Alan Partridge's Scum reboot: Malevolent Madeley and mind-wiped Melanie Phillips show the media's tactical amnesia at work
Richard wants to give out a kicking while Mel pretends she had no part in the MMR antivaxxer panic...
It’s just 11 days since a serving MP — Sir David Amess — was killed at his constituency surgery. Even during the brief period between news of the attack breaking and Amess’ death being announced, right-wing commentators crassly connected it to Angela Rayner’s “scum” comments at the Labour Party conference. That quickly hardened into an exploitative consensus from parliament and press alike that the ‘real’ problem was incivility and social media anonymity.
Two days after Amess died, Dan Hodges — British political journalism’s dimmest man and Glenda Jackson’s most regretable production since 1970’s The Music Lovers — wrote in The Mail on Sunday that “we1 have to begin to talk about and confront the scourge of Left-wing extremism” and castigated “the left” for not believing that:
… Tories are good, honest, decent, committed public servants, who just happen to have a different political philosophy.
That’s the same Dan Hodges who wrote a Mail on Sunday piece headlined Labour MUST kill vampire Jezza, illustrated with an image of the then-Labour leader in a coffin and containing the following description:
[Jeremy Corbyn has] become a political vampire. Paralysing and then feeding on his party, slowly sucking the blood from its veins.
But, you see, when hacks like Hodges do it, it’s not dehumanising language, it’s just a colourful analogy.
Yesterday on Good Morning Britain, decades-long experiential art piece on the theme of cringe, and former amateur Ali G impersonator Richard Madeley asked Keir Starmer:
What about an exclusion zone for the hard left on [sic] your party? Some of the criciism you got after conference a couple of weeks ago was that you basically didn’t seize the opportunity to give them a good kicking and to make it absolutely clear that the days of the Corbynistas, as we might call them, are well and truly over.
Starmer, with the ingratiating simper of a Year 7 desperate for the Sixth Formers’ approval even as his head is flushed down the toilet, accepted the premise of Madeley’s question without contradiction or caveat.
Earlier in the interview Madeley asked if it was true — “as it was reported in several Sunday newspapers…from well-placed sources” — that Starmer was “now sidelining Angela Rayner… because of her comments about ‘Tory scum’, that you found those embarrassing and obviously, in the light of the terrible events that happened two Fridays ago, incredibly poorly timed, and that you’re actually keeping her out of sight and bringing other people forward, is that true?”
After Starmer said “no” — a straight answer — Madeley continued: “So, she’s still your best girl is she?” Angela Rayner is 41 years old and, as Starmer went on to note and Madeley will also have been well aware, is currently on bereavement leave after the death of a close family member (“a close person to her… someone she treated more or less as her mother,” in Starmer’s words).
Just as Starmer later accepted Madeley’s implication that the “hard left” — a category that seems to have expanded to contain anyone who does cringe and equivocate if you call them a socialist — does not have a right to exist within the Labour Party or even perhaps in politics generally, he let the linking of Rayner’s rhetoric with killing of David Amess go unchallenged.
Knowing how heartfelt Dan Hodges’ hatred for the dehumanisation of political opponents is, having read his paean to the goodness and honesty of Tory politicians, I headed to his Twitter account expecting to find his condemnation of Madeley’s demand that the ‘hard’ Left receive a kicking.
There was none. Instead I found a congratulatory tweet to yesterday’s newsletter star Kevin Schofield on his return to political journalism after a lucrative period shilling for the gambling industry. Turns out Hodges’ positions are more full of shit than the rivers his beloved Tory Party voted not to protect.
The British press’ tactical amnesia has kicked in less than two weeks on from the death of Sir David Amess. The howls about civility and the need to treat your political rivals as people to work with rather than punching bags are already lost to the sands of time and the attentions of the Wayback Machine.
