Andrew Neil’s undetectable blush: The British media’s superpower is an inability to feel embarrassment…
A whistlestop tour through 24 hours of cringe.
How would we know if Andrew Neil were blushing? Like a chameleon trapped in a meat locker, his face is a permanent gammon1 red. If he were ever to feel the burning indignity of embarrassment or the twinge of shame, his ruddy rhino hide would conceal any outward signs. It is an evolutionary advantage developed during almost 40 years in the British media — a significant amount of that time spent on sunbeds / being hosed down with fake tan — but Neil is not alone in this quality.
One of the biggest professional advantages in the British media is an inability to experience shame and a superhuman tolerance for embarrassment. Individuals who we were assured by hysterical Daily Telegraph editorials and talkRadio appearances by grumbling Emperor Forehead, Brendan O’Neill, had been cancelled, write in newspapers and appear on radio and television.
If Sideshow Bob were a member of the British media establishment, he could step on every rake in turn and still find himself being paid a six-figure salary to write pieces about how the real problem with society is the Bart Simpson generation and their beloved TikTok.
Today’s newsletter is a tour of British newspapers’ embarrassing output from a single 24 hour period. And since I opened on Andrew Neil, let’s start with his Daily Mail interview, the latest stop in his post-GB News rehabilitation tour.
Headlined 'GB News is just a disaster. I came close to a breakdown. It would've killed me to carry on. I HAD to quit': ANDREW NEIL breaks down in tears in his first interview since his exit from channel he helped create, Rebecca Hardy’s piece begins with the usual reputation polishing:
He’s the titan of British broadcasting, an unflappable presenter who, with 25 years of broadcasting under his belt, stood as the BBC’s leading political interviewer with his forensic, fearless grilling of more party leaders than most contestants on the reality TV show Love Island have had dates.
He’s been on IRA and jihadi hit lists, and is also – as I can attest – a formidable boss. So it comes as a surprise when Andrew Neil starts to cry and confesses to me how he nearly succumbed to mental collapse, broken by his experience at GB News.
‘I came close to a breakdown,’ he confesses, tears falling.
It’s rather appropriate that the mention of Love Island in that first paragraph lead MailOnline’s CMS to automatically add a line prompting readers to seek out the “Latest news and updates on all of your favourite Love Island contestants” as this is Neil getting the “reality TV survivor” treatment.
Having left the GB News’ Enmity Island, a place he was instrumental in setting up and promoting vigorously across the British press, Neil now wants to frame himself as a victim, the poor put upon old political interviewer taken for a ride. That emotional display could only look more like crocodile tears if he broke off mid-interview to offer an unsuspecting frog a lift across a river.
The suggestion that Neil has been on IRA and jihadi hit lists, drawn from a quote by Neil later in the piece (“Don’t forget, I’ve been on the IRA hit list twice. I’ve had special protection — anti-terrorist forces outside my house. I’ve been on the jihadists’ hit list. This feels worse.”), is an interesting one.
Neil doesn’t appear to have discussed this before in interviews nor does it seem to have appeared in news reports. It may be that such threats were never made public for security reasons but there is an element of convenient timing in Neil, engaged as he is in an attempt to reburnish his reputation, mentioning them now.
The most famous story involving the IRA that involves Neil isn’t brought up much these days. In 1986, following Thames TV’s documentary Death On The Rock about the shooting of three unarmed IRA members on Gibraltar, The Sunday Times — under Neil’s editorship — libelled an eye-witness to the murders, Carmen Proetta, who had appeared in the documentary.
The Murdoch papers, encouraged by aggressive government briefings about the documentary makers, went hard for Proetta. The Sun falsely described her as “the Tart of Gib” and claimed she was “anti-British” but The Sunday Times coverage was more extensive and arguably even more brutal.
Reports in all 11 national newspapers at the time talked of a “gun battle” and referred to a bomb being found. It was later revealed that the men were not armed and there was no bomb. The Ministry of Defence managed to imply there had been a bomb by briefing reporters about a “suspect bomb”. Ian Jack explained in Granta that:
… According to the Ministry of Defence, the phrase ‘suspect bomb’ or ‘suspect car bomb’ is ‘a term of art’. As the army’s bomb disposal officer explained to the inquest it means no more than a car which, for whatever reason, is thought to contain a bomb. Hence you ‘find’ a suspect bomb by finding a car and suspecting it. Hence you ‘deal with’ a suspect bomb by confirming its presence and defusing or exploding it, or by discovering no bomb exists.
