"Can't I have oranges like everybody else?" Writing studs-up commentary in a world of diving columnists...
The British media is forever being awarded late goals by bent referees.
In his post-match analysis after Saturday’s Manchester derby — a 2-0 shellacking for United by City — Roy Keane said:
There was one yellow card for Man Utd today — I think it was for Ronaldo — and I’m not saying go out and get 7 or 8 yellow cards, that doesn’t win you football matches, but it is a derby game, you have to show your quality but you do have to show some sort of emotion in the game.
Go and close somebody down! I’ve often had where I’ve not been at the races in a game where I go, “Do you know what? What I might do is… I might smash into somebody, just to make me feel better.” And sometimes it gets a reaction from the other players or the fans…
Today’s edition is a “smash into somebody” instalment. Perhaps it will get a reaction from the other players.
With British politics and political journalism currently indulging in a revival of that classic early ‘90s plotline “sleaze” — a silly word with a weightier alternative: “corruption” — questions about rules, who sets them, how they are applied and who they apply to are getting a lot of attention.
On Twitter, Sky News deputy political editor Sam Coates asked:
How do you “ban second jobs” for MPs when being a minister is a “second job” on top of being an MP. So any crackdown would be about what forms of extracurricular work permitted Is anything funded by government/state OK? Anything above a certain £? Certain industries? Books?
It’s like he believes “context” is just slang for WhatsApp message from a Tory source. As the Irish Examiner’s Political Correspondent, Paul Horsford, joked:
If an MP drives his child to school, is he not then a taxi man!?’
Coates says the point of his thread was “not to argue one way or another about reform” but “to point out that simple sounding solutions aren’t necessarily simple”. But as with Matthew Syed’s “we all lie to ourselves” column yesterday, it serves to further muddy the waters in favour of politicians.
Being a minister is not “a second job”, it’s an extension of responsibilities within an existing role. Similarly writing a book — whether fact or fiction — or having a professional role such as doctor or barrister is not a means of quietly peddling influence like opaque ‘consultancy’ roles are.
It doesn’t surprise me that some journalists pretend to be as confused by the concept of “conflict of interest” as the politicians they write about. The British media is absolutely riven with conflicts of interest where editors, reporters, and columnists ‘forget’ to mention relationships of all kinds.
I’ve used the example often but the fact Spectator political editor and Times columnist James Forsyth is employed to write about the government which employs his wife and in which his best friend serves as chancellor, but never includes declarations of those conflicts in his articles, remains stunning.
Coates’ “I’m just asking questions!” faux-naivety comes from a culture in which access and social conviviality means that the interests of the media class and the political class are so intertwined that they are functionally identical. The story gets diluted because hacks feel greater sympathy for politicians than they do for their readers and viewers, mere “civilians”.
In a long interaction yesterday, Lord Finkelstein — Times columnist and Tory member of the House of Lords — told me that this newsletter is simply the product of me “waiting for other people’s columns to come out and saying how bad they are instead”. He went on, after deigning to grant that these critiques have “moderate value”, to say that I “[watch] other people have ideas and create things and then say they are rubbish.”
The simple retort would be that they should simply write fewer terrible columns but his sea-lioning1 is a good example of how the rules of British media work. When a columnist with the imprimateur of one of the newspaper proprietors says something it is to be taken seriously and considered as part of the cut and thrust of public debate, no matter how cruel, crass, or credulous. But anyone else must abide by inconsistently applied ‘civility’ standards.
If you criticise columnists and the wider media — and I admittedly do it with an unusual relentlessness — you must be jealous and desperate to be where they are. It’s the same line of argument that produces so many columns about the horrors of social media (see Sonia Sodha’s Social media fuels narcissists’ worst desires, making reasoned debate near impossible in yesterday’s Observer) which can be boiled down to “it was better when the plebs had to write letters that we could disregard or disparage at our leisure”.)
Despite writing for Byline Times, Perspective magazine and a number of other outlets, I’ve essentially been so throughly expelled — or self-excluded — from the mainstream British media at this point that I’m not even welcome at the specialist Hack Referral Unit where recalcitrant journalists are taught not to throw things and to show Times columnists due deference.
Returning to the footballing analogy with Boris Johnson-style clumsiness, columnists are happy to deliver crunching challenges but will take a dramatic dive the second they’re touched by even a glancing criticism. The Daily Mail gathers its petticoats at the thought of swearing or televised sex — albeit with a luxurious spread of screenshots — but will happily headline a story about the death of a man in a shark attack with All they found were his goggles…
And, in an industry choked by nepotism, newspapers still have the gall to run “sins of the father”-style stories, like today’s Daily Telegraph story on the The Crown casting Natascha McElhone (Stepdaughter of IRA supporter cast as The Crown’s Countess Mountbatten) and The Daily Mail with its “hurrah for the blackshirts!” history commissioning Stephen Pollard to moralise about Oxford colleges taking money from the Moseley foundation (Disgrace and hypocrisy of my alma mater).
Add to that the spectacle of former Independent editor Amol Rajan interviewing former Sun editor David Yelland on this morning’s Today programme about the morality of reporters approaching survivors and the bereaved after horrific incidents and I’m not really at home to the notion that I’m a bigger problem.
Thank you for indulging me by reading today’s edition and for reading the newsletter generally. I’m especially thankful for the paid subscribers who help me keep things on the road. I’ll be back with a special paid subscriber-only recommendations edition later and tomorrow with a normal instalment.
And the headline? It comes from a joke that my mum once told at a job interview2:
A football manager walks into the changing room for the pre-match. He turns to a new player and says, “I’m going to put you on for the first half then pull you off at half time.”
The player replies: “Can’t I just have oranges like everyone else?”3
Pursuing people with persistent requests for evidence or repeated questions, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity. It may take the form of "incessant, bad-faith invitations to engage in debate".
They didn’t hire her.
It turns out this is probably from an anecdote about Rodney Marsh talking back to Alf Ramsay, an incident that he believed led to him never being picked for England again.