Doomed Geronimo and dancing Gove: Two stories that show the British media is fundamentally ludicrous...
'Murder' and the dancefloor.
This edition of the newsletter is about two residents of this curséd island; one is a ridiculous looking danger to public health and the other was Geronimo the Alpaca.
At first glance, the coverage of Michael Gove at a club night in Aberdeen and the prolonged run-up to the eventual destruction of Geronimo could seem to have little in common but each in its own way represents the abject lack of seriousness in the clown car derby of the British media.
Yesterday’s Daily Mail front page was a case in point, putting the “execution” of Geronimo — if that’s an execution then thousands of bovine TB-infected cows have their Marie Antoinette moment every week — on equal footing with Afghanistan.
An image of Geronimo being led away by DEFRA officials, flanked by police officers, dominated the top half of the paper, with the screaming headline:
On doomed Geronimo’s last day, shambles that shames men from the ministry.
The fate of the celebrity camelid took up pages 5, 6 and 7. The main story — Now UK’s In Talks With The Taliban — made page 2.
The paper’s news story on the events at the farm in Warwickshire quoted Geronimo’s owner Helen Macdonald accusing the Environment Secretary George Wallace of “murdering an innocent animal” and “making a martyr”. At the top of the page rag-outs of the Mail’s previous headlines provided unintentional comedy:
Lifeline for Geronimo… thanks to Mail
August 18Court condemns Geronimo to die
August 19
Across a double-page spread with all the ‘horrifying’ pictures a Daily Mail reader could wish to luxuriate in, Robert Hardman wrote of the “black farce [where] all that was missing was the Benny Hill theme tune”. In the online version, readers can ‘enjoy’ footage captured by GB News of “the final moments of Geronimo the Alpaca as police came to take him away”. All that’s missing is a soundtrack of They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa by Napoleon XIV.
Hardman, writing with the deadly dramatic seriousness of a man paid to be an idiot, told readers about the scene:
With a fleet of police vans sealing off surrounding lanes to prevent reinforcements – and even a drone to keep an eye from above – the men from the ministry (they were mainly men) turned up with a death warrant, cut open a gate and went for the UK’s Most Wanted camelid.
Missing from Hardman’s report and the others that littered yesterday’s papers is the reason that the “men from the ministry”1 were required to turn up so mob-handed: The presence of a scrum of reporters and photographers along with a band of angry alpaca defenders, one of whom was briefly arrested for the huge offence of… shooting a police officer with a water pistol.
Similarly, the Mail man and his fellow hacks don’t stop to wonder if Geronimo “cowered in fear” in part at the clicking cameras and chuntering journalists pissed off to be dispatched to a dismal field.
Hardman, whose role at the Mail is to be an instant expert on any given news event, staring imperiously from his byline alongside the line “How I see it”, wrote…
[Geronimo] is – or was – surely Britain’s most energetic TB patient, judging by his Herculean efforts yesterday. He looked more like a candidate for an alpaca Olympiad rather than the victim of a hideous respiratory disease.
… ignoring that cattle (and camelids for that matter) can carry TB and remain asymptomatic for years. That’s why animals are tested. But pesky facts would get in the way of Hardman sketching the actions of the DEFRA officials as “assassins” carrying out a “death sentence” and Geronimo as spitting Spartacus.
But Hardman’s effort was not even remotely the most ridiculous report. That title belonged to The Sun whose front-page headline (GERONI-NO!) was accompanied by copy that tipped so far into self-parody the writer Amir Razavi probably needed to be winched out. He wrote:
Geronimo the tragic alpaca was dragged from his paddock yesterday and executed by a team of government officials.
The eight-year-old animal, whose plight touched the nation, was shoved into a horsebox and killed with a bolt-gun after 25 cops descended on his farm.
Geronimo, who DEFRA claimed had TB, kicked out and appeared distressed as he was pulled away with a tope around his neck at Wickwar, Gloucs. Supporters clashed with cops with one woman arrested as the 26-day stand-off ended.
As ever in tabloid land, word choice is everything. Geronimo was not put down but “executed”, supporters “clashed” with “cops” and a news story propelled in large part by coverage from The Sun, Mail and others becomes a “26-day stand-off” as if it would have dragged on as long without the papers’ involvement.
Like The Daily Mail, The Sun gave Geronimo not only the front page but a double-page spread inside the paper. Sandwiched between an equally hysterical lede and headline Battle to save Alpaca comes to tragic end and Dragged to his death sits an abjectly deranged report. It begins:
Geronimo’s furious owner said yesterday the tragic alpaca’s “barbaric” execution was murder. The eight-year-old animal was dragged to his death by a team of “bully-boy” DEFRA officials after he tried to make a last dash for freedom.
