Cyanide Sunday: A run through today's columns reveals the British media at its most deranged
Featuring: Simon Heffer demanding commissars, Daniel Hannan's road hatred, India Knight being really weird about Emma Raducanu and the Nick Cohen column on Sally Rooney that absolutely no one wanted.
You’d think writing about the British media on a daily basis would inure me to its persistent madness but there is no natural immunity or inoculation known to science that can protect against the mix of mediocrity and malice pumped out by the columnist class. Sundays — when the takes have had time to marinate for a whole week — are often the most deranged days.
I snapped awake at 4.30 am this morning, my diseased brain hungry for the rotten fruit of the Sunday paper opinion pages. So today’s edition is a grab bag from that grotesquerie, a smörgåsbord of stupidity through which we might get a renewed sense of just what’s wrong with the British media.
Let’s begin with Simon Heffer — Beaker from The Muppets if he were raised by a pair of broody Brownshirts — whose latest column for The Daily Telegraph is a direct demand for the government to install puppet leaders in every cultural and societal institution it can influence. If this were someone on the Left making this argument, Heffer would scream about “commissars” but since it’s his idea, he’s sure it’s just solid, stolid Tory common sense.
Firmly ensconced in the mirror world from whence all Telegraph columnists write — Boris Johnson is still Prime Minister there, he just has an ‘evil’ moustache — Heffer uses Dame Cressida Dick’s contract extension as Met Commissioner, approved and pushed by the scenery-chewing Tory Home Secretary, Priti Patel, to argue that the government is not good enough at placing its own yes men and women in the important jobs.
Floating entirely outside our reality, Heffer writes:
Labour governments have excelled at using patronage to install in public posts people who share their values and prejudices; the Conservatives have proved pitiful at it. Under them, the deputy to the last head of the NHS has succeeded him, to perpetuate his ways when radical reform is vital. The BBC is under the control of leftists, and long has been. The blob has thwarted an attempt to appoint Mr Paul Dacre, who is about as far from a leftist as one can get and still remain at liberty, to lead Ofcom. The present Archbishop of Canterbury, who more or less closed down the Church of England during the pandemic when it was needed most and who struggles to muster a serious opinion on anything, was actually appointed by a Tory prime minister.
The last head of the NHS, Sir Simon Stevens, was friends with Boris Johnson at university and helped him become President of the Oxford Union. At the BBC, which Heffer imagines to be a cell of hardcore Marxist guerillas, the current DG — Tim Davie — was a Conservative Party council candidate, and the chair — Richard Sharp — has advised both Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, donated £400,000 to the Conservative Party, and is a former director of the Centre for Policy Studies, a Tory think-tank co-founded by Margaret Thatcher.
And when Heffer writes that…
The blob has thwarted an attempt to appoint Mr Paul Dacre, who is about as far from a leftist as one can get and still remain at liberty, to lead Ofcom.
… it’s the equivalent of seeing a genuine version of Stewart Lee’s “these days, you get arrested and thrown in jail if you say you’re English” line in the wild.
Heffer is from the “if you say it angrily enough it doesn't actually have to make sense” school of column writing (an institution that is over-subscribed every year) so it’s unsurprising that the conclusion to his column amounts to the kind of blithering idiocy you’d expect from a drunk racist uncle in the latter stages of an uncomfortable wedding reception. He writes:
The Tories must assert a grip on patronage. In the criteria for almost any public appointment the emphasis is on commitment to diversity, outreach and the public sector, with scant regard for achievement in the real world. Thus public bodies end up controlled by those who reject and repudiate conservative values.
The Government is especially negligent in allowing sheer propagandists for anti-conservatism to entrench themselves in higher education, where they rear the next generation of the blob. So many public institutions function so poorly because those who manage them seek to further an ideology rather than to achieve results that benefit the public.
Until this supposedly Conservative Government gets off its knees and uses its power of patronage as its supporters would wish, the decline of those institutions, and our country, will remain precipitate.
I’ll translate what he means into a sentence for each paragraph:
“There are rather too many people who aren’t white getting jobs for my liking and many of them don’t believe the things I do ergo they aren’t qualified, unlike me, an animated bag of ham.”
“The government should use its political power to push its own propaganda in schools — the kind we like — and ensure that our ideology, you know, the good kind, is pursued at all times.”
“I want everyone I don’t agree with censored and sacked, and that’s what free speech really means.”
Elsewhere in The Sunday Telegraph’s super-soaraway sociopath supplement, Daniel Hannan — a man bumped up to become a Baron for services to stupidity — delivers the kind of lukewarm libertarian urine that the paper’s readers lap up with all the alacrity of the Piss Goblin of Berghain1.
