse, admits Ford spokesman Daniel Ward. "Frankfurt is a very important international motor show and there is no question that the launch of a new model is tremendously important and clearly it was affected. We were looking forward to significant coverage but it disappeared without trace as papers cleared pages and pages for what was happening in America," he says. But Ford and its competitors were not the only ones whose carefully laid plans were torn apart by the events in New York. Tony Blair began the day preparing to talk tough to the unions at the TUC conference. He was not expecting an easy ride but copies of the speech he never made reveal that he had planned to launch a robust defence of his policies for the reform of public services and to insist that the unions accepted that the government would use the private sector to improve public services where it made sense to do so. He was also planning to deliver what would have been one of his strongest speeches in support of the European single currency since he took office. To stay out would be an absurd denial of self interest: "Tell me what nation anywhere, faced with such a strategic alliance right on its doorstep, at the crux of international politics, would isolate itself from that alliance," he planned to say. Instead, the Prime Minister had to restrict himself to a few short and sombre comments on the situation in America. The Tories had no more luck. William Hague was obliged to announce that the declaration of the new Tory leader would be postponed for 24 hours as a mark of respect to the victims of the attacks. Kenneth Clarke and Iain Duncan Smith both expressed optimism about their chances. The case running at Nottingham crown court that week was what tabloid editors expected to provide their front page. The story of the hammer attack which left nine-year-old Josie Russell brain damaged had gripped the public for days and the running order for Tuesday 11 September looked like being the climax, with the jury due to be shown harrowing video evidence in which Josie relived the attack which killed Lin and Megan Russell, her mother and sister. In court that day, Josie Russell described how she was tied up and heard the sound of the hammer. "The man said give me your money and Lin said: 'I have got no money, shall I go back to my house and the man said 'no'," she was heard to say. "'No, no, no', he said and I don't know. And don't know and then tied up and me running up here (pointing to a model showing a path leading up to a remote house) and hammer - bang. OK, OK, OK ... Lin said to me 'run', down here." In the end, what was shaping up to be the story of the month was granted a cursory few hundred words. But not everyone was sorry to see their stories disappear into thin air. As Jo Moore so famously said, it was a very good day to bury bad news. Step forward the Scottish Media Group, which chose 11 September to announce that it was slashing its dividend and introducing a cost-cutting programme after suffering a 30 per cent fall in half-year profits. Chief executive Andrew Flanagan found himself confessing that there was no point in attempting to forecast when it would recover. "It's tough enough trying to predict where October's (revenues) are going to be, so predicting the date of the upturn would be very foolish," he said. Lord Ousley also had good reason to be relieved. The publication of an appendix to his report into race relations in Bradford which accused some Muslims of behaving like colonists and welcoming Islamic ghettos had all the ingredients for, at best, a major political slagging match and, in the worst case scenario, provoking more street disturbances. Instead, the origins of the hijackers ensured there was little appetite for stories about outraged Muslim sensibilities and coverage was minimal. Neither was there much enthusiasm for opposition to the government's anti-terrorist bill, which finally made it through the Lords and Commons after weeks of wrangling. For opportunistic news management, however, few could compete with the man who employed, and stood by, Jo Moore. Stephen Byers chose wisely when he selected 11 September as the moment he would reveal that local government was facing a financial crisis. Government attempts to spread prosperity around Britain had so far failed, he admitted, though no-one was listening. Days and weeks had passed before anyone thought to have another look at some of the news stories released by Byers' department in the days after 11 September. What else happened that day? Who now remembers the report which revealed that the privatisation of public services could lead to the widening of the 18 per cent gap between the average pay for women and men? Or that a Lille court chose that day to block the shutdown of the Sangatte refugee centre, rejecting Eurotunnel's attempt to close the Calais centre? Or that Europe's chief competition official issued mobile phone companies with a warning that they were still charging customers too much to make phone calls abroad and that the European commission was prepared to take a tough stance against overcharging? This was also the day that Slobodan Milosevic was written out of Serb history. A new school textbook on Yugoslavia mentioned the wars in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo but omitted the man charged by the Hague international tribunal with war crimes. Book editor Nobosjsa Jovanovic explained there had been no room for the disgraced leader. From Washington came a tale of treachery, murder and a $3 million lawsuit against Henry Kissinger and other Nixon administration officials, which implicated them in the 1971 killing of Chilean military commander Rene Schneider to prevent Salvador Allende taking power in Chile. Back in Britain, British Energy chose 11 September to take a begging bowl to the government's door, asking for £3 billion worth of debts to be wiped out and for permission to build ten new nuclear power stations. Friends Provident had a bad day at the office - a drop of £2.5 billion in the total funds under its management over the previous six months. Euro MPs said British and European consumers should pay less for their cars (again) and the British government placed an export ban on a Michelangelo drawing sold more than a year earlier to a German dealer for the then world record price of £8.1 million. Irvine Welsh planned to stage a drug-themed musical about Blackpool using students from Queen Margaret University College, Edinburgh, and Valerie Haney, 34, the eldest daughter of the notorious "Big Mags" Haney, was jailed for five years at the High Court in Glasgow for supplying heroin. The US lost a spy plane over Iraq and in Northern Ireland RUC officers were questioning a 69-year-old man on suspicion of murder as they began to excavate two houses in west Belfast to look for the bodies of two boys - Thomas Spence, 11, and his best friend, John Rodgers, 13 - who disappeared almost 27 years earlier. Hugh McPhee, 31, was jailed for 30 months for trussing up retired sheriff Eric Stewart, 73, and leaving him gagged and bleeding in his Wick home, and the Marquess of Blandford arrived at Perth Sheriff Court in a chauffeur-driven Bentley to admit speeding at more than 100mph on the A9. His case was deferred for six months. Australia appealed against a court ruling and ordered hundreds of Afghan refugees to be taken straight to the tiny Pacific island of Nauru and in Switzerland a nurse who had already confessed to the killing of nine elderly women admitted responsibility for 18 more deaths of old people in nursing homes and hospitals. Military policeman Martyn Barker, 25, was dismissed from the army after he admitted downloading child pornography from the internet while he was serving in Gibraltar and an industrial tribunal heard that St Johnstone footballer Kevin Thomas told his bosses he had taken cocaine after being told his father may not be his real father. Scotland's senior judge, Lord Rodger, announced he was quitting the post at the end of the month and Aberdeen was chosen as the first city outside the central belt to host the Scottish parliament. There was bad news for kittiwakes, whose numbers on Shetland and the Isle of May in the Firth of Forth had apparently plunged from 54,600 pairs to 23,000 in just 17 years but there was good news for coin collectors and people who find themselves short of change with the launch of a £5 coin, in 22 carat gold and sterling silver, to celebrate the Queen's Golden Jubilee. In Glasgow, a car parking space went on the market for £10,995 and a survey by FHM magazine found that men wanted love, not lust. Amid all of this, Scotland was declared free of Foot and Mouth. For those who had despaired of the government's handling of the crisis, it came as no great surprise that it should choose the worst possible day to announce that it had finally won its battle.
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................................................................................................................. Copyright ©2004 Gethin Chamberlain. All rights reserved. |
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