The pull-quote ratchets up the drama with a line from Geronimo’s owner (“They have made a martyr of him. My faith in this country has gone…) that makes you wonder what she felt about the deaths of all those Iraqi children or feels about the current treatment of refugees. Perhaps all of them should have worn alpaca wool jumpers to reach the required cuddliness threshold for empathy.
But the true masterpiece of manipulative tabloid emotionalism came from Rod Liddle. His byline picture (imagine a crumpled sleeping bag made human by a racist witch) was accompanied by the honorific “the columnist who first championed Geronimo’s cause,” while the headline on the boxout read Shy alpaca is sacrificial lamb for vindictive badger cull. Make your mind up, Rod: Was he a literal alpaca or a metaphorical lamb?
Liddle’s contribution is, as you might expect, a series of distortions, exaggerations, lies and half-truths wrapped in the sanctimony that takes years of public bloviating to master. Liddle gets dewy-eyed for animals in a way he doesn’t when it comes to refugees, anyone who isn’t a Milwall fan or, for instance, pregnant girlfriends2. He addresses Geronimo directly in his conclusion:
RIP Geronimo. Lots of people fought for you. In the end, you took on the government and there was only going to be one winner.
A callous and vindictive government.
Farewell Geronimo, you are wiv the angles now.
As I wrote a few weeks back, animal injustice stories are a classic part of the tabloid toolkit, especially in the… uh… dog days of summer.
Geronimo now joins the pantheon along with Blackie the Donkey, ‘saved’ by The Sun and snatched for the glory by The Daily Star, Anapka the Parasailing Donkey, and Annie “the loneliest elephant in Britain”, and while his owner has vowed to “continue the fight” she’ll find the tabloids who so vocally championed the cursed camelid have already moved on.
Unfortunately, stories about Michael Gove (like the man himself) are not so transitory and the tale of his dancing exploits at a club night called Pipe3 has delighted political hacks whose bar for hilarity is lower than an oligarch’s basement. Over and over again they’ve assured readers in print and on Twitter that the notion of Gove going for it on the dancefloor is the funniest thing since David Miliband held a banana and his brother Ed grappled with a bacon sandwich.
Like the bacon sandwich moment, a culinary faux pas that political journalists simply cannot let go of a full seven years later, Gove dancing looks set to be one of those forced memes that the British media returns to frequently, a dog that thinks even it’s most repulsive vomit is equivalent to a Jackson Pollock masterpiece.
As someone who spent a good chunk of my late-teens and early-twenties working in nightclubs, I can assure you that the “out of place middle-aged man dancing uncomfortably in his suit” is not a creature headed for extinction or even that rare at all. Most nights see at least one example making other people uncomfortable while attempting to reclaim their lost and utterly shop-soiled youth.
But to the political hacks and columnists of Britain, Gove’s powerful almost divorced man energy was worthy of extensive comment. In The Guardian, Zoe Williams not only embarrassed herself but the entire school with a piece headlined I didn’t think I could feel empathy for Michael Gove. Then he hit the dancefloor. After a few hundred words of scene-setting and space-filling, she concludes:
I saw Ken Clarke having a curry once and asked him if he wanted to join me and my sister. It was only partly because I thought nobody should have to eat alone if they don’t want to; it was mainly that I was so pleased he liked curry, even though almost everybody does. Anyway, turns out he also likes eating alone, but there were no hard feelings.
People make the point, and I take it, that if you dwell too much on the humanity of senior Conservatives, it’s a failure of solidarity to all the people whose humanity those same Conservatives don’t care about. In the end, though, it’s not about Michael Gove and his moves. It’s about not being hardened by the hardness of others and, it turns out, the clubbers of Aberdeen are a world away from granite.
“We’re all human beings” is up there with “his heart’s in the right place” in the list of biological facts that do double duty as hardy perennial Chicken Soup for the Soul aphorisms in the hands of columnists.
Ken Clarke may have the demeanour of Churchill the nodding insurance dog chuckling to persuade you to put up with higher premiums but he’s a true blue Tory who served under Margaret Thatcher, was up to his jowls in the expenses scandal, and spent the thick end of a decade as Deputy Chairman and director of British American Tobacco — while still an MP — as that corporation lobbied the developing world to reject health warnings on cigarette packets and targeted children with its advertisements. I couldn’t give a fuck if he enjoys a lamb bhuna or tolerated Zoe Williams patronising him.
Similarly, I’m sure many of history’s greatest monsters enjoyed a little boogie but I don’t allow their ability to pull off the full set of moves from Black Lace’s Superman (“That’s it, Benito, now ski! Spray! Macho man!”) to distract me from their actions off the dance floor.