Beneath the headline, There is a strong moral case for low taxes. But the Government has lost sight of it, Hannan begins:
The case for lower taxes is not tactical. It is moral. A smaller state makes space for sturdier, more independent and, yes, more virtuous citizens.
When we choose to spend our money on others, we make an ethical choice. When the state does so on our behalf, it infantilises us, leaving us smaller as well as poorer.
Lower taxes also lead, other things being equal, to faster growth and higher living standards. The ethical and economic arguments reinforce one another. Conservatives used to understand that.
Yes, roads, public hospitals, and the fire service are all indications of how the state keeps us as mewling infants clamped onto the grotesque government teat. Obviously, the only sane system would be a pay-as-you-burn fire service (if your house burns down it’s simply the will of the market) and Uber ambulances (“Sorry to hear about your heart attack. We’re currently operating surge pricing.”) racing around on toll roads operated by Serco.
While Hannan screeches at the very government that lifted his talentless carcass into the House of Lords, a minister (for now) from Boris Johnson’s cabinet of horrors, Wurzel Gummage’s management consultant cousin, Oliver Dowden, rocks up in the same section to throw some red meat to the culture war crowd.
Seeing an opportunity to make a splash ahead of the frequently-promised reshuffle — Penny Mordaunt is tipped to snatch the role of Culture Secretary from him — Dowden jumps on this week’s ginned-up story about the Churchill Fellowship charity, ignoring the fact that Churchill’s own family have said it is, and I quote Sir Nicholas Soames here, “absolute bollocks”.
After a lede featuring a line that you’d usually find lurking in the depths of the comment section or any Richard Littlejohn column (“We cannot allow our fantastic philanthropic institutions to become subsumed by wokery…”), Dowden or rather whatever spad was delegated to dash out this doggerel writes:
The British people are a proud nation of givers, with the majority of us reporting that we have donated to charity at some point in the last year. Whether it is to improve our local communities, fund medical research or protect animals and wildlife - we want to do our bit to support others near and far. Charities are part of the rich fabric of our national life. They bring pleasure, purpose and essential services to millions.
In a serious, functioning country, rather than this curséd island, that last sentence would be unthinkable. Charities should not be required to “bring… essential services to millions.” Atlee’s line on charity…
[It] is a cold grey loveless thing. If a rich man wants to help the poor, he should pay his taxes gladly, not dole out money at a whim.
… is overused only because we are fed the kind of emotionally manipulative pap pushed by Dowden in the Telegraph piece. Successive governments — both Tory and Labour — have hollowed out the state and expected charity to sew up the gaping wounds with sutures that the public is obliged to fund.
This is Dowden’s third piece of Telegraph paywalled culture war doggerel this year, after May’s We won’t allow Britain’s history to be cancelled (“I want to take not a Maoist but a “moreist approach” to heritage…”) and July’s GB News-trumpeting Tolerance risks being undermined by a vocal minority. We will not stand by and allow that to happen.
Having got the mewling praise of charities out of the way, Dowden gets to his point: Telegraph readers are afraid of the ‘woke’ emerging from under their beds to force pronouns upon them and shout that Winston Churchill was a chud, and Olly will not stand for it. He continues:
Earlier this week one such charity, the Churchill Fellowship, sparked debate with a controversial rebrand which appeared to airbrush Sir Winston Churchill from its public profile.
The Churchill Fellowship has now stated that it is not seeking to disown the reason that they exist, which is welcome. But I found it quite extraordinary that it got to the position where this clarification was required.
Dowden deliberately ignores the views of the Churchill family (who think the controversy is stupid) and pretends that the “clarification was required” because of some organically occurring public disquiet rather than a series of sensational media stories, beginning with ludicrous Sun front page.
Inspired again by media uproar about yet another statue, he continues:
Just last week the Guy’s and St Thomas’ Foundation overruled legal advice to move a statue of Thomas Guy from its main forecourt. A public consultation had been run on the matter, with statements from the foundation citing Guy’s shares in the South Sea Company, which had a major role in the evils of the slave trade. His role in founding one of the world’s finest hospitals was deemed entirely secondary to this share ownership. Three quarters of those who responded said the statue should remain in place, and yet they announced they were moving it anyway.
The statue of Guy — who made huge profits from shares from the South Sea Company, supplier of 4,800 slaves a year to plantations and transporters of 64,000 slaves between 1715 and 1731, and invested some of that money in founding the hospital — isn’t being boxed up or destroyed, but will simply be moved to a less prominent position on the same site… eventually.
