Britain’s most booming industry? The consent manufacturers: Patel tricks The Observer, Royals’ “Vanishing Andy” strategy, and why *you’re* to blame for everything…
Consent manufacturing machines go, “brrrrr!”
Previously: Hate male: Matthew Parris pretends to be baffled by the anger at his ‘charming’ Prince Andrew anecdote…
In today’s Sunday Times, the latest slab of fan fiction loosely based on a true story from the paper’s recently ‘promoted’ Chief Political Commentator Tim Shipman1 is illustrated with a red flag onto which the heads of Engels, Lenin, Stalin and… uh… Boris Johnson are superimposed.
Yesterday’s newsletter was about how the bulk of the British media, particularly its columnists, exists in an alternate universe that bears little relationship to the one you or I live in. But Shipman’s piece — “Is ‘Red Tory’ Johnsonism marching to a landslide or will it crash into its own contradictions?” — with its illustration that places Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson cheek by not-inconsiderable jowl with Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin is a special kind of unhinged.
The underlying implication is that Johnson’s hard-right government — which commentators like The Daily Telegraph’s Camilla Tominey are howling is insufficiently “nasty” — is equivalent to the Soviet state because it was forced into spending huge amounts of public money during the pandemic with much of that money flowing to its families, donors, and other assorted cronies.
This is the inevitable next step from the 2019 Labour Party manifesto policy of ensuring everyone had access to an internet connection being described by right-wing newspapers and BBC onscreen captions alike as “broadband communism”. Anything beyond Darwinian cruelty is now “woke nonsense”.
To ensure that the Overton Window2 — already remodelled and narrowed so much that it resembles a cat-flap — can never be shifted left again, even an administration led by Boris Johnson and delivered by a cabinet of libertarian horrors must be framed as suspiciously red when it does even the barest of the bare minimum in terms of state assistance.
Shipman’s piece begins with Johnson quoted saying the quiet part loudly:
A small part of Boris Johnson still does not quite believe his luck. When he was wheeled into a drinks reception on Monday night at the Conservative Party conference, the prime minister held up his hands and declared: “It all seems to be worryingly hitch-free ... we will need to concoct some sort of diversion or row.”
Many a word spoken in jest… Johnson has previously been too loose-lipped about his party’s love of dead cats and live culture war distractions. In 2013, in an aside in a Telegraph column about bankers’ bonuses, he explained Lynton Crosby’s advice on “dead catting”:
"There is one thing that is absolutely certain about throwing a dead cat on the dining room table – and I don’t mean that people will be outraged, alarmed, disgusted. That is true, but irrelevant. The key point, says my Australian friend, is that everyone will shout, ‘Jeez, mate, there’s a dead cat on the table!’ In other words, they will be talking about the dead cat – the thing you want them to talk about – and they will not be talking about the issue that has been causing you so much grief."
Currently, the Prime Minister — recently described as “in world king mode” — doesn’t feel the need to gun down any metaphorical felines. He’s off on holiday in Marbella, assured of his invincibility after Tory Party Conference and the reshuffle before it — no Raabs before Marbs? — and assuming polls that suggest the public blames the media more than him for the current crises will continue even as the Christmas tabloids assure us he will ‘save’ creeps closer.
But Shipman’s “Red Tory” colour piece is another shot across the bows from the Murdoch press. The point is to worry Conservative backbenchers and demand red — no pun intended — meat from Johnson in return for The Times, Sunday Times and Sun’s support. Shipman follows Johnson’s lead in saying the quiet bit out loud in a subsequent paragraph that reads:
In politics they talk about the “Overton window”, the range of policies acceptable to mainstream public opinion, moving to the left or right. Last week Johnson stretched it in both directions, offering a cocktail not previously mixed by Conservative leaders. He has always, as Walt Whitman put it, “contained multitudes”, now his party must too.
When he says “acceptable to mainstream public opinion”, he’s pretending that the media doesn’t play a significant role in shaping what that opinion looks like, and that the main opinion that matters in shaping The Sunday Times’ editorial line belongs to the only powerful Keith in British politics — Keith Rupert Murdoch.
According to Politico’s London Playbook — edited by ex-Guido stooge and reputed godfather to Boris and Carrie Johnson’s son Wilfred, Alex Wickham — Shipman has been given the newly created role of Chief Political Commentator because “bosses [are] eager to push more of his authoritative long-read colour pieces that are a hit with subscribers and dominate Westminster chatter each weekend”. I wonder if Shipman dictated that line down the phone to Wickham or let him freestyle it.
The “colour” of this week’s Shipman piece may be red but the truth is that it’s the same old gossip dragged up as analysis as he always delivers. That’s why we’re treated to a Heat magazine-style bit of snidery about Johnson’s weight…
The prime minister still describes himself as a free marketeer but the former scourge of the nanny state wants the government to do more to bully people into lifestyle changes that will prevent illness. “You have got to tell people if people are too fat,” he urges. Johnson, who slimmed down after his stay in intensive care last year, has put some weight back on, and in moments of reflection he has been known to say: “We are eating our feelings.”
… and the ludicrous revelation that:
Johnson’s obesity guilt may explain why plans for him to walk on stage for his speech to Ciara’s Level Up were shelved. Alongside the admonishment “Level up, level up, level up, level up, level up”, which might have been written for the prime minister, the lyrics also include: “You know you want this yummy, yummy all in your tummy.”
I apologise if the vision of Shipman (or, even worse, Johnson) singing about “this yummy yummy” has put you off your food.