The hypocrisy of those the quotes and columns that sprang from the horrific killing with such exploitative glee becomes more clear with every passing day. It was there from the beginning though, as commentators like Hodges, The Times’ Janice Turner, conspiracy-theory hawking huckster Tom Newton-Dunn, he who can always make it up, Richard Littlejohn, and The Sun’s 70s throwback Tony Parsons all lined up to put Rayner in the crosshairs.
If there was even a scintilla of good faith lurking in the buffet of bad faith served up after Amess’ death, you’d see some of the columnists and commentators who claimed to be so shocked and appalled by the lack of ‘civility’ in the public discourse stand up to criticise Madeley. But their silence is more deafening than an ear plugs-free attendance at a My Bloody Valentine gig.
While Richard Madeley — Britain’s premier unofficial Alan Partridge impersonator — being allowed to cosplay as a serious presenter — even when he vocalises his Ray Winstone in Scum fantasy of smashing the ‘hard’ left in the face with a bit of lead piping — is ludicrous, he’s still at best a mid-table Championship team compared to Melanie Phillips’ Premier League level derangement.
In today’s Times, beneath the headline Antivaxers are the toxic worst of left and right and a lede that reads, “[An] unholy alliance of wellness pseudoscience and extreme libertarianism is behind school protests”, Phillips writes:
Some anxiety about the Covid vaccine is understandable. The normal testing programme has been vastly accelerated. There are legitimate concerns about civil liberties if vaccination is made a condition of someone’s job or entry into a venue. But the antivaxers screaming at the school gates believe the state is actually trying to poison people with the Covid vaccine. Unfortunately, you can go online and find people with scientific qualifications saying this in terms.
Yet there is no evidence for this whatever. Vaccination always involves a balance of harms. But the evidence suggests that the harms resulting from this vaccine are rare and vastly outweighed by its benefits.
All the scare stories are unfounded. It’s claimed, for example, that tens of thousands are suffering serious vaccine side effects. But this is based on statistics showing merely the number of those who subsequently died of other ailments; it doesn’t prove cause and effect.
It’s claimed the vaccine may affect women’s fertility; there’s no evidence for that. It’s claimed it causes heart inflammation. But these instances are rare and generally minor, while the incidence of heart inflammation from Covid itself is far higher. And so on and on.
This antivaccine hysteria is part of a far wider and deeper phenomenon. Elements on the right, for whom the vaccine is a threat to poison the population, have latched onto all government responses to the pandemic to claim a wordwide conspiracy involving globalists, paedophiles, the “deep state”, Jewish financiers — and Bill Gates working with all of the above to control people through microchips.
Putting aside the predictable attempt to smush together Left and Right, along with a gratuitous and off-topic reference to “the Insulate Britain Mob”2 earlier in the piece, you could be fooled into thinking that Phillips has written a relatively reasonable column. But if you were, you’d also find yourself a victim of the British media’s collective amnesia again.
Melanie Phillips was a key actor in the media propagation of the ‘MMR jab leads to autism’ conspiracy theory in the early 2000s. When Andrew Wakefield made his now throughly discredited claims of a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, Phillips wrote about his claims frequently and defended him even as proof that his research methods and motives were suspect emerged.
In 2005, after the Cochrane review comprehensively debunked Wakefield’s ‘work’ and found there was “no credible evidence” for a link between MMR and autism, Phillips contributed a Daily Mail piece headlined MMR safe? Baloney. This is one scandal that’s getting worse — it’s still online despite the Mail’s subsequent institutional volte face on anti-vaxxers — howling about…
… clouds of obfuscation, an ignorant cacophony of catcalls - and an unresolved public health problem.
After Dr Ben Goldacre wrote in The Guardian that:
Health scares are like toothpaste: they're easy to squeeze out, but very difficult to get back in the tube. On Monday, for example, Melanie Phillips of the Daily Mail wrote yet another attack on the MMR vaccine. She suggested that the journalists who trusted the new Cochrane review, which shows that MMR is probably safe and not linked to autism, were lazy stooges who took the press release at face value.
