Distracted by revolting Cox: Outrage, misdirection and the Mail's grim 'magic'...
Isn't it curious that the corruption scandal has landed on a ludicrous backbencher who's already of no use to Boris Johnson?
In The Prestige (1995)1, Christopher Priest invented three terms for the structure of a magic trick (the pledge, the turn, and the prestige). He writes:
Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called ‘The Pledge’. The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But, of course… it probably isn’t.
The second act is called, ‘The Turn’. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you’re looking for the secret… but you won’t find it, because, of course, you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know. You want to be fooled.
But you wouldn’t clap yet. Because making something disappear isn’t enough; you have to bring it back. That’s why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call, ‘The Prestige’.
Many British political stories — particularly those pursued by The Daily Mail — have a similar structure: 1) the dredge 2) the burn and 3) the pettiness.
Take the current ‘sleaze’ scandal — “sleaze” being a handy tabloid term which ducks the honesty of words like “corruption”. After it was triggered by Owen Paterson’s foot stomping and Johnson’s clumsy attempt to capitalise on it, the dredge began with political hacks and their editors pretending to be shocked by the grubbiness of second jobs and digging out examples.
That most ‘consulting’ jobs taken up by MPs have a distinctly “Professor Moriarty, consulting criminal” vibe about them was well-known to political hacks and most of the public. But once there was an ember of public anger to stoke in the wake of Operation Shithead2 — Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Mark Spencer’s failed attempt to get shot of Parliamentary Standards Commissioner, Katherine Stone — the newspapers went for it.
In ‘the burn’, the papers dedicate several days to a story and focus on the most egregious example they can find. This part of the ‘trick’ can, and often is, helped by sources acting as magician’s assistants and encouraging a bit of misdirection.
So it is that while Boris Johnson’s ongoing battles with Stone are still mentioned, the focus of the story has shifted to the Caribbean cash-grabbing antics of Sir Geoffrey Cox, a backbencher with a bit of name recognition from his time in cabinet but far enough away from the Prime Minister at this point that Johnson can condemn him and Tory sources can rage that he’s “taking he piss”.
Now, there’s no doubt that Cox is taking the piss to such an extent he could be working a third job as a human catheter but the majority of his antics — aside from a claim that he used his parliamentary office to conduct a Zoom call linked to his lawyering for the British Virgin Islands, one of the world’s most tenacious little tax havens — have been common knowledge3 since he was elected as the MP for Torridge and West Devon in 2005.
The Times, whose front page today sceeched ‘Brazen’ Cox4 accused of flouting Commons rules, confined reporting on the announcement of his new job at the City law firm Withers in October 2020 — following Johnson deciding his services as Attorney General were no longer required in February 2020 — to its legal column Out of Court, which languishes at the back of the book.
Jonathan Ames, The Times Legal Editor, wrote:
The revolving door between private legal practice and the government is becoming more Americanised by the year. It is commonplace Stateside for attorneys-general to land at law firms after leaving government.
And this week Geoffrey Cox, QC — the “Brian Blessed” of the House of Commons who recently said the prime minister was doing “unconscionable” damage to Britain’s reputation over plans to tear up parts of the Brexit treaty — has found a cushy number. He has bagged a role at Withers, a City law firm for the rich and not so famous, as its “consultant global counsel”.
Helpfully for a silk who does very profitable Bar work, Cox will remain at Thomas More Chambers. So what’s in it for Withers? According to sources, he will “help open doors with foreign governments”. World domination . . . Not too much pressure, then.
I don’t detect any shock in that prose nor did the appointment trouble the hacks who ply their trade on the politics desk.
That’s not to say that Cox coining in £970,000 on top of his MP’s salary isn’t a mirthlees joke nor that his exploitation of remote voting measures to effectively move his constituency office to the Caribbean isn’t a clear case of sticking to the letter of the law while kicking the spirit of it firmly in the nuts. The point is that hacks accepted this without criticism until it became convenient to discuss.
Even more brazenly, The Mail on Sunday, which used an editorial this weekend to castigate Boris Johnson for his attempt to “weaponise unhappiness” with the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner (“The sight of our politicians with their snouts in the trough will always provoke rage…”) printed a full page op-ed from David Davis the week before denouncing Stone for conducting an “inquisition” against Paterson and calling it “a troubling saga”.
The Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday alike are opportunistic to their core. Having used Operation Shithead as chance to give Johnson a tap on the snout, they have now shifted their attention to Cox. Today’s Daily Mail — in a great example of how the burn hits the same story over and over again — howls on its front page: After Mail exposé, THREE new Cox bombshells… Tawdry truth about the Dishonourable Member for the Virgin Islands.