In a statement released on 1 September, Guy’s & St Thomas’ Foundation said:
Information explaining how both men made their wealth, and their connections with the trade of enslaved people, should be made more broadly available through interpretation alongside the statues and online.
… As both statues are listed, most changes will need planning permission. In preparation for this, we have commissioned specialist consultants to lead the development of interpretative materials, intended to accompany each statue and provide accessible histories of the two men, their contributions and their individual connections with the trade of enslaved people. Visitors to the sites will have the chance to explore further materials online.
If Dowden had even remotely been writing in good faith when he contributed his Telegraph op-ed back in May promising “a ‘moreist approach’ to heritage”, he’d have no issue with the foundation’s plans. They’re not hiding the history but simply adding more context to it. But that’s not what this is about.
A news story in yesterday’s Times attempted to blame one of the foundation’s trustees — Dr Danny Sriskandarajah, the chief executive of Oxfam GB — for the decisions and Dowden’s Telegraph piece continues:
This is just another example of a worrying trend in some charities that appear to have been hijacked by a vocal minority seeking to burnish their woke credentials. In so doing they not only distract charities from their core missions but also waste large amounts of time and money.
I’m quite sure this is not what the millions of British people who donate to charities every year had intended their hard earned and thoughtfully donated cash to be spent on… We don’t need [our charities] hunting for divisions in a way that serves neither their benefactors nor the country.
This is a question of which “vocal minorities” the government favours. If the vocal minority is Tory party donors or Telegraph readers (an increasingly minority hobby) they are all too delighted to listen. But if actual minorities want history to be more accurately reflected and not simply kept as a story seen through the myopic lens of a white majority that’s a “distraction” and “hunting for divisions”.
What Dowden and other ministers — spurred on by Boris Johnson and his Spiked/RCP adjacent culture war advisors in Number 10 as well as their media outriders — are engaged in is a counter-revolutionary effort. This is not about protecting viewpoints but censoring ones that the government and its ruddy-faced supporters cannot stand being aired.
Still, as we leap over to The Sunday Times, Dowden will find plenty to delight him as Matthew Syed, the clown prince of ping-pong, argues It damages society if we keep on calling our politicians cheats and liars, racing to the defence of Priti Patel, Tony Blair, and George W. Bush among others.
Syed, who last appeared in this newsletter back in May offering a lecture on parenthood to Prince Harry, begins by talking about a bit of constituency work by the Home Secretary that made it into the papers this week:
It involved Shirley Cochrane, a woman from Essex who had been diagnosed with breast cancer in 2016 but who felt abandoned by the NHS during the pandemic. She had been seeing cancer specialists every six months but was told last spring to “self-manage” at just the time she thought she felt another lump.
Unable to get through to specialists or generic phone numbers, Cochrane contacted her local MP — Patel — in a state of desperation. “She managed to secure for me a telephone appointment, and that was followed by the mammogram, and thankfully that was OK,” Cochrane told the Commons health select committee. She sounded more than a little grateful.
I mention this because I can’t help noticing how often Patel is demonised in our political culture. Every time I see her on TV, I brace myself for the vitriol, the ad hominem attacks, the questioning of her motives and intellect, a tsunami of nastiness that shames those who indulge in it. This isn’t just limited to social media. You see it in commentary, radio phone-ins and the “most liked” comments on newspaper websites.
Perhaps the rather bigger story about Patel this week — her plan to use “armoured jet skis” to send refugee boats back towards France, which was called “an accident waiting to happen”, “not clever” and “problematic” by noted member of the wokerati, former First Sea Lord, Admiral Lord West — might serve as evidence of why she is “demonised”.
Or it could be that she was allowed to get away with bullying by Boris Johnson, a situation that led to an almost £400,000 payout to the Home Office’s former Permanent Secretary, Sir Philip Rutnam, and the resignation of the Prime Minister’s chief advisor on the ministerial code, Sir Alex Allan.
Or her gleeful desire to see the return of capital punishment. Or that she was able to return to government in one of the great offices of state after previously being fired for running her own independent foreign policy.
Or her attacks on taking the knee and Black Lives Matter combined with the government’s attempts to effectively make protest illegal. Or… or… or… I could fill the rest of the newsletter with reasons, frankly.
Syed moves on from Patel to make excuses for a whole range of political figures:
But when we look only for the bad in MPs, when we impugn their motives, will it not discourage talented newcomers from entering the fray? And will it not, over time, undermine faith in our system of government?
Just look at the way political leaders are dismissed with a careless wave of the hand and a spiteful aside. Tony Blair? The butcher who took us into Iraq. Gordon Brown? The sucker who sold gold on the cheap. George W Bush? The president with the IQ of a chimp.
