Cummings, goings, and Rashford decisions: The Spectator is a cesspit and that's no scoop
Allegations about a Marcus Rashford article that mysteriously went awol ring true but a look at the magazine's archives is enough to show its true colours.
There was a brief but justified social media storm on July 20th when Marcus Rashford tweeted to preempt a forthcoming Spectator article.
The Manchester United player and food poverty campaigner wrote:
Just heard The Spectator are planning to run a story on me tomorrow about how I have benefitted commercially in the last 18 months… To clarify, I don’t need to partner with brands. I partner because I want to progress the work I do off the pitch and most of any fee I would receive contributes to that.
Last summer, 1.3 million children had access to food support. Through my relationship with Burberry, children have a safe place to be after school where they will be fed, following the November investment, vulnerable children have safe places to go this summer holiday, and due to my relationship with Macmillan 80,000 children now have a book to call their own.
Do I have a larger commercial appeal following the u-turns? I’m sure. But I’m also a Manchester United and England international footballer. Why has there always got to be a motive? Why can’t we just do the right thing?
PS. I actually enjoy reading bits from The Spectator now and again but this is just a non-starter…
And then — compared with the sound and fury of support for Rashford and rage about The Spectator seemingly gunning for a young man who is admired across the country and indeed the world — silence from the magazine and its editor, haunted Victorian vaudeville dummy, Fraser Nelson.
The Rashford article never appeared. The story disappeared until yesterday when a new Substack account appeared with a piece that claimed The Spectator had been trolled to the point of almost publishing a series of fabricated claims about the player.
The author of that piece, Danielle Grufferty, also seems to be the person behind the painfully unfunny ‘satire’ account @corbynsuperfan1, though an Independent article from 2017 bylined to her is confusingly written.
The headline and lede read…
People were genuinely outraged in 2016 by tweets from @CorbynSuperFan, taking completely seriously a tweet that read: 'In the 1980’s, only two men stood up to bring an end to apartheid in South Africa. One was Nelson Mandela, the other was Jeremy Corbyn'
… but a paragraph later in the piece refers to the account as if it was simply one she enjoyed retweeting:
For every Twitter account spreading post-truth nonsense, there are a rising number of brilliant parodies such as @CorbynSuperFan, where an attempt at satire sometimes proves to be rather close to the bone.
These accounts would be nothing if it wasn’t for people “not getting it”. I’ve been having far too much fun of late retweeting the “Blairite Scale”, as well as poems about Richard Burgon. And then there’s this classic: “In the 1980’s, only two men stood up to bring an end to apartheid in South Africa. One was Nelson Mandela, the other was Jeremy Corbyn.” Cue the outrage.
Either way, a YouTube video in which she ‘interviews’ CorbynSuperFan further establishes her connection to the account:
In her Substack post, Grufferty says she decided to troll The Spectator after it published an article by someone using the handle Wokeyleaks, who the magazine described as “a disillusioned social-justice warrior from within the entertainment industry.”
She writes — maintaining the ‘mystery’ around who Wokeyleaks was/is — that:
I decided to amuse myself by sending them some fake stories. Surely they wouldn’t take this seriously, I mused, as I hammered out frankly ludicrous claims about the great and the good; and thought little more of it.
A few weeks later I was somewhat surprised to receive a reply.
The Wokeyleaks writer “Edward Snowflake they/them” (hahaha do you get it, very witty, lol) wanted to know more about the “gossip” I had. Out of all the bizarre stories I’d claimed to have, the one that interested them related to a certain Marcus Rashford and the talent agency he worked with at the time, Roc Nation.
There is, in fact, no mystery about who’s behind Wokeyleaks. Heydon Prowse2, a former child actor who played Colin Craven in 1993’s The Secret Garden and made a name for himself as an adult with a series of pranks on politicians, unmasked himself as “Edward Snowflake” in June to widespread indifference.
In that article, Prowse promised that The Spectator was preparing to publish more Wokeyleaks scoops (following on from vague claims about ‘wokery’ at secret intelligence agencies and the arms manufacturer Northrup Grumman, and some crushingly obvious stuff about hypocrisy at tech companies). It seems Prowse hoped the Rashford ‘scoop’ would be next.
Grufferty says she fed The Spectator a series of lies about Rashford, claiming that his food poverty campaign was all the idea of “wealthy white liberals” at Roc Nation and that his mother was a member of the Communist Party. She then quotes an email, presumably from Prowse, that reads:
I'm so sorry this is taking so long to make happen. We've been waiting for Fraser [Nelson, Spectator Editor] to read and approve. He finally has today and suddenly he's extremely excited. I don't think he had any idea. Now he thinks they might make it a cover and says it might be the best story Spec have or will run all year! Great news, though frustrating it's taken him so long! It also means that we have to go back and double check every thing [sic] with the lawyers. We're pencilling next week. Spec doesn't really do investigative stuff so this is all a bit new to them. So If I have any further questions from Fraser, am I ok to ping them over this week?
Really excited. I think it will be a real splash. You should be proud.
As a long term observer of The Spectator’s output and the previous form of Fraser Nelson, his deputy Freddy Gray, and the publication’s chairman GBeebies big stinking cheese Andrew Neil, the email has the ring of truth.
Grufferty’s story goes on (and on) with her suggesting that The Spectator kept asking for more and that she kept giving it to them. Finally, she claims the wheels came off when Rashford tweeted about what The Spectator was up to:
So you know how it is. One minute, you’re getting ready for bed, the next you’re in a conference call with Fraser Nelson and Freddy Gray of The Spectator. I wondered, did Fraser and Freddy always work this late or had Rashford’s tweets panicked them so much they couldn’t sleep?
