Paper Monitor

12:06 UK time, Thursday, 26 October 2006

A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.

It’s Myra Hindley as you’ve never seen her before, staring out from under her peroxide blonde mop in that infamous police mugshot, in the Daily Mail.

What’s the beef, you might wonder - the Mail’s picture desk has frequently dusted that image off in its long-running condemnation of the Moors murderer.

Ah, but here’s the rub. She’s done up like an angel, white dove of peace perched on one hand, heavenly robes of white replacing her more familiar 60s garb. It is Channel 4’s provocative ad for its new drama about the child-killer and Lord Longford, the Labour peer who fought to free her.

Advertising revenues can be hard to come by these days, and a full-page ad sold is a full-page ad sold. But Paper Monitor cannot help but wonder at the bile that might be spewed in the Mail’s letters page tomorrow. For not only does this ad dress Myra up as an angel, it is C4 wot’s done it! Tick off those Mail hate-figures.

Meanwhile, Paper Monitor has been most intrigued by the 51-year-old solicitor who has launched legal proceedings to prove that he is Princess Margaret’s secret love child.

That his birth certificate lists Mr and Mrs Joe Average as his parents does not dent his certainty – “I’m adopted!” Then there’s his recollection of a lovely lady who came to visit when he was two, who told him to behave as “one day you’ll be the king of England” – well, 12th in line for the throne, should his claim be proven.

The Guardian too has had its curiosity pricked, for it has dug a photo of the wasp-waisted princess from its archives taken just two months before his birth (here she is, foreground right, in another photo taken at the same time from our own archives).

“It suggests that either a Windsor’s uterine walls are as unyielding as her sense of duty, or that Marge remained resolutely unduffed until the highly legitimate Viscount Linley came along,” says the paper.