It all came back to me last week, vividly and painfully, when a man from the Sunderland area was arrested and charged in connection with the hoax tape. At that time, I was a young reporter on a radio station in Manchester, where the Ripper had murdered two of his victims. Like most women in the north of England, I felt threatened by him, but I was also one of a tiny handful of women reporters covering the case, hugely outnumbered by male detectives and crime correspondents. It's no exaggeration to say the experience changed my life; few women in their 20s can have been exposed to such an astounding degree of casual everyday misogyny, prompting me to write my best-known book. If one episode stands out, it is that press conference in Moss Side police station in Manchester.
It followed a meeting in the same room at which the tape was played to local prostitutes - a cheap publicity stunt, for by the end of the day there can hardly have been anyone left in the country who hadn't heard it on TV or radio. As I walked in, burdened with a huge old-fashioned UHER tape recorder, a senior detective mistook me for a prostitute. "Sorry, love," he called out, "you're too late, the pros' conference is over." Moments later, he was bantering with my male colleagues, who affected to be worried about catching STDs from chairs the prostitutes had sat on. "I kept out of their way just in case," said a policeman responsible for protecting the city's women from a sadistic killer.After Sutcliffe's arrest, it emerged that the police had interviewed him on nine occasions, but he never even made it to the D62 file, the list of 1,000 men considered the most likely suspects.
A basic rule of leadership, he argues, is that the more people you involve in the policy- making process, the more effectively a policy will be implemented. His hero is the first President Bush - not the most gifted domestic political operator in history, but with two remarkable foreign policy achievements that the Cheney-Rumsfeld "cabal" couldn't get near: creating the environment in which the Iron Curtain (and ultimately the Soviet Union itself) could disappear without bloodshed; and forging a true UN coalition, embracing Arab countries as well as America's traditional allies, to drive Saddam from Kuwait.And Wilkerson puts his finger on a central weakness of this administration: the shambolic way in which decisions are made. Seldom have I met a dumber man."But the critique extends far beyond personalities Wilkerson is an old pro who's been around. Feith, it will be remembered, is the individual described by General Tommy Franks, commander of the Iraq war, as "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth" Wilkerson adds, "He was.
