A Notes.app apology government
... a no apologies press, and a national soap opera in which we're barely extras.
Previously: Shorting shame
The value of shame in the British media is even lower than the pound.
The news trickled out first in a print-edition-spoiling 12.20 am story given to The Sun’s political editor Harry Cole: The government was “preparing” to cancel its plan to scrap the 45p tax rate. But the move was confirmed in a Notes app apology-style tweet from Kwasi Kwarteng timed to hit the breakfast news. It was so disingenuous that the Chancellor came over like a z-list actor expressing regret about an ‘ill-advised’ Halloween costume:
… it is clear that the abolition of the 45p tax rate has become a distraction from our overriding mission to tackle the challenges facing our country.
Yes, a distraction like Tommy Cooper doing the glass/bottle/glass trick and neither a colossal market-melting fuck-up nor a favour to the gang of short-selling vultures Kwarteng enjoyed drinks with on the evening of his mini-budget. And the tweet itself was a distraction from the government’s remaining commitments to slashing public services and benefits.
The abruptness of the clown car reorientation left tyre tracks all over The Daily Telegraph’s leader column with its confident prediction that “Liz Truss is not for turning”. The piece, which was still pulsating like a hammer-struck thumb on the frontpage of the paper’s website at the time of writing, begins:
Liz Truss is clearly not a leader easily buffeted by events if she thinks she is right. Despite last week’s market turbulence and the subsequent political fall-out, Ms Truss remains determined to pursue the strategy she and her Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, have set out.
I think I just saw the Prime Minister fly past my window like a trampoline in a high wind. But, of course, the Telegraph is produced in an alternate reality and posted through a wormhole into ours; it’s the only explanation for the following paragraph:
On the BBC yesterday, she gave an unapologetic defence of every decision she has taken so far, including the cut in top rate tax from 45p to 40p. She also did not rule out cuts in spending and welfare benefits. Her interviewer Laura Kuenssberg asked whether it was not a bad political message to reduce payments for the poor while helping the wealthy. But Ms Truss said the country has ended up with a 70-year high in the tax burden by worrying about “how things look”. Her priority was with outcomes not optics. It was a bravura performance that should give pause to colleagues pressing for a U-turn.
Bravura (n.) — great technical skill and brilliance shown in a performance or activity.
It would’ve been a performance of great skill and brilliance were Truss a clown with a speciality in peforming halting hubris. Unfortunately, she’s the Prime Minister and if her colleagues need to “give pause”, they could borrow one from her as she appeared to be buffering throughout the interview.
While The Telegraph hasn’t disappeared the leader column — the top comment currently reads, "Can’t believe the DT hasn’t replaced this garbage yet…” — it is pretending to have known Truss was no good all along.
Ross Clark, whose byline picture gives the impression of a man who has just trapped his scrotum in his zipper but is trying not to let on, declares Liz Truss has become a new Theresa May. Inevitably, his first line u-turns on his own paper’s leader column of just hours earlier (“So, it transpires that, unlike her heroine, the lady IS for turning.”) and he’s wiped all trace of his own column from September 6 (“This is the most conservative Cabinet in a long time”) from his mind.
Camilla Tominey, who needed to witness just 24 hours of the new administration to write a column crowing that “unflustered Liz Truss [had] already shown she is captain of her own ship”, is now reporting from Tory party conference that “Truss's entire policy platform appears in jeopardy” and quoting mutinous sources:
She needs to get out there on Wednesday and nail her Conservative colours to the mast or she’s finished.
The villain of Tominey’s piece is dubious raver and Pob stand-in Michael Gove:
Michael Gove cut a lonely figure on Monday morning as he emerged from his hotel at the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham and went for a run.
Appearing from the cordoned-off security area wearing a pair of headphones - and a satisfied smile on his face - the man who stabbed Boris Johnson in the back had claimed another victim in his successor, Liz Truss.
With her experience of projecting thoughts and feelings onto members of the Royal Family, it’s a piece of piss for Tominey to detect all of that symbolism in an increasingly dessicated former Cabinet Minister trotting out of his hotel.
Of course, Gove — Machievelli reborn as a particularly unlikeable prep school prefect — knew full well that he would be pictured going for his run, even if I’m not sure that he meant to go for a look best described as “pervert startled during fire drill”.
The Daily Mail, which gave Truss’ leadership campaign so much support, first dedicated its front page to an attack on Gove (Fury as Gove stokes Tory 45p tax revolt) before changing it to (Are Tories on brink of 45p tax U-turn?) for a later edition. Here in Norfolk, we got the first version on our shelves.
While the Mail’s original splash began…
Michael Gove faced a backlash from fellow Tories last night after savaging the Government’s mini-Budget on the first day of the Conservative Party conference.
… Rachel Wearmouth writes a very different telenovela for The New Statesman:
Rumours are swirling that MPs – most of whom did not back Truss’s leadership – are beginning to coalesce around Gove and Shapps, who are seen as reliable.
We’re seemingly meant to have forgotten Gove adopting various silly accents in an interview with BBC Breakfast in May:
In his newsletter, The Daily Telegraph’s Christopher ‘Chopper’ Hope writes:
Unbelievably Conservative MPs are now smelling blood in the water, with suggestions that Truss will be out by Christmas and a new PM appointed (not elected) by MPs.
That storyline was also presented by Tim Shipman in his latest dramatic retelling for The Sunday Times:
Former ministers are openly discussing what would happen if Truss was ousted. “There would have to be a leader by acclamation,” one said. “And it would have to be Boris or Rishi. She’s finished already.”
The same piece gave an insight into the Labour Right’s similiar distaste for democracy:
Labour’s conference was by common consent the most upbeat since Tony Blair’s valedictory speech in 2006. Business was out in force while the hard left stayed away. “The twats in T-shirts have disappeared,” a member of the shadow cabinet observed.
Unsurprisingly, The Times — Michael Gove’s once and future home as a hack — was far more kind to him on its front page (Gove and Shapps attack ‘tin-eared’ Tory tax cuts) and its analysis on the inside pages concludes:
Truss’s allies hope that Gove’s reputation for having a hand in defensestrating two previous Tory leaders could allow them to portray him as being motivated by bitterness. The problem is that a significant number of Tory MPs, even those who don’t like or trust Gove, agree with him.
The common factor in the coverage is that the Conservative MPs are treated like characters in a soap opera that the Lobby is simply obessed with; the rest of us barely manage to reach the status of extras.
Gove, who was given gushing valedictory coverage when he “quit frontline politics” via a piece for The Times in August, is back like Dirty Den emerging from a Walford canal. The idea that the governing party might topple its newly-installed leader after a month and replace her as Prime Minister without even an internal election is treated like a spicy plot twist.
While the government puts out Notes.app apologies and unapologetically carries on with the policies it had planned all along, we have a press that will never apologise. The very same columnists who assured us we were underestimating Truss and failed to understand Kwarteng’s powerful intellect will now pretend they knew this is what would happen all along; they’ll emerge from the shower and the whole Liz Truss storyline will have just been a dream.
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