A howling tumour
Liz Truss's 'enemies of growth' speech convinced The Telegraph's headbangers and distracted The Times' tone detectors... + Gove gossip analysis.
Previously: A Notes. app apology government
... a no apologies press, and a national soap opera in which we're barely extras.
Magaret Thatcher didn’t make her “enemy within” speech from the stage at a Tory Party conference. She spoke those words in the relative privacy of a 1922 Committee meeting in 1984, defining Miners’ leaders, “some local authorities”, and the entire city of Liverpool as those enemies. Of course, the speech was leaked/briefed to The Times, which reported the next day:
The Prime Minister last night drew a parallel between the Falklands War and the dispute in the mining industry. Speaking at a private meeting of the 1922 Committee of Conservative backbench MPs at Westminster, Mrs Thatcher said that at the time of the conflict they had had to fight the enemy without; but the enemy within, much more difficult to fight, was just as dangerous to liberty.
Liz Truss detailed her enemies live on TV and to an audience of sea-lion-clapping activists in the hall at a Tory Conference that was less a party and more a wake mixed with the ‘airing of grievances’ (serenity now!). She spoke of the least convincing villainous gang since the “axis of evil” — “the anti-growth coalition”.
In her fevered imagination, that group includes:
Labour, the Lib Dems, the SNP, the militant unions, the vested interests dressed up as think tanks, the talking heads, the Brexit deniers, Extinction rebellion and [referring to Greenpeace protestors who interrupted the speech] some of the people we had in the hall earlier.
Truss appeared to believe that anyone can have a go at government if they fancy (“The fact is they prefer protesting to doing… talking on Twitter to taking tough decisions.”) which is plausible since we’re currently letting her have a turn as PM. In the political speech version of ‘making up a guy to get mad at’ she said:
They taxi from north London townhouses to the BBC studio to dismiss anyone challenging the status quo.
From broadcast to podcast, they peddle the same old answers.
That last line will have sounded good in the stale atmosphere of her hotel room, the bright idea of some dim bulb advisor, no doubt seconded from one of those “vested interests dressed up as think tanks”.
For a woman whose career and political ideology owe so much to the influence of the IEA — practically the dictionary definition of vested interests dressed up as a think tank — required more gall than a complete collection of Asterix books.1 And it was equally bold of a Prime Minister whose most fervent remaining supporters are talking heads in The Daily Mail, The Sun and The Daily Telegraph to attack the fine British export of bullshit opinions delivered on deadline.
Thankfully for Truss, The Telegraph’s talking heads haven’t taken offence. Ed West, deputy editor of the cow site UnHerd and author of Tory Boy, argues that It is the job of politicians to champion unpopular ideas. If that’s the case then Truss is a genius. Life boat-despising, ghost of cigarette smoke past, Nigel Farage is delighted by the speech while still predicting that the Conservative Party is “doomed”
Farage’s Ronseal-soaked former UKIP colleague, Patrick O’Flynn, was more positive, writing under the headline Liz Truss might just have rescued her premiership:
Strip away the depressing context surrounding Ms Truss’s speech, of backbench rebellions and media pile-ons, and what we heard and saw was a well-crafted address that attempted to place her culturally on the side of “normal working people” – especially in the private sector. More notably, she has positioned herself firmly against an “anti-growth coalition” whose members she characterised as being driven from north London town houses to BBC studios to preach “more tax, more regulation, more meddling”.
If you ignore everything that was happening, it was fantastic. Who needs “context”? Only pinkos, the unpatriotic, and foreigners.
Ross Clark, his byline photo giving the impression of a man worried his chest freezer of dead cats and scrapbook of ‘pet missing’ posters are about to be uncovered, is pessimistic (Truss is accumulating too many enemies) but still claims the speech was somehow good:
This was an assured performance in contrast to the often-wooden and stuttering appearances during leadership campaign debates. You would not guess, merely from watching the speech, that this was a Prime Minister under severe pressure after just a month in the job. Truss dealt far better with an interruption from Greenpeace protesters than Theresa May coped with a protest during her own speech five years ago, merely delivering an instruction from the podium to get them removed.
Truss’s speech did not dwell too much on her personal history, was admirably free of corny jokes and was mercifully short. Moreover, it had a clear theme, delivered in the familiar form of listing her three priorities for government: “growth, growth and growth”. In fact, the whole speech was a little more reminiscent of Tony Blair’s conference speeches than it was of Margaret Thatcher, down to the way she handled her U-turn over the 45p tax rate – in one sentence, ending with “we get it”.
We remain in the territory of words having been picked clean of their meaning; Truss was assured as a Slade’s Dave Hill picking through a minefield in his stacked heels, as “reminiscent of Tony Blair” as alleged comedian Matt Forde admiring himself in the mirror. Even when performing scepticism these columnists demand that we reject the evidence of our eyes and ears in favour of their superior impressions.
The never-knowingly hinged Truss-supporting ‘economist’ Andrew Lilico, who assured the audience that he “doesn’t care about equality [because] equality is morally wrong” in a recent Sky News appearance, continues that theme:
It was solid stuff, and it was admirably focused and concise – the speech lasted only a little over half an hour even including the break to have some protestors removed.
It was short. Short and concise are not the same thing.
Outside of the op-eds, The Telegraph continues to do Truss plenty of favours, although not via the gif above which made its home page look like a report on the Prime Minister appearing as Ming the Merciless in an ill-advised primary school production of Flash Gordon. In its leader column today, it declared that “Tories owe Liz Truss their full support”. And like a pop fandom filling the mentions of a rival artist with snake emojis, the once and future home of Boris Johnson has taken aim at Michael Gove.
