Saints, Sinners and "The Salt Path"

A.k.a. why you should always wonder why journalists write what they do

Over in the UK there’s been a controversy recently about a book (and movie adaptation) and its author. The book is called “The Salt Path” and it describes the travails and travels of a middle aged couple who, when they hit rock bottom back in about 2011, decided to hike the south coast of England. I’ve never read the book, or its sequels. I’ve never heard of the author either before this scandal hit. But while I’ve never read this particular book I do read books of the same sort and I am a sucker for travel writing in general - indeed I have a whole separate substack devoted to that sort of thing - so some of the issues hit home.

I only learned of the scandal thanks to a substack post by someone who I follow:

The cost of our addiction.....

This post is quite a bit of an expansion on the comment I left there.

Last weekend the Observer newspaper published, as front page news I believe, an investigation into the background to the book and author (archive link). Having read the substack post, my curiosity led me to want to find out what it was about so I (skim) read the article. I’ve read a fair number of investigative journalist reports and some experience with how journalists work which helped. That article came across to me as a deliberate hit job. That doesn't mean it doesn't contain nuggets of truth, but I absolutely got the impression that it was intended to tell a particular story and presented/selected evidence to meet the narrative while almost certainly ignoring anything that ran contrary to it.

Rudyard Kipling, author and journalist back in the day, talks about “suggestio falsi” and “suppressio veri” and absolutely everything in that article screams both of those. It insinuates, it makes impressions, it sets up a strawman to destroy, and it utterly fails to let the victims (i.e. the Salt Path’s author and her husband) present the case for the defense. Moreover it seemed to me to be deliberately written to make a Motte and Bailey defense possible if (when) the victims seek to sue for libel etc. In other words it’s written to make it look like there’s some monster crime¹ but once you dig in there are very few actual claims of criminal behavior.

It turns out that the victims, having taken legal advice, have published a rebuttal and I strongly recommend that anyone who cares about the facts of this particular case read it and the Observer article and see which comes across as more believable.

However I’d like to use this as a moment to comment on some bigger issues.

The Requirement to be Perfect

One of the things that jumps out at me reading the Observer article, and the responses to it, is that there seems to be an unspoken expectation by the journalist, and various of those who piled on, that the authors of memoir books are to be 100% accurate and to be pretty much plaster white saints in their personal lives.

This, it seems to me, is gross hypocrisy. Anyone who has experience with people telling tales in a group (say down the pub) is well aware that the teller will exaggerate certain events, merge and mingle others and fail to mention embarrassing details that may detract from the tale. They may even borrow tales and events from others, file the serial numbers off and present the final product as their own. This, as Rudyard Kipling put it in a memorable poem, has been going on since bards and minstrels first wandered from court to tavern:

When 'Omer smote 'is bloomin' lyre,
   He'd 'eard men sing by land an' sea;
An' what he thought 'e might require,
   'E went an' took - the same as me! 

The market-girls an' fishermen,
   The shepherds an' the sailors, too,
They 'eard old songs turn up again,
   But kep' it quiet - same as you! 

They knew 'e stole; 'e knew they knowed.
   They didn't tell, nor make a fuss,
But winked at 'Omer down the road,
   An' 'e winked back - the same as us!

I take it as read that any travel writer does similar. Things are basically true in essence but not necessarily 100% accurate in every particular. Nor will they cover the tedious bits in tedious detail. People read these books for inspiration and there’s only so much inspiration to be had reading about being splashed by the cars in the car park of Sainsbury’s on a rainy Tuesday. Likewise descriptions of bowel movements, blisters and boring moments where you trudge along the path on a grey day with a total lack of scenic views, fellow hikers etc.

Finally nothing at all requires that the author be faultless in whatever caused them to get into the predicament that they are escaping through travel. To take the Observer article as accurate, it is quite possible that the author embezzled money in the years before the time of the book and that this was the root cause of their subsequent financial issues. So what?

I see no evidence that the author was a serial criminal, nor any evidence that she intended to do anything other than get out of a financial hole the best way she could see to do it. It is notable that she does not appear to have been actually charged, let alone prosecuted, and that she does not appear to have declared bankruptcy. None of those prior poor decisions have any bearing on the inspiration provided by the book except to explain how she ended up in the mess she did at the start. “We lost the family home due to poor financial decisions”, which I believe is more or less what the book blurb says, is quite sufficient. She fucked up and to quote a certain book “let he who is without sin cast the first stone”. It seems to me that the Observer’s journalist might want to take that admonition to heart. But we’ll get to her in a minute.

Journalistic Priorities

First though we might want to ask ourselves why the Observer and the journalist thought this story was so important. I mean the UK is not, how can I put it? in the most robust economic and political health these days, nor is it lacking in crime.

To put it more bluntly, the author of the Salt Path did not gang rape dozens of girls, nor did she sell drugs, riot, burn buildings down, burn the Koran or even Xeet anything remotely nasty about immigrants. You might think that a newspaper would want to spend time and effort investigating some of the above or whether inquiries into some of the above have been blocked because they might implicate current politicians, senior bureaucrats and the like². Yet those stories remain uninvestigated, instead the front page of the newspaper is about this book and its author.