While Shipman is writing one kind of fan fiction, over at The Mail on Sunday a different kind of fantasy is being peddled on the front page with a headline that screams Home Working Left Britons At Taliban’s Mercy and a They Live-style white on red logo demanding “Get Back To The Office”. That the story right next to it is an “exclusive” on “Boris and Carrie [flying] off for [a] family holiday on the Costa del Sol” really enhances the “are you fucking kidding me?” effect.
The MoS claims that “civil servants away from their desks could not read vital documents about UK citizens trying to flee the murderous regime, hampering their escape” and attributes the claims to “senior Cabinet Ministers”, who presumably expect us to suffer from very specific amnesia about Dominic Raab’s sunlounger diplomacy and trouble with the sea being closed.
Inside the paper, Iain Duncan Smith — seemingly fully recovered from being menaced with traffic cones — gets a full page to howl In the 1940s they kept coming to the office — even when Hitler’s bombs were raining down, evoking World War II when the real war he’s interested in is the government’s one on civil servants, recently intensified by Oliver Dowden’s raid on the Peloton factory.
Duncan Smith castigates others for not being “Brains of Britain” while comparing the pre-internet office workers of the 1940s — many of whom were moved out of London during the Blitz — and the threat of night bombing with a viral pandemic. His farcical argument is combined with stories about put-upon cafe owners denied business by home-working civil servants (no word on the cafes closer to those homes) and a claim that working-from-home will lead to “a mental health time bomb”.
A few pages later the paper’s City Columnist, Hamish McRae, expands the blame game to include… all of us, really, writing We can ALL start to turn Britain into a land of high wages — by parking more carefully and complaining less often. It’s a bold ask from The Mail on Sunday for people to complain less since complaining about things is practically a religion to them and Mail columnists are the veritable priesthood of grumblers.
The paper also finds space for the results of a ginned-up survey from… let me check my notes… “golf driving range firm Topgolf” that claims young people are ruining queuing (“Barging in, Britain’s queue-jump millennials”3). As is usually the case, it also doesn’t understand who millennials are, using the word as it does “woke” to simply mean “people we don’t like” and writing…
… those aged between 18 and 34, are also more likely to respond aggressively when someone jumps the queue ahead of them.
… despite the millennial generation being generally defined as those born between 1981 and 1996 (so the youngest millennials are 25) and the survey being conducted among just 2,000 people.
Today’s second major strand of fan fiction comes from the only family in Britain able to award their own gaslight factory a royal warrant — the Windsors. In a one-two punch of briefing to The Sun on Sunday and The Sunday Times — two cheeks of the same arse — the Royals want it to be known that Prince Andrew will never return to public duties. Not because of what, for legal reasons, I will describe as his “nonce adjacent behaviour” but because it’s bad for the brand.
The Sun’s headline reads Exclusive: Royal Bombshell — No Way Back while The Sunday Times goes with Met officers quiz Andrew’s sex accuser4 on the front page while dedicating a feature in its magazine — “There’s no way he’s ever coming back” — to repeating the palace’s lines so thoroughly that I can picture royal lackeys dictating the punctuation.
The aim of these pieces could not be more transparent. After it was recently reported that the Queen is bankrolling Andrew’s legal cases and his lifestyle, “the firm” needs to make it clear that the creepy uncle is being dealt with and that Charles — with his own cash for access scandal — and William (endlessly engaged in a PR campaign to prove he’s superior to his younger sibling) are detached from the antics of the future orange jumpsuit wearer.
It is no coincidence that The Sun and Sunday Times have the same story with the same lines on the same day. It’s a move by Charles and William’s press operations to cover both ends of the newspaper market and place a cordon sanitaire around the sweat-drenched Duke of York, putting an end to how own briefing campaign of recent months that suggested he might return to “public duties” (golfing and glad-handing despots) by next year’s Platinum Jubilee.
The same kind of self-serving briefing is evident in The Observer’s front-page story about Priti Patel (“Patel’s fury as PM blocks harassment law”) which comes from “senior Home Office sources” and has clearly been okayed by the Home Secretary herself. The aim is to shift the narrative around Patel — who okayed Met Commissioner Cressida Dick continuing in her role for another two years — and position her as a champion of women.
The choice to brief to The Observer makes sense too; while The Sunday Times and Daily Telegraph are onboard with the Boris Johnson project, The Observer is always going to snaffled up a story about arguments between the Prime Minister and his Home Secretary even if the effect is to launder a line that Priti Patel wants out in the world. Meanwhile, Patel can plead ignorance to the Prime Minister because why would she brief those ‘pinkos’ at The Observer?
The Home Office sources will have also predicted — correctly — that The Observer’s story would be quickly followed up by MailOnline.
As ridiculous as Shipman’s “Red Tory” read on Johnson and the flag illustration putting him in the lineage of Lenin and Stalin might be there is a hangover from Soviet times that is useful in reading the British press. Kremlinology — the study of tiny choices in public presentations and state publications like Pravda — was far from fool-proof (the German term Kreml-Astrologie [Kremlin Astrology] more honestly acknowledged that) but it has value when you look at British media.
By looking at what is briefed in where and comparing the briefings received by one paper with another, you can triangulate your way towards a more realistic vision of what’s going on than anyone paper will ever give you. Relying on a single British newspaper, however, is like consulting a snowglobe to predict what the weather will be like outside your window.
Caroline Wheeler has ascended from Deputy Political Editor to become Political Editor of The Sunday Times, taking the role previously held by ‘Shippers’.
American policy analyst Joseph P. Overton’s concept that an idea's political viability depends mainly on whether it falls within a range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time, rather than on politicians' individual preferences.
Incidentally, the survey was reported by other outlets a week ago and The Mail on Sunday has picked it up as a space-filler.
It’s a poorly written headline that implies — at best clumsily — that it’s Virginia Giuffre under suspicion rather than Prince Andrew.