In unreconstructed Mean Girls-style, Camilla Tominey wrote a piece yesterday that featured more dog whistles than a bad day at Battersea:
It was only last week that Liz Truss invited Michael Gove into No 10 to see how he might be able to help her fledgling administration… Advisors warned against it, mindful of the former Times journalist’s well-honed reputation for political backstabbing but the meeting went ahead anyway.
… On Sunday, their worst fears were realised when Gove, 55, declared the scrapping of the 45 per cent tax rate was “not Conservative”…
… The blow was doubly painful for Ms Truss, 47, since she had also helped her former Cabinet colleague through a difficult period following his separation from his wife of 20 years, Daily Mail journalist Sarah Vine, in June last year.
Despite outranking Gove in Cabinet, when she was foreign secretary Ms Truss agreed for the homeless father-of-two to stay at her official London residence…
… “Because he used to work for the Times and his ex-wife works for the Mail there’s this perception that he has got a hotline to two newspaper groups.”
“Gove’s network is everywhere. He has these young, clever men placed all over the place who are all massively loyal to him.”
Barely below the surface, this is about rivalries and enmities between the right-wing newspapers as much as it is conflict in the Conservative Party. Gove is The Times’ man; he worked there before being an MP, returned to interview Trump with Rupert Murdoch just out of sight, and announced his ‘departure’ from frontline politics in an article for the paper. Boris Johnson — twice betrayed by Gove — remains The Telegraph’s once and future star columnist, and, as the party’s paper, it feels only it has the right to aggressively critique a Conservative Prime Minister.
There are also euphemisms and winks included to titillate those with an awareness of Westminster rumour, gossip, and widely known but ‘secret’ knowledge. “Helped her former Cabinet colleague through a difficult period” is a hoary old tabloid cliche that implies a more hands-on kind of help. It harks back to an infamous picture of Gove and Truss on a train together, as well as speculation about her choice in necklaces/appearance in a notorious spreadsheet of alleged Westminster misdeeds, and his alleged choice in relationship structures.
The phrase “homeless father-of-two” is a pretty studs-up way of describing Gove’s living situation after his separation from Vine and there’s innuendo sprayed all over the line “young, clever men… who are massively loyal to him”. Rumours about Gove’s closeness to researchers were rife after news of his divorce was announced. I wrote about them at the time. 2
Someone asked me today whose side the Daily Telegraph is on. The answer is and always will be that The Daily Telegraph is on the side of The Daily Telegraph. Its support for individual politicians is contingent on their support for the aims of The Telegraph and for now the interests of the remaining Barclay brother.
That arrangement was evident during Christopher ‘Chopper’ Hope’s live interview with Suella Braverman yesterday. When she said, like a gender-flipped bizarro world Martin Luther King Jnr, that…
I would love to have a front page of The Telegraph with a plane taking off to Rwanda, that’s my dream, it’s my obsession.
… she was talking to the editors and readers of The Daily Telegraph, unbothered by the fact that the rest of us could hear her.
When the Shadow Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, responded to Braverman’s despicable claim that she will introduce legislation to immediately deport people who cross the Channel, by telling Sky News…
The problem is that the government are not deporting people today even when their claims have failed. What the government need to do is get a grip of the system, process claims quicker and ensure that people who have not got a right to be here are sent home.
… she was speaking to the same hardcore of right-wing newspaper editors and columnists. It’s hardly surprising that Telegraph columnist, builder-hater and bowtie-lover Tim Stanley wrote last week that he is “no longer terrified of Labour” with its “very nice and normal” people. They’re offering the same inhumanity but with a promise of greater efficiency.
Saying the hard-right thing in the ‘right’ way matters a great deal to newspapers commentators. In The Times, its panel of columnists focused on tone and presentation in their assessment of Truss’ speech.
While generally unimpressed, Emma Duncan says, “this most divided of parties could at least agree that Putin and the greenies are enemies.” Greenies? Tough on the Poddington Peas, tough on the causes of Poddington Peas?
Matthew Parris, so often praised by the unobservant for his critiques of Johnson and Truss, writes:
This was a speech almost entirely without content, littered with cliché, covertly defensive, ducking every difficulty, milking cheap applause wherever it could be found — and delivered with better poise and more aplomb than I’d thought Liz Truss was capable of.
Add “poise” and “aplomb” to our ongoing list of words that have been scoured free of meaning. Parris, a bag-carrier for and then an MP under Thatcher, railed at Truss for…
… [reaching] for the answer beloved of every demagogue, ideologue and populist in history: enemies of the people.
… but then, of course, the demagogic Margaret got him elected and gave him so much material for the books and parliamentary sketches that followed.
Finally, Alice Thomson prefaced her criticisms with a cloying columnist’s empathy:
Oh Liz, I almost felt sorry for you this morning. Did you manage any breakfast?
From there she noted:
Trussonomics, the prime minister made clear, is all about growth, growth, growth. She defined herself against the anti-growth coalition.
That line is representative of much of the analysis, rating (or otherwise) the retooling of the old Blairite peroration (“education, education, education”) as a cold demand for “growth, growth, growth”. The missing questions are: Growth at what cost? Growth for what reason? Growth that benefits whom?
A party that has trashed and continues to trash education and the NHS, funnels riches to its friends and donors, and presides over literal rivers of shit demands more, more, more. What we witnessed today was a tumour calling for growth and a press that’s more interested in its shape and style than its brutal effects.
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I’ve used that joke several times before but if Truss is going to keep reheating the same old lines, why shouldn’t I?
Meanwhile, in The Daily Mail, Sarah Vine is still squeezing content out of her marriage to Gove (Liz Truss has broken the first rule of politics. Keep your friends close but your enemies (like my former husband) closer).