The problem is that Phillips seems to misunderstand basic epidemiology. She cites "research data" of highly dubious status and misrepresents what data there is. Her response is a microcosm of the problems that can arise when journalists engage with science.
… Phillips took to its pages for a right-to-reply piece (The case against me boils down to smear and evasion) and began in her traditional humourless, myopic, arrogant style:
At the heart of the MMR vaccine controversy is an attempt to blind people with science. Proponents of the vaccine say science has proved it is safe and that those who deny this are scientifically illiterate. This argument has been used to tell parents that the evidence of their own eyes is not true. While the vast majority of children have had no problem with the MMR vaccine, a small proportion of parents found that after vaccination their children developed bowel problems, an allergic reaction to various foods, and a halt to their behavioural development that produced the symptoms of autism.
Phillips preferred to be blinded by quackery and her own desire to back “the anti-establishement figure”3. She went on, in February 2006, to publish a futher Daily Mail piece (MMR : the facade cracks) which has subsequently been memory-holed from both the paper’s website and Phillips’ own site (but which was archived there as late as 2013).
Writing in the BMJ in November 2005, the author and GP, Dr Michael Fitzpatrick, offered a neat summation of Phillips’ actions and output:
[She] appears to be captivated by Wakefield’s self professed status as a maverick and crusader against the establishment. His posture of martyrdom and victimhood seems to have a particular appeal for Phillips, whose polemical style provokes much animosity. The price of this self indulgence (Phillips is one of Britain’s best paid journalists) is borne by the real victims of the MMR-autism fiasco. These are parents anxiously facing decisions about immunisation and parents of children with autism who carry an unwarranted burden of guilt over having had their children immunised.
Phillips is one of many journalists (by no means confined to the tabloids) who have endorsed the anti-MMR campaign. They have provided a voice for middle class anxieties about environmental threats and for the distrust of established sources of authority in science, medicine, and politics that have led some parents to reject MMR. Some journalists, writing as celebrity parents, have followed the principles of the “journalism of attachment” popularised in recent military conflicts.
This requires a high level of emotional engagement but no specialist knowledge of the subject (specialist medical and scientific correspondents have generally rejected the MMR-autism link). Although autism has become fashionable in the media, a condition characterised by difficulties of communication remains uniquely terrifying to those who live by the word. For a profession renowned for its sociability, children for whom language and friendship are problematic are a source of potent fears.
In 2019, The Daily Mail ran a frontpage campaign encouraging parents to have their children get the MMR vaccine and this year it commissioned an article written by the very same Dr Fitzpatrick who unpicked its scaremongering, castigating “anti-vaxxers' gospel of fear”. But while the paper that carried her words has tried for repentance — under the leadership of a different editor — the woman who was the most intense advocate just sails on.
The level of gall needed for Phillips to lecture about the horrors of anti-vaxx scaremongering could be converted into a statue of General de Gaulle so tall that it would tower over Christ the Redeemer in Rio. In pretending that her past output never happened, Phillips is also pretending that she played no part in creating a public discourse in which conspiracy theorists pickets schools.
It’s the same pretence that she puts up when people mention that her work — including the text of an entire column — was quoted in the mass killer Anders Breivik’s manifesto as a source of inspiration.
Whether it’s Madeley getting an exemption from criticism over his rhetoric because it’s fine to imply that people on the left have no right to have a voice in ‘mainstream’ politics, or Phillips being allowed to forget her intimate involvement in bringing the anti-vaxx mindset into the heart of public debate, hypocrisy runs through British media like the message in a piece of particularly sticky Brighton Rock. And very few people have clean hands.
There’s that weasel word “we” again. We know who’s welcome in Hodges’ conception of “we” and who isn’t.
I remain extremely suspicious of what and who is driving Insulate Britain, particularly in light of today’s story on the latest police attempts to infiltrate BLM.
Despite the fact that she, a Guardian hack turned Daily Mail hack turned Times hack, married to a famous legal journalist, is a throughly establishment figure