How convenient.
After Death on the Rock was broadcast two Sunday Times journalists Rosie Waterhouse and David Connett were dispatched to Gibraltar to interview key witnesses. One of them, quoted in The Media on the Rock: The Media and the Gibraltar Killings (Miller, 1991), explained:
I expected that I would be told to investigate further the circumstances of the shooting. However, I wasn’t. I was told that we were to investigate the making of Death on the Rock.
On their return, Waterhouse and Connett both wrote memos to Robin Morgan, The Sunday Times’ featured editor, complaining about how their copy had been used to create what Connett called “a hatchet job”.
Waterhouse, who later resigned, wrote in her memo that:
I expressed concern that you [Morgan] seemed to be accepting the official version of the shooting without question. You were not interested in any information I obtained which contradicted your apparent premise — that Thames was wrong and the official version right.
Michael Cockerell, the storied political documentary maker, has said the story was reinforced by lines briefed from the top (“One government minister rang the political correspondents of three different newspapers with defamatory allegations against… Proetta.”)
£300,000 in libel damages were ultimately paid to Proetta, half of which came from The Sunday Times in an out-of-court settlement. Roger Bolton, Death on the Rock’s producer, said that one of the reasons Andrew Neil was pushed into settling was that Whitehouse was prepared to give evidence in court that her copy had been misrepresented by Neil’s editors.
An inquiry by Tory peer Lord Windlesham and Richard Rampton QC2 into Death on the Rock, commissioned by Thames, found — with some caveats — that the programme was a “trenchant” work of journalism that had been made in “good faith and without ulterior motives”, which proved “freedom of expression can prevail in the most extensive, and the most immediate, of all the means of mass communication.”
A call from the Sunday Times’ NUJ chapel for an investigation into the paper’s reporting and specifically Andrew Neil’s role was ignored.
I recount that story again to remind you that the Andrew Neil who traduced Thames over Death on the Rock and was involved in the libelling of a woman whose only ‘crime’ was to be a witness to an event the British state would rather have gone unseen is the same Andrew Neil that The Daily Mail calls today “a media giant” and “the most talented broadcaster of his generation”.
I suppose Neil is a giant in the sense that giants blunder around destroying things with little concern for the lives of “little people”. It would be in keeping for a ‘giant’ to be the driving force behind a campaign of AIDS denialism as Neil was as editor of The Sunday Times and for a ‘giant’ to do the bidding of other ‘giants’ like Rupert Murdoch and the Barclay brothers.
The true embarrassment of Hardy’s interview is that we are meant to feel sorry for him (“To see this ‘thumper’ (his word) of a man crumble in front of me is deeply saddening.”) and to take his account of the events at GB News as gospel.
As I’ve written previously, Neil’s problem with GB News’ output was not content but tone; in the run-up to the launch he roared about his plans for segments called Wokewatch and Mediawatch, and implied that the rest of the British media was lily-livered and left-wing, soon to be crushed by the giant’s foot of GB News, the scourge of the “wokerati”.
Hardy’s piece offers more evidence for the ‘tone rather than content’ theory. Neil complains at length about the technical issues that bedevilled the channel in its opening weeks — gremlins that still pop up with hilarious frequency even now — and is angry that his professional reputation was being ruined by “amateurs”.
But the broadcasting reputation that Neil gained during his time at the BBC was on the back of legions of producers, researchers, editors, and technicians who worked tirelessly to make him look good. GB News revealed him to be the most pathetic sort of Oz-like figure, the curtain pulled back and the levers connected to nothing.
While Neil’s pride was battered by his association with GB News — a connection he is now trying to furiously retcon — he’s not ashamed. That’s why he jutted his chin like a cockerel when criticised by Nels Abbey on Question Time last week. He could not imagine that anyone would criticise him to his face nor that anyone doing so could be doing anything but ‘abusing’ him.
It beggars belief that Neil, facilitator of so much foulness from The Spectator, has the gall to pretend that he was the moderate voice of reason at GB News. He merely found the channel’s cruelty and spite to be delivered without the polish with which he’s been accustomed. Without the hundreds of years of history behind The Spectator masthead or the central role in national life played by the BBC to support him, he was the Norman Desmond of news: “I am big – it's the channels that got small.”
The most dread line in the piece is “Andrew now says he’d be quite happy not to see a TV studio this side of Christmas.” which increases the fear that Neil will be back on television in 2022. That may be at the BBC, which already welcomed him back to Question Time and has a Director-General in Tim Davie who is desperate to appease the right at all costs.