… I could go into more detail on the call itself, how the emails I had sent were described as “proof”; how they were doing somewhat of a hatchet job of rewriting the article during the call, but I think the following exchange speaks for itself:
“But look if you were actually a wind-up, I think we would have worked it out by now” - Fraser Nelson
“If you are, hats off to you!” - Freddy Gray
Again, knowing just what a combination of credulous and cruel Nelson and Gray are, this exchange feels believable.
The Substack piece stops there. Grufferty claims a further draft of the article was sent to her and quotes from it but nothing has appeared. It won’t now she has told her story. And that’s a good thing, not because The Spectator should be protected from public humiliation but because Marcus Rashford has had to deal with enough shit already.
Grufferty herself links to multiple Spectator pieces that targeted Rashford and other football players…
The morality of free school meals, Rod Liddle, 31 October 2020
Why I’m ducking the Rashford debate, Matthew Parris, 31 October 2020
Do we really need a football hate crime police officer? Tom Goodenough3,
1 February 2021.Before Rashford: sports stars who got political, Mark Mason, 5 February 2021
The real reasons children are going hungry, Rod Liddle, 6 March 2021
Britain is a tolerant country and a few football racists don’t change that, Linden Kemkaran, 15 July 2021
The Marcus Rashford mural – an anatomy of a moral panic, Steerpike,
16 July 2021
… and yet she thought it was ‘necessary to prove that the magazine — which publishes Taki (author of a column in praise of the Wehrmacht) — is racist by making up lies.
The ‘sting’ — poorly executed and hubristically recounted — has proved nothing. It caused Marcus Rashford more worry and gives The Spectator the chance to claim that it was the victim of a hoax which it stopped at the last moment.
Grufferty made her ‘revelations’ in the same week that The Spectator carried an interview with Dominic Cummings whose wife is the magazine’s commissioning editor and which seems to have been commissioned by her. Lynn Barber — once known as the Demon Barber of Fleet Street but seemingly soft as a sheep in her encounter with Cummings — writes:
I’ve been waiting over a year to meet Dominic Cummings. Any time Mary Wakefield asked me to interview someone for The Spectator, I said: ‘I’d rather interview your husband.’ And she promised he would do it, one day. I began to lose faith, but at last, the day dawns. On the way to see him I run into Mary and their son Ceddy outside their home in north London and she takes me to the kitchen to meet Dom. He is friendly, hospitable, takes me to sit in the garden to talk, and gently shoos Ceddy indoors.
It could not be more chummy. But it also includes some interesting claims; Cummings saying Johnson half-heartedly tried to buy him off with a knighthood and Barber suggesting that the former special advisor is now making more money from Substack than he did in Number 10.
In the comments below the chat — as big a sign that the British establishment is just one horrible dinner party as you can get — readers ask: “Where’s the Rashford expose?” They’ll be waiting a long time. Just as the rest of us will have a long wait before Fraser Nelson and the gang acknowledge Grufferty’s claims.
That’s The Spectator’s usual strategy when faced with something it would rather not talk about: Silence. It just waits for things to die down and carries on regardless. That’s why Wakefield’s partial account of her family’s experience with Coronavirus — which makes no mention of the Barnard Castle flit — remains in The Spectator archive without updates or explanations.
It’s also why Nelson’s reply to complaints about repeated racist statements published in his magazine’s pages from Taki4, Rod Liddle and others is the full Ronan Keating. He believes he says it best when he says nothing at all, even as he files a Friday column for The Daily Telegraph5 every week and enjoys frequent appearances on the airwaves.
We didn’t need Grufferty’s self-aggrandising stunt to prove that The Spectator is staffed in large part by insidious race-baiters or that Fraser Nelson’s ‘refined’ Scottish accent provides cover for a nasty mind; the magazine’s archives and current output are there for all to see.
Andrew Neil was asked on Twitter back in July about Boris Johnson’s qualities when he was Spectator editor. Neil, who booted Johnson out in favour of a different flavour of potato (then-Sunday Telegraph deputy editor Matthew d'Ancona), wrote:
Mr Johnson was an interesting, eclectic editor for this time. Though most of the heavy lifting was done by his deputy. He didn’t last very long with me as his boss. And he was totally unsuited to take The Spectator into the digital age. Fraser Nelson has done that magnificently.
Yes, Nelson has a magnificent grasp of how hyperbole and hate travel much further online than facts and fair-dealing. He has a trollface for Twitter and a thin smile to plaster on when he sat on Andrew Marr’s BBC sofa.
In seeking to ‘prove’ The Spectator’s tendencies and get attention for herself, Grufferty only succeeded in bringing more abuse to Marcus Rashford’s door and offering Fraser Nelson a reason to claim that he and his publication are the victims. That faint sound you can hear is a slow clap.
The account has just 1,972 followers and petered out in late 2020. Credit to @Wariotifo for making the connection.
Though I’m not convinced that ‘Heydon Prowse’ isn’t a Douglas Adams parody that has leaked into our dimension.
Reverse nominative determinism at work there.
Though in 2013 Nelson defended a column in which Taki defended the fascist Golden Dawn Party by commenting mildly that “Our readers like diversity and well-written pieces that they disagree with. We have no party line.”
This week’s is a predictable trudge through the vaccine passports debate.