Yes, raising the dead of Iraq and Afghanistan is terribly rude. And don’t you know we’re meant to see George W. Bush, not as a warmonger who used torture with impunity but a funny little old guy who does paintings now?
Things get even more ridiculous when Syed speaks of Theresa May as “ the woman who, through sheer moral clarity, introduced laws to clamp down on the iniquities of modern slavery.”
I’m sure I remember something about Go Home Vans.
This is a classic “you (the idiot), I (the intellectual)” column where the writer presents themselves as eminently more rational than the farmyard mob which surrounds them. Syed continues:
… these examples reveal the nobility of many who place their heads above the democratic parapet. Just last week I read parliamentary reports on health and crime, neither of which will appear in many news headlines or the tedious columns of those who peddle sarcasm from the sidelines.
Listen, Matthew, I don’t come to the ping-pong palace and tell you how to hit the ball. Don’t come here telling me how to do my sneering sarcasm, okay?
After getting in yet another glancing attack on Professor Priyamvada Gopal, an academic about whom The Times is obsessed, Syed concludes:
We desperately need to change this tone, for it is not merely poisoning the political system; it is infantilising the electorate. It causes us to reduce difficult political trade-offs to lazy character attacks; nuances to parodies.
At the very least, the next time you feel moved to suggest that all politicians are fools and charlatans, perhaps reflect that it was us who put them there. If there is idiocy in the system, therefore, we should look in the mirror.
There’s so much gall here it’s like flying over Rio and discovering that Christ the Redeemer has been replaced with a giant statue of Asterix.
And if politicians wish to be taken seriously and not seen as grasping, corrupt, craven monstrosities perhaps they should stop acting like that. Funny how the good deeds of left-wing MPs rarely make the pages of The Times, isn’t it?
From Syed’s politico fan fiction, we jump to another creepy column in today’s Sunday Times: India Knight on Emma Raducanu. Under the dubious headline (Two cultures smash — and a British star is born) and lede (“The brilliant Emma Raducanu is half Romanian, half Chinese and all ours…”), Knight drools:
Raducanu, whom I really want to call Emma, or maybe Em or Emmy, has featured in every conversation I’ve had for the past week — however it begins, Emma is where it ends up. Outside the Aldeburgh literary festival on Thursday, the artist Maggi Hambling started up a heartfelt chant upon hearing the name.
Just saying the words “Emma Raducanu” causes people to light up and become lyrical about her incredible trajectory, her fluid, almost balletic playing style, or the fact that she is so charming in interviews, with her giant smile and her teenager’s lack of guile… She is wonderful to look at, in repose and in motion (I know this should not matter, but it does).
…We are all weak from Emma’s loveliness. Isn’t it glorious to feel such uncomplicated pride and pleasure in someone because they are simply extraordinarily good at what they do? I love the purity of that moment, before some sour person pipes up — as they inevitably will — and decides that it’s time to take her down a peg or two.
Sorry, just had to take a break there to reconstitute myself after cringing inside out from sheer embarrassment. I think Emma Raducanu is incredible and her win last night is an uncomplicatedly good story. But Knight’s column is something else. The obsession with Raducanu’s ethnic background — which Knight excuses with reference to her own (“Having a Belgian father and Pakistani mother myself…) — is odd and unsettling, as is the need to ‘claim’ her for Britain.2
As AGildedEye wrote to me on Twitter:
This obsession with where people's genes originated, as if we all have to be able to account for ourselves and describe ourselves in percentages (each of which will be more or less approved of) is just racism, surely? "Yes, but what IS she?" She's not a cockapoo ffs.
There’s a parasocial peculiarity to the way Knight describes a young woman who she does not know and about whom she — like most of us — has only recently become aware. The gossipy insider stuff (“Maggi Hambling started up a heartfelt chant…”) only makes it grimmer.
Knight seemingly wanted to write a column that rejected racism but manages to achieve the opposite. She continues:
She is also now the most celebrated person from Kent in the world. Kent is, of course, the place where we are turning away small boats full of immigrants who have made their way from France. Emma Raducanu didn’t arrive by boat but, like her parents, she is an immigrant. This flower of Britishness, this new source of national pride and joy, this 21st-century English rose, is British and doesn’t contain a drop of British blood.
