Forde theatre (closed for repairs)
You don't need to be a conspiracy theorist to be dismayed by coverage (or lack of it) around the Forde Report.
Search The New Statesman website for stories on the Forde Report — the findings of barrister Martin Forde’s independent inquiry into the Labour Party’s leaked antisemitism report, which were finally published this week — you’ll find nothing. Or rather — given that the site just points to articles by alleged comedian Matt Forde instead — worse than nothing1. The New Statesman’s podcast was similarly silent.
On Radio 4’s Week In Westminster, the Forde Report also didn’t make the cut. The running order instead focused on two losers talking about fighting leadership campaigns, a pair of think-tankers discussing zombie government/parliament (a state of affairs that will end in September and describes most British political summers), a feature on the pantomime politics of PMQs, and Zac Goldsmith2 burbling about Boris Johnson’s “green legacy”.
When the political media did pay attention to the report, it was largely to twist the findings to fit their previous stories. So from The Sun (“Labour under Jeremy Corbyn was ‘out of control’ with racism and sexism ‘rife’, damning report finds”), Daily Mail (“Jeremy Corbyn's allies used anti-Semitism as 'factional weapon', report says”) and Telegraph (“Jeremy Corbyn ‘notably silent’ as Labour tore itself apart over anti-Semitism”) we got headlines that made Corbyn the singular villain of the piece. Meanwhile The Daily Mirror (“Scathing report finds both sides in Labour used anti-Semitism as 'factional weapon'“) and Guardian (“Antisemitism issue used as ‘factional weapon’ in Labour, report finds”) opted for comfy both-sideism.
The Independent’s Jon Stone was a creditable outlier (“Anti-Corbyn Labour officials covertly diverted election funds away from winnable seats, Forde report finds”) but it took self-proclaimed Tory, Peter Oborne, writing for Middle East Eye, to explain plainly why coverage of Forde’s findings has been either partial or non-existent:
…Forde is devastating about media misreporting. He goes into granular detail about the emails leaked to the press in early 2019 which opened Corbyn to the devastating allegation that he intervened in the Labour Party disciplinary process in order to protect friends or supporters.
He cites BBC and Sky News as well as articles in the Times, Jewish Chronicle and Sun (“Jeremy Corbyn’s cronies 'meddle in Labour anti-semitism cases to stop their friends getting kicked out of party'”).
Forde says that it is “entirely misleading” to imply that the leaked emails were evidence that Corbyn’s office was “inserting themselves unbidden into the disciplinary process for factional reasons”.
This media narrative that Corbyn was actively intervening to stop antisemitism cases was deeply damaging to Labour Party chances in the run-up to the 2019 general election.
It was also, Forde makes clear, unsupported by the documentary evidence.
As soon as the report was published, the current Labour leadership’s line on it was tweeted out uncritically by the i’s Paul Waugh…
NEW from Labour: The Forde Report completely debunks the conspiracy theory that the 2017 general election was somehow deliberately sabotaged by Labour Party staff opposed to Corbyn's leadership.
… and The Mirror’s Pippa Crerar:
NEW: Labour sources say Forde Report "completely debunks the conspiracy theory" the 2017 general election was deliberately sabotaged by party staff opposed to Corbyn's leadership.
The Forde Report says:
Some senior HQ staff had the ability to implement resourcing decisions covertly. A handful of staff in Ergon House created an additional fund for printing costs under code GEL001 (spending some £135,000 in total on campaigns supportive of sitting largely anti-Corbyn MPs and not on campaigns for pro-Corbyn candidates in potentially Tory winnable seats).
In his thread on the report, Waugh repeatedly took quotes from it out of context. For example this tweet…
“The evidence clearly demonstrated that a vociferous faction in the Party sees any issues regarding antisemitism as exaggerated by the Right to embarrass the Left. The authors of the Leaked Report were supportive of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, enthusiastic and fully committed.”
… is a truncated version of this section of Forde’s conclusions:
The evidence clearly demonstrated that a vociferous faction in the Party sees any issues regarding antisemitism as exaggerated by the Right to embarrass the Left.