Why?

One obvious reason is sales. Scandal sells and, as I understand it, the movie of the book became generally available a month or so ago so the newspaper can hitchhike on the publicity and promotional efforts made by the movie company. So millions of people in Britain have heard of the book/movie and author and it is, apparently a reasonable bestseller. Hence one can see why an article about the author will be financially attractive.

But why a hit piece? I can easily imagine a more sympathetic version of this article that mentions the alleged embezzlement but which, like the author’s rebuttal, notes that the lack of official judicial action and so on. One that shows how a variety of poor financial decisions and poor trust in others led to disaster. But that was not the article written. Why?

I suspect a significant degree of crab bucket syndrome. Plus the fact that the author doesn’t do the “I’m a victim” thing. Instead of letting government agencies get her out of her mess she tries to solve it herself. The Observer’s readership, however, tends to be the people who work in those agencies and they don’t like to see a customer slip from their grasp. They don’t believe that people can succeed on their own unless they take from others so they are primed to believe that any success must have some kind of crooked underpinning

Finally, to return to the beginning, one reason for publishing this hit piece at the time it was published is that is distracts attention from the disastrous government of Two Tier Keir which is now “celebrating” a year in power with a Chancellor weeping in the commons and a commons rebellion on attempts to restore some kind of fiscal restraint. Plus it’s a true British story. No immigrants involved. So it helps to remind people that immigrants aren’t the only badd’uns.

Bluntly it’s a story that helpfully distracts from real issues and allows people to get their 15 minutes of hate out on a person that has never hurt them or done anything to them except provide some of them with an enjoyable memoir to read. The fact that it makes the newspaper money is a bonus.

Another bonus is that the victim is almost certainly unable to find a cause of action to sue despite having had her reputation destroyed and probably, as a result, being unable to market her next book properly - there are suggestions that it may not be released at all, for sure it won’t sell as much.

Which leads us back to the writer of the hit piece.

Who is Chloe Hadjimatheou?

Ah yes. Doing a search on her name is interesting. Her other claim to fame as a journalist is her work as a BBC journalist about Syria. This gives you internet articles like this and pages like this. The allegation is made that Ms Hadjimatheou was used by UK intelligence to whitewash a certain group/person who may have faked evidence of atrocities in order to get international action in certain matters. It is also suggested that she’s covering up other stuff:

A reader of this correspondence could reasonably conclude that on this matter Raed Al-Saleh has something to hide, and further that Ms Hadjimatheou is for some reason colluding with him by helping him to avoid having to respond

I don’t know that this is true, but it seems to me that just as the author of the Salt Path has a few skeletons in her closet, so does the journalist. I also note that she seems to no longer be with the BBC but moved to Tortoise which was then acquired by the Observer. She often seems to get bylined as “Narrative Editor” which is not a title I’m familiar with.

Interestingly in addition to continuing to write about the Middle East and occasionally Ukraine for the Observer she seems to be developing a small side business in domestic issues. If you look at her articles (I spent a few minutes doing so via muckrack) she seems to repeat accepted narratives and not rock the boat. Combine that with the alleged involvement with UK intelligence and you wonder whether she’s writing what some part of the British government/establishment wants. Thus its worth pondering whether her handful of articles about other topics (such as this one) are also being written to advance certain narratives while downplaying others.

For example the other “big story” she has had recently is about a white female teacher at a school in N London who sexually abused boys. Given grooming gang scandal where predominately Pakistani origin men raped thousands of girls³ it seems curious for her to spend all this time and effort on a woman who may have abused at most a couple of dozen boys. To be clear, I’m not saying the woman is in anyway innocent or that her victims were not traumatized. However, unless there’s evidence that many female teachers in the past colluded to abuse the children they taught - there doesn’t seem to be - then surely this is a minor story better suited to a local paper (which a version of the story ran in) than a national one?

On the other hand if you wanted to downplay the rape gang scandal and how it was systematically ignored by the authorities for decades then the distraction of a teacher abusing her pupils for decades works well.

So What?

Finally to recap. For most people this story is a tempest in a teacup, if that. They haven’t read the book or watched the movie and don’t really care if the author is a liar or not. But many people have read the book or watched the movie and many of those people may feel (do feel according to various posts on social media) betrayed. However a large part of that betrayal is caused by them believing that the investigative report is fair and accurate, which it isn’t. In my view the newspaper piece is carefully written to insinuate misdeeds that it then doesn’t provide the evidence to back up.

The result of this hit piece is increased sales and attention to the newspaper, distraction from the dire state of the UK in general, and loss of faith in the author by her readers which is sure to result in lower future income to her. The journalist, Chloe, on the other hand, gets a couple of weeks of coverage that raises her own profile.

1. crime may be the wrong word - scandal, impropriety …

2. for example

3. In this post I estimated it to be around 50,000 albeit with very large error bars