It’s a clumsy writer who manages to evoke blood and soil in their anti-racist column. Similarly, the idea that Raducanu, a high profile sportsperson and exactly the kind of individual given ‘an exception’ by racists, and her family are…
… a corrective to the minority of people who are not welcoming, who are hostile, who make idiotic remarks about “eastern Europeans” generally and “Romanians” more specifically (I expect those people are looking forward to driving their own lorry over to collect Christmas toys, and to eviscerating their own turkey).
… is excruciating. Knight brings the piece to a neat conclusion that is not supported by the paragraphs that come before it:
People writing endless nauseating nonsense about “whither Britishness?” need to pause and take a good look. Britishness is a maypole on a Kentish village green, or a chicken curry, or a pint of warm beer. Or Emma Raducanu.
Maybe Emma Raducanu can be an individual who isn’t suddenly taken to be a symbol, placed in the same rollcall as a maypole, a lawn, a curry, and a pint.
And finally, in today’s rush around the most terrible takes, we come to Nick Cohen in The Observer. In the same week that The Observer’s sister paper The Guardian deleted a question and answer from an interview with Judith Butler after publication, adding only a cryptic correction3, he’s had to head to Australia to find someone ‘cancelling’ Sally Rooney.
Headlined So Sally Rooney’s racist? Only if you choose to confuse fiction with fact, Cohen’s piece is a classic of the “take one quote and claim it represents a trend” genre of column writing. Opening with talk of “liars”, “informers”, and “character assassins” — you’d almost suspect some projection here — he jumps back to August 21 and a column in The Sydney Morning Herald by Jessie Tu.
He writes that the paper:
… whose code of ethics boasts that it has “no wish to mislead” and “no interest to gratify by unsparing abuse”, ran a long attack on Rooney. Its commentator, Jessie Tu, spends an age bragging about how brave she is for defying the consensus that Rooney is an interesting writer and then announces, “Normal People should be called White People because, in Rooney’s world, people like me don’t exist. In the book, Asians are mentioned only as tourists who choke the pathways of museums in Italy. ‘I don’t know why we’re bothering with Venice – it’s just full of Asians taking pictures of everything’, one of the male characters whines.”
Now, as Cohen correctly notes, the anti-Asian sentiments in Normal People are spoken by Jamie, a character we are meant to despise, and swiftly repudiated by other characters (“God forbid you might have to encounter an Asian person… it’s kind of racist, what you just said about Asian people”) and Tu undermines her arguments by not saying that.
But Tu’s point beyond the misuse of the quote stands: In Normal People, Asian people like her do not exist, other than as a way of making an example of one character’s racism and other characters’ liberal distaste for it, while not actually being friends with or encountering anyone who isn’t white.
Cohen shows the same malice he accuses Tu of having for Rooney. Look at how he describes her critical opinion on the author (“… spends an age bragging about how brave she is…”). Isn’t Tu allowed to use the same rhetoric Cohen himself has deployed for decades? She’s not wrong to say that Rooney’s characters are overwhelmingly white and largely from a small subset of Irish society.
But Cohen is simply using Tu’s article as a jumping-off point for yet another rant about “progressive witch-hunts”. From his specific criticism of Tu, he moves onto a general rage about how…
… in most of the liberal culture industries the fear of public shaming by progressives is far greater than the fear of state punishment. It’s one thing if the shaming is justified but what follows when the denunciations are false?
Is interesting to note that the right-wing comment site Quilette — which is based in Australia, but whose ‘associate editor’ in London is Cohen’s Spectator colleague Toby Young — published an article attacking Tu’s piece on Rooney earlier this week. I wonder where Cohen got his inspiration from.
Having made the leap to “witch hunts”, he gets around to introducing Nazis into the mix, writing:
Historians who investigated the files of the Gestapo in Nazi Germany estimated that personal malice motivated 40% of denunciations to the secret police: wives who wanted husbands out of the way so they could be with their lovers (and vice versa) and workers taking office politics to the extreme.
… Frightened people go along with them for fear they will be condemned as heretics if they do not. The result is a culture that appears self-confident on the surface but is sterile and conformist underneath. You don’t have to look far to find it. It is all around you.
So a writer has an opinion that Cohen disagrees with and uses a quote clumsily and becomes akin to the Gestapo or the Stasi, as if one article is enough to send Sally Rooney to a literary gulag.
If Tu was a writer who Cohen was friends with or favoured, he’d hoot at her hatchet job and decry people attempting to ‘cancel’ her.
The logic of the British columnist is a flexible one and it only needs to make sense to people who ‘matter’.
Here’s a Reddit thread of tales about the Piss Goblin, no kink-shaming here, should you wish to know more. You have been warned.
It feels mildly reminiscent of The Daily Mail’s campaign to get Zola Budd a British passport (and a circulation boost).