The authors of the Leaked Report were supportive of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, enthusiastic and fully committed. Nevertheless, in explaining, in the Leaked Report, the involvement of the EHRC they stated clearly:
“This report thoroughly disproves any suggestion that antisemitism is not a problem in the Party, or that it is all a ‘smear’ or a ‘witch hunt’.”
This represented a mature acknowledgement of the problem.
Another tweet from the thread included these quotes…
"We accept that the Leaked Report was itself a factional document with an agenda to advance + that the quoted messages were selected pursuant to that agenda.” "In a few cases, comments were presented in a misleading way." Lack of right of reply "clear breach of natural justice.”
… selectively editing, as former Corbyn speechwriter Alex Nunns noted, a section on… selective editing. That part of the report actually says:
It has been put to us by a number of witness that the extracts of the messages quoted in the Leaked Report were cherrypicked and selectively edited, such that the quotes that appear in the Leaked Report are both unrepresentative and misleading.
Having reviewed the transcripts and considered evidence from many of those involved, we do not agree. We find that the messages on the SMT [Senior Management Team] WhatsApp reveal deplorably factional and insensitive, and at times discriminatory, attitudes expressed by many of the Party’s most senior staff.
We accept that the Leaked Report was itself a factional document with an agenda to advance, and that the quoted messages were selected pursuant to that agenda. Unsurprisingly the majority of the SMT WhatsApp transcripts (which run to some 1,200 pages) and the instant messages consist of perfectly acceptable discussions about work or personal lives, and we accept that the quoted messages appear more shocking when read without the cushioning of that more anondyne material. Nevertheless, the substance of the quoted messages is concerning — and totally inappropriate from senior staff of a purportedly progressive political party — and the selective editing does not equate to an overall distortion of the quoted messages’ meaning; we do not consider that there was a conspiracy on the part of the Leaked Report’s authors to distort them.
It’s not surprising that political journalists are unreliable narrators on the Forde report; many of them weren’t simply observers of the drama during the Corbyn era but actors in it and instigators of it. Paul Waugh makes his cameo on page 55 of the report:
HQ staff told us about negative stories being briefed about them, saying that it was unheard of for Party staff (as opposed to MPs) to be the subject of those kind of attacks prior to 2015: “despite […] being Party staff for a long time, I think I managed to keep my name of out of the press pretty much wholly for years and then suddenly, you know, I was being named in articles by Paul Waugh and by other people […] that was a new thing for us.”
The leaking of negative stories was also utilised heavily against LOTO [Leader of the Opposition’s Office], possibly because there was greater mainstream press interest in negative stories about Jeremy Corbyn and his team than there was in negative stories about largely unknown HQ staff. Witnesses from LOTO/the Party’s Left told us:
“very few people were aware I worked for the Labour Party, until an announcement that I was a ‘new starter’ went out in a ‘staff bulletin’ to Party staff in late August. Immediately following this, James Lyons from The Sunday Times contacted me asking about my employment…”
On the day after Forde’s findings were published, Iain Dale delivered a monologue on his LBC show, raging about press coverage of the Tory Party leadership contest and, in particular, The Daily Mail’s monstering of Penny Mourdant:
I have a lot to say about the media role in this election so far, not just on Penny Mordaunt, but I think the coverage in The Daily Mail and various other newspapers has been disgusting. It has been amateurish, it has had an agenda and, I’ve never really bought into this idea that the establishment can stitch things up, but boy have they stitched things up here. And it is a disgrace and it’s something I hope a lot of people will analyse afterwards. It won’t get any analysis, of course, in The Daily Mail or The Daily Telegraph or The Times or maybe even The Sun, because it’s not in their interests to do so.
But it is something that we should be talking about and people in the broadcast media should be talking about because it is largely the print media. Generally, the print media hasn’t got the influence it used to have, certainly in general election campaigns, because its readership has completely diminished. But it’s had a massive influence over Tory MPs. And that says a lot in itself, how they can be influenced by the tripe that political journalists have written in The Daily Mail over the last few days. And those journalists should be absolutely ashamed of themselves.
