Always too soon

The Daily Mail ropes in a tame academic to take advantage of Tony Slattery's death.

Previously: Dancing with Kissinger's Ghost
Michael Gove's column in praise of the IDF gives the corpse of satire another kick...

---

The actor and comedian Tony Slattery’s death was announced yesterday by his partner of nearly 40 years, Mark Michael Hutchinson. He died of a heart attack and is the subject of a range of kind and sensitive obituaries in today’s papers. And then there’s The Daily Mail. It should come as no surprise that the publication which gave us Jan Moir’s infamous ‘nothing natural’ column about Stephen Gately’s death back in 2009 should be the place where taste and decency have no role.

You might justifiably argue that the best thing to do is ignore the Mail’s story but there’s a familiar structure to it that’s worth unpicking. Let’s start with the typically overstuffed headline:

Tony Slattery ‘killed by cocaine’: Medics reveal how tragic comedian’s HUGE drugs and booze consumption would have shattered his health - as devasted pals lament ‘cruel irony’ that he’d turned his life around before heart attack death aged 65

Using our old friends, the load-bearing quotemarks, the Mail can suggest to the reader that it was actually cocaine that caused Slattery’s death rather than a heart attack. Its source for that assertion is Ian Hamilton, an honorary fellow at the University of York, whose bio on X is just the words “Press & media enquiries” coupled with his phone number. Hamilton writes for The Independent and appears regularly across the media opining on drugs, alcohol, and addiction.

The Mail started with the angle it wanted to pursue and contacted Hamilton because it knew it would be able to solicit quotes from him that would support it. Despite the headline talking about “medics”, he’s the only ‘expert’ quoted. Here’s what he says:

'While it's good news he was able to overcome and abstain, the damage could already have been done,' Mr Hamilton told MailOnline.

'Particularly with cocaine because it does have an effect on the Cardiovascular system through the heart.'

He added: 'Unfortunately alcohol is a sneaky drug really - it creeps up on you slowly before causing problems. Cocaine is highly addictive and very damaging to the heart.'

The word “could” is key there. Hamilton has been asked to speculate about the health of a man he didn’t know and the same hedging tone is present in the story’s salacious opening line:

Tony Slattery's £4,000-a-week cocaine and alcohol addiction likely caused his death despite overcoming the extreme habits years ago, an expert has warned. 

The Mail returns to those ‘extreme habits’ later in the story, prompting Hamilton to talk about them specifically:

During the lowest points of his life, Slattery would take huge amounts of cocaine and consume several bottles of vodka every day.

'That's like 50 units plus a day,' said Mr Hamilton.

'When you think chief medical officers' advice is 40 units a week, it's way over the recommended level.'

He added: 'At any age drinking that amount of alcohol is going to accelerate the risk of fatality.'

There’s a major error there which I’d hope is down to poor transcription on the part of the MailOnline reporter and not Hamilton himself. The chief medical officers’ advice on alcohol consumption is not 40 units per week but 14 units a week, spread evenly over three days or more.

Of course, Slattery’s experience of addiction will have had an impact on his health — he said so himself — but the way Mail presents its story is deliberately sensationalist and designed to imply a more direct correlation. Hamilton’s quotes don’t say that the comedian was ‘killed by cocaine’ but the Mail feels confident enough that they support that suggestion to stick the phrase in the headline.

To further bolster its angle, the paper seizes upon the line that it was “a cruel irony that fate should snatch him from us just as he had really begun to emerge from his lifelong battle with so many dark demons” from Stephen Fry’s Instagram tribute to his friend. By placing that thought alongside its innuendo, the Mail can imply that his friends are thinking the same thing.

The word ‘exclusive’ is a much abused one in the British media and this story is a perfect example of an ‘exclusive’ that has been ginned up entirely by the paper in question. The Mail wanted to write a story that raked over Slattery’s earlier struggles in a grim manner and it found an ‘expert’ willing to provide the quotes to justify it. It is ‘exclusive’ because no one else wanted to take that line.

This case is a salutary one for both general readers and academics. For readers, it’s a reminder of the scepticism required when you're presented with a story balanced on ‘expert’ opinion. For academics, it’s a warning to be very careful when offering up a quote to journalists. I sincerely hope that Ian Hamilton, however eager he is to appear in the press, didn’t want to see his name attached to a story like this one.

---

This is issue 930 of Conquest of the Useless. Thank you for reading. Please consider sharing this edition…

.. and, if you haven’t yet, think about upgrading to a paid subscription.

It helps and allows me to spend more money on research and reporting. Buy a t-shirt if you’d like to make a one-off contribution and get a t-shirt.