We now move from one relic of Thatcherism to another: former Tory MP turned Times columnist Matthew Parris. Seen as a kind of ‘cuddly’ columnist who centrists can mutter “makes a lot of sense”, Parris is actually deeply reactionary — a requirement for keeping a long-term berth in The Times comment section — with some of his recent greatest shits including the suggestion that GRT people should be stripped of their ethnic minority status, and a number of columns advocating eugenics, and a defence of Prince Andrew.
His column in today’s Times puts forward such an embarrassingly bad faith argument (The state shouldn’t be fixing all life’s glitches) that I suspect he penned it while wearing a full face of clown paint. Perhaps there’s an egg in the archives of the Clown Museum with his byline picture intricately painted onto it.
After an equally ludicrous intro line (“Tories have forgotten how to push back against demands to sort everything from fuel queues to Christmas lunch planning…”), Parris writes:
Have you queued for fuel yet this weekend? Are you panic-buying Fanta Orange? Did you know that if we can’t get carbon dioxide to the slaughterhouses then pork and poultry may be temporarily off the menu, but lamb and beef won’t? And do you think it’s up to the government to guarantee your chicken dinner today, your leisure-motoring this weekend and the astonishingly cheap gas prices you pay to slip off the jersey and heat every room in your home through the coming winter?
Yes, since the Tories are in power, this former Tory MP is arguing that it’s downright ridiculous for the public to expect the government to deal with an energy crisis and to act to prevent food shortages. That’s not what governments are for! They’re there to award contracts to their friends, give peerages to newspaper columnists, and sell off the silverware.
Parris writes of the world that he and most Times readers live in, one where Britain has…
… the highest rates of car ownership in the world, the widest consumer choice in our supermarkets, and the need to spend less of our income on food than almost anywhere in the world…
… and rails about the idea that government should concern itself with shortages and energy crises at all:
Is it now the government’s business to smooth [shortages] out for us?
This is a picture painted without space for the growth in food banks, the rise in zero-hours contracts and other precarious working conditions, and most glaring of all the huge percentage of people’s incomes gobbled up by housing costs.
Following in the footsteps of other similarly deranged columnists like The Daily Telegraph’s Allister Heath, Parris wants his readers to believe that despite a right-wing government attempting to fill every possible public appointment with right-wing figures, Britain is actually falling to the Marxists with every passing moment. He continues:
The 2020s are turning into the decade when the centre in British politics moved stealthily, steadily to the left. Our chameleon Conservative Party is staying in power by changing its colours. Blue has taken on a pinkish edge and it’s getting pinker by the week. The knee-jerk response to every problem is becoming “What’s the government going to do about it?” and the Tories’ knee-jerk answer is becoming “We’re working on it. See it, say it, we’ll sort it.”
Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party is a right-wing populist beast but it doesn’t serve Parris’ arguments to admit that. Instead, he rants about people worrying about shortages at Christmas (“Shall we starve if there’s no turkey? Do mince pies contain essential nutrients unavailable from other food sources?”) and splutters about the petrol shortages of his youth in ‘Rhodesia’.
Like Judith Woods in The Daily Telegraph earlier this week, who argued that our response to energy prices soaring should be to pop on a jumper and think about how shit it used to be, Parris argues for a kind of noxious nostalgia, a return to bleakness as a national improvement exercise.
Of course, it won’t be Parris or his pals unable to afford their energy bills, nor will they be the ones who can’t get the food they want. His fellow Times columnist Janice Turner joked earlier this week about feeling like “a Soviet housewife” when she couldn’t get her favourite kind of sardines but it will not be The Times column penning demographic who will struggle this winter. They, like the upper classes getting their treats under the counter during rationing, will find ways of doing just fine.
In his autobiography Chance Witness, Parris writes of being asked to become The Times parliamentary sketchwriter, aged 40 and with “just a thin-portfolio of published work”, having “never met with conspicuous success in any job I’d done.” He became an MP at 30 and was out of that job by aged 37. It requires an incredible imperviousness to shame and embarrassment to have such certain (and stupid) opinions as a columnist while admitting your ineptitude at every other job you’ve ever had and the ease with which you moved through them.