Roll that line “I’ve never really bought into this idea that the establishment can stitch things up” around in your mind for a moment and recall that Iain Dale’s show was the venue for Simon Heffer’s claim that Jeremy Corbyn wanted to reopen Auschwitz.
Dale notices the agenda this time because it isn’t in service of his faction. He deserves no credit for only spotting the elephant in the room only when its dung landed squarely on his chum’s head.
Strip away the QC’s tendency to say “on the one hand, on the other” from the Forde Report and you have a story of a party’s unelected officials working to undermine its elected leadership. If that leadership had not been from the Left, the political media would have raged against the disregard for democracy. But the Left is not treated as legitimate so it’s not a problem.
Also on the day after Forde Report’s publication, David Aaronovitch took Boris Johnson’s use of the phrase “deep state” in the House of Commons as the jumping off point to write in his The Times column that:
… it has been a rather delicious conceit of [the Left] that should a “genuine socialist” (ie someone like Corbyn) be elected to power in Britain, the various organs of the deep or shadow state, from the BBC to MI5 via the Athenaeum, would combine to bring them down.
In the 1980s this idea was extended to explain the thwarting of any opposition to Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan or to nuclear weapons, nuclear power stations, the sinking of the Belgrano and mine closures. Films and drama series regularly featured such shadow state activities as the solution to a mystery that a questing journalist or campaigner, often doomed, was seeking to uncover. In many cases there could seem to be superficial evidence for such a belief. Police powers during the miners’ strike were pretty draconian, special police units infiltrated “subversive” organisations (which either sounds appalling or sensible according to your worries) and in most of that time there was no transparency whatsoever with regard to the secret services, with the first director of MI5 not even named until 1993.
It must be such a comfort to the victims of the Spycops that Aaronovitch considers their suffering “superficial evidence”.
That Donald Trump and Boris Johnson both use the term “deep state” in a self-serving manner to excuse their own failings and justify their desires doesn’t mean that there’s no such thing as power used covertly and beyond the apparent bounds of democratic oversight. On a small scale it’s there in the permanent state of the Labour Party — its officials — working against the elected leadership. On a large scale it’s revealed by the Spycops inquiry and the ongoing revelations about state collusion with Loyalist terror groups in Northern Ireland.
In the Forde Report-free New Statesman, Jonn Elledge also tackled Johnson’s use of “the deep state” as an excuse for his fall. He writes:
The other, much more worrying phrase in that speech is “deep state”. This, as anyone who has read my new book (some people are calling it the book of the summer) Conspiracy: A History of Boll*cks Theories, and How Not to Fall for Them – co-written with Tom Phillips – will know, is the language of the conspiracy theorist. In just two words, it conveys a belief that elected leaders are not the only, or most important, holders of political power: somewhere unseen lie bigger, scarier, more malign forces that have their own agendas.
… There is no deep state, of course: the real thing blocking the Brexit dividend is the unhelpful fact that there’s a trade-off between sovereignty and growth, which is what some people (God, I’m doing it now) have been saying all along. But it suits Boris Johnson to tell us, and possibly himself, that there is – and that he is the only one who can save his party from it.
There’s a problem with this dismissal of the notion that there are no other forces with “their own agendas” beyond the holder of political power. You don’t need They Live-style glasses to reveal their existence. They are media proprietors, arms company shareholders, longstanding figures in the security services, and yes, sometimes Labour Party officials. The conspiratorial mindset comes when you believe that they are all working together in harmony or that conspiracies outweigh cock-ups in the world.
Come on now. Even Iain Dale has realised there’s such a thing as a stitch-up.
If you enjoyed/got something from this edition, please share it by hitting the button below…
… and consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter:
Thanks to @EuanYours for this joke.
Front man, remember, for the most racist London mayoral campaign ever undertaken.