Inside, the Mail’s Political Editor Jason Groves, Chief Political Editor Harriet Line and reporter Glen Keogh write “Number 10 [has] distanced itself from the former minister” and that:
… senior Tories were privately aghast at his decision to decamp to the Caribbean for up to a month at the tail end of the last lockdown in pursuit of a lucrative contract.
One source said: “It is very sad that we are having to tell MPs that they need to put their constituents first.”
Along with the inevitable — and justified — attention given to Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer’s own past extra-curricular earnings, the attention on Cox means that others, the Prime Minister included, are under less pressure.
After the Paterson debacle, Johnson is now seriously being allowed to seriously talk about how “an MP’s primary job is and must be to serve their constituents and to represent their interests in Parliament.” That’s the same Boris Johnson who remained editor of The Spectator throughout his first term as an MP and earned £250,000 a year as a Telegraph columnist — which he dismissed as “chicken feed” — while Mayor of London.
The honesty of The Daily Mail’s ‘rage’ is also undermined by the fact that, despite contributing a full page op-ed to today’s edition headlined If Boris thinks he can extricate his party from sleaze with easy charm, disaster awaits, Fleet Street’s most zombie-looking columnist Stephen Glover was the man who organised the reunion dinner of Telegraph leader writers5 that the Prime Minister rushed down from COP26 to attend.
It’s said that a chat with fellow Paterson pal, former Telegraph editor and dessicated bald eagle Charles Moore at that Garrick dinner was a factor in Johnson’s cack-handed attempt to undo the ex-minister’s punishment and knobble the standards commissioner.
Glover concludes his column by saying: “If [Boris] thinks he can extricate a Tory Party engulfed in sleaze with… easy charm and obsfuscation, I see only disaster ahead”. I wonder if he mentioned that when passing the claret or took a moment to ask himself if he should have been socialising which such a sleazy individual?
While The Times and Daily Mail continue to hammer the government with front pages, it’s little more than professional wrestling-style drama. We’ll be told that this is a major problem for Boris Johnson but once the heat goes out of the tale, The Times and the Mail will move on.
The Daily Telegraph meanwhile is already bending itself into unfeasible shapes to avoid talking ‘sleaze’ on its front page — today’s contained no mention — and readers had to wait until page 8 for its coverage, which was confined to that page and a sympathetic comment piece from Madeline Grant later in the book (Full-time MPs entrench the fatal conceit the state can solve everything).
Right now on The Telegraph’s website, former Labour MP turned reliable pro-Tory opinion stooge, Tom Harris, backs Cox — not a sexual libel but a statement of fact — with a piece headlined Owen Paterson didn't deserve the support of his Party. But Geoffrey Cox does.
The Sun also kept the ‘sleaze’ story of its front page today, sticking its coverage in the easily skipped graveyard slot on page 2, pushed down the agenda by Lady Gaga wearing a dress and the confessions of Katie Price.
Just as, in the aftermath of the death of Sir David Amess, debate with abruptly shoved towards the unrelated but convenient topic of “online civility”, the ‘row’ will now be sat-navved towards increasing MPs pay, arguing that singular minds (citation very much fucking needed) like Cox won’t bother with politics unless they are handsomely rewarded. That he barely bothers already won’t matter.
That shift of the debate — away from the sheer number of politicians with dubious second jobs and the particular suspect behaviour of the Prime Minister, onto Cox, and then to the line, “see, we should pay MPs more!” — is the pettiness, the political journalism equivalent of the prestige. Boris Johnson is already moving to hang Cox out to dry and the result of the pettiness will be a blurring of the details and a few symbolic scalps.
In two weeks — probably less — the everyday corruption will go back to being too boring for front pages and the inquiries into Boris Johnson’s own ethics will be back as chuckleworthy foibles. Labour will back down too; the risk of futher splash back from its own toxic sludge around donations and second jobs will make it too scared to push it. Starmer will burble platitudes, Johnson will find other shiny distractions and the clown car will trundle on.
It was adapted into a typically good but headache-inducing 2006 film by Christopher Nolan.
Not an official codename, mind.
Private Eye, pre-empting the current ersatz Fleet Street fury, talked about Cox’s particularly part-time attitude to parliament in issue 1553, back in August.
I’m fairly sure I saw Brazen Cox at Download Festival in 2003.
As reported in Private Eye no. 1560