Elsewhere in the past day’s roll-call of media embarrassment — putting aside the ongoing and almost Turner Prize-worthy performance art of Robert Peston’s career, Laura Kuenssberg’s ventriloquism act for the government, and Harry Cole’s ongoing cuckold fetish coverage of Boris Johnson — there are three more examples I want to touch on quickly:
One: “… a combination of Barbara Castle and Nicole Kidman…”
Though written by two women — Rachel Sylvester and Alice Thompson — The Times’ profile of Angela Rayner commits all the cardinal sins of articles about prominent women. It mentions her children in the first section, boils her down to “ballsy, confident and outspoken” (how often are male politicians described like that) and focuses on her clothes and her tattoo before it gets near her ideas:
Angela Rayner is one of the most powerful women at Westminster, the deputy leader of the Labour Party and shadow secretary of state of the future of work and shadow first secretary, who has been elected three times to Parliament by her constituents in Ashton-under-Lyne. She has a reputation for being ballsy, confident and outspoken – a “fiery, ginger” northerner, as she likes to say… With three children and a granddaughter who earned her the nickname “Grangela” among her followers on Twitter, she seems to have it all.
When we meet, she looks poised and in control, a combination of Barbara Castle and Nicole Kidman in a neat black dress and immaculate white jacket. A red rose tattoo is showing through her fishnet tights…
Throughout the piece, it writes in a weirdly fetishing way about poverty and her upbringing as if writing about a northern woman who didn’t do PPE is the equivalent of observing the behaviour of some rare beast in the depths of the jungle. There is a whole dissertation to be written about the use of quote marks around the word “nan” in the following paragraph…
The children had baths once a week, on Sundays, when they visited their grandmother. Rayner’s “nan” bought her a pair of black steel-capped shoes because “they’d last longer”, which attracted more teasing. “This is why I’ve got an obsession with shoes and my sister’s got an obsession with handbags, because we had nothing.” Rayner has lost count of how many pairs of shoes she has. “The good thing about being a politician is I’ve got two offices, so I can just shove things everywhere and it’s an excuse to buy more.”
… while I don’t have the time and space to unpick the thousands of ways I hate this section:
In some ways, Rayner’s background could not be more different from that of Boris Johnson, who went to Eton. But the prime minister also suffered emotional deprivation as a child and his late mother too suffered from mental health problems. “There are some issues that are not class-based,” she says. “If you’re at boarding school, that could be even worse than a child who has poverty but lots of love and affection from their parents.”
One of these things is not like the other.
Two: The Sun’s A to Z of Woke
An insane melange of terms it doesn’t understand, is presenting in total bad faith, or has based upon a fringe story that it’s taken out of context, The Sun’s A to Z of Woke is the apex of the British media’s campaign to ensure ‘woke’ has no meaning beyond: “Things we don’t like and wish to mock”.
If embarrassment was radiation, you’d be reaching Chernobyl levels of exposure by the time you reached the entry for R:
R is for Richard. Spotted Dick, a favourite pudding for generations, became the rather more prudish Spotted Richard at Flintshire County Council’s canteen in 2009.
So, that’s a story from 12 years ago, which was actually about a few canteen staff briefly changing the name of the dessert because one customer was being annoying, used an example of “PC gone mad”. The name change was swiftly reversed but not before unhinged coverage from papers, including The Sun.
The council’s chief executive, Colin Everett, told the BBC at the time:
Although the majority have seen the humorous side of the story, the impression given in the media that the council might have been 'politically correct' has led to some derision and, sadly, to a number of abusive letters being sent in from across the country.
Three: “Please watch another TV show…”
Reporting on the process to select the next Chief of the Defence Staff, Sky News’ Security & Defence Editor, Deborah Haynes, dragged Game of Thrones and James Bond into the story, with a piece headlined:
The entire framing of the piece is ludicrous, but this paragraph, in particular, pushed the embarrassment levels beyond the safe recommended daily dose:
In addition, Mr Johnson apparently appreciated an announcement by the navy on Thursday to make James Bond actor Daniel Craig an honorary commander - like the on-screen spy.
"The PM absolutely adored that," one defence source said.
Perhaps Admiral Sir Tony Radakin could really nail his application by getting the Prime Minister a new plastic warship to play with in the bath.
A lot more shame and embarrassment in the British media would do it a great deal of good, but being able to fall on your face and pretend it’s a new move your personal trainer taught you is a must to succeed in modern journalism. When there are ‘giants’ like Andrew Neil showing it’s totally fine to make an arse of yourself for decades, why would anyone do any different?
According to certain papers reading the latest Ofcom research into ‘offensive’ terms, this word is “banned”.
Who later successfully defended Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books against Holocaust denier David Irving’s libel suit.