Gove is currently presiding over a Cabinet Office that pushed through all sorts of cosy deals during the pandemic and which stymies and frustrates FOI requests as a matter of course, was key to Vote Leave’s industrially-deceptive Brexit campaigning, wrote: “I would prefer a fair trial, under the shadow of the noose” while arguing for the return of capital punishment, says the British Empire was “benign”, and has perpetrated so much clumsy backstabbing he makes Brutus look like an amateur.
Williams was not alone in softening towards Gove because he can do a soft shoe shuffle while on hard… liquor. For The Independent, Marie Le Conte wrote a piece headlined I’m jealous of Michael Gove’s nightlife. What on earth is happening? It’s a column straight from the category marked “Tenuous angles”. Tying the general stress of the pandemic and the common wariness about getting back out into the world to Gove’s antics, Le Conte concludes:
I have no idea how or when we will come out of this state of quasi-limbo; I wonder if we need to live through a normal winter again before things feel good again.
But then, maybe we do not have to; maybe Michael Gove, recently divorced and strategically boasting about being the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, can show us the way.
After all, a good night out does not need to be more than it is; if anything, it is usually at its most needed when everything else feels quite drab and dreary.
Here’s to Gove then; the unexpected icon of this late summer. My next hangover will be on him.
If Gove is to be an icon of anything let it be of rat-like Westminster cunning, the willingness to say or do practically anything to retain a ministerial car, and/or the enduring cultural resonance of Pob.
Worryingly, The Independent managed to wring out another piece on the glory of Gove, with Jordan Tyldesley’s piece assuring us that there was “nothing cringe” about footage of his nightclub performance. She wrote in his defence:
It’s refreshing seeing people in positions of high office being human, which is why I’m sad Gove is being mocked for having the confidence to enjoy himself. Here is a 54-year-old man going through a divorce and all he wants to do is let his hair down. Is that such a crime?
No, Gove deciding to go dancing is not a crime. But I’m sure if we spent a little longer picking over the actions of the government he serves in and the department he leads we could find a few more actual crimes to focus on. And his policy on big fish, little fish and, indeed, cardboard box would matter a lot less then.
For The Times, Robert Crampton (imagine the most boring man in a boring pub full of boring men who would happily read to you from the Screwfix catalogue) brings us another classic of the commentator’s arsenal — the “I once stood quite close to a person who is in the news this week” column. Beneath the line My confessions of dancing — up close and personal — with Michael Gove, Crampton ‘confesses’:
Full disclosure: I have actually seen Gove dance, up close and personal and in the flesh. Even fuller disclosure, we even danced TOGETHER for a short while, trading shapes until the inevitable vicissitudes of a crowded floor broke up the fun. It was in a hotel basement in Cheltenham, where this newspaper sponsors the literature festival every October.
It’s the kind of story that would fail to reach the legal standard set by the Anecdote Licensing Authority, if such a body existed, and would be downgraded to a “minor remembrance”. Crampton uses this passing acquaintance with Gove’s ‘moves’ to conclude that:
This is the sort of all-too-human behaviour that risks restoring some semblance of public trust — it’s too soon to talk about respect, let alone affection — in the political class. Democrats of all persuasions owe the Govester a favour.
The bar is so low that a micron would struggle to limbo under it.
Crampton’s few hundred words cannot, however, compete with a single paragraph in Sarah Vine’s latest column. Still holding back on the true waterfall of vitriol that will descend once her divorce is finalised, she simply nods to the raving Gove story:
While my almost ex-husband was throwing some interesting shapes in Aberdeen (WhatsApp from my mother: ‘That video alone is grounds for divorce’), I spent the long weekend in Wales with my teenagers and some friends.
That and a line earlier in the column (“In Bruce’s case, she’s had the same nanny for 20 years. Which, come to think about it, is longer than some marriages last.”) serve as warning shots to Gove. I think the shooting war is coming soon.
And now it’s time for me to draw on another trick from the columnist’s arsenal — the ‘cut-and-shut conclusion’ — where two seemingly unrelated topics are welded together like write-offs in a reclamation yard.
I’ve been thinking about the Gove and Geronimo stories not simply because they share the same first letter or because I dream of Gove and guillotines. The way both these stories have been covered by the British press illustrates how fundamentally unserious it can be.
The death of a single alpaca gets more newsprint than the plight of thousands of humans (and the thousands of cattle which are slaughtered for carrying the same disease every year) while a single moment of ‘humanity’ gains Gove indulgent coverage from people who should know better but never will.
A highly contemporary reference to a radio comedy of the same name that went off the air in 1977, a mere 44 years ago.
Liddle was arrested and received a caution for common assault against his girlfriend Alicia Monckton in 2005. He denies he assaulted her and claims to have accepted the caution because it was “the quickest way to be released”. Liddle and Monckton married in 2008.
Sometimes the jokes are too obvious.