Gilty men

… and women. The commentators and papers who talked up Liz Truss will be allowed to get away with it again.

Previously: A howling tumour Liz Truss's 'enemies of growth' speech convinced
The Telegraph's headbangers and distracted The Times' tone detectors...

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At Last! A True Tory Budget
September 24, 2022

How Much More Can She (And The Rest Of Us) Take?
October 15, 2022

Those Daily Mail headlines are separated by 22 days. Both front page stories were written by Political Editor, Jason Groves; he composed the first alone and shares the blame for the second with recently-elevated Chief Political Correspondent, David Churchill, and political reporter, Kumail Jaffer. On Twitter, Groves quipped yesterday:

Has anyone tried switching the govt off and on again?

Employees of The Daily Mail — which dedicated thousands of words and a string of front pages to pushing Liz Truss during the Tory leadership contest — don’t get to make those jokes; they have no purchase on sarcasm having expended so much capital on crawling and credulousness. It’s like a man standing beside a cesspit with a hose affecting innocence to ask: “Why is everything covered in liquid shit?”

The Mail on Sunday’s never-knowingly-correct Dan Hodges had a running Twitter bit for a while where he posted a link to a column he wrote in December 2021 predicting Truss would be Prime Minister with the words, “Oh how they laughed.” During the leadership contest, he replied to someone asking, “honest question: do you really think she will be good?” with one word: “Yes.”

Yesterday, Hodges tweeted:

I would genuinely be surprised if Liz Truss is still Prime Minister by this time next week. Or at least hasn't announced her intention to resign once a successor has been chosen.

Contrition is not a valued quality in professional — I use the word in its loosest possible sense — political commentators. Hodges can’t admit he was wrong any more than the newspapers for whom he has opinions to order can. That’s why the Mail published a leader column today in which it stroked its chin and opined:

The Mail supported [Liz Truss] for clear reasons. Firstly, and fundamentally, because we believed in her tax-cutting agenda, which lies at the heart of Tory philosophy. We also believed that she was personally opposed to the failed Blairite consensus which has left this country with low growth and high taxes, the negation of the achievements of the Margaret Thatcher era.

But alas, nobody can pretend that Ms Truss’s few frantic weeks in Downing Street have fulfilled the promise she seemed to show. On the contrary, it is impossible to argue that her premiership thus far has been anything other than a disaster.

The premise here is that the Mail wasn’t wrong, it’s just that Truss has let it down. We’re meant to accept that no one could have predicted that a woman possessed by the deranged spirit of the IEA and with less charisma than a rain-sodden, faded teddy bear left years ago at an accident blackspot, would be a disaster.

On the day after Truss became Prime Minister, the headline on Jason Groves’ breathless piece in praise of her was Cometh the hour, cometh the woman... But cometh the fuck up, the self-reflection does not cometh. Nor does the questioning of the Mail titles as sources of analysis, they’ll still be held up to be taken seriously in newspaper reviews and quoted with great import on the Today programme.

The Sun’s Harry Cole — who along with James Heale from The Spectator is due to publish a biography of Truss on December 8 — greeted her arrival in No.10 with a fawning front-page story headlined Liz Puts Her Foot On The Gas, giddily quoting “insiders” to solidify his chance of being stenographer-in-chief. Now he’s being praised by fellow hacks for writing How Liz Lost It: Inside story of Liz Truss’ first 40 days in power that ended in biggest political meltdown for 300 years.

I can understand why Cole’s angry; Truss is now the second PM in a row to leave him out of date (though at least this one hasn’t also stolen his date). Appearing before an audience of people who accidentally leant on their remote controls, he told TalkTV’s foremost launderer of neo-nazi talking points, Tom Newton-Dunn, that:

Once you flinch once, the blood is in the water, the sharks circle and they want to come back for more… the first time she gets to pull the lever, it’s a trapdoor.

For research purposes, Cole should be required to test his trapdoor and shark theories in person; I’m sure News UK would let him put it on expenses.

Rebooting the bastard machine

In the midst of the leadership campaign, back in August, Media Guido — the press-obsessed offshoot of perpetually-thirsty drink-driving-enthusiast Paul Staines’ grubby enterprise — crowed on Twitter:

You can sense the palpable despair of most of the broadsheet punditry as it dawns on them that Liz Truss is in all likelihood going to be Prime Minister and will probably go on to smash Keir Starmer in the general election.

In the replies, famously normal person Allison Pearson, who is in no way a part of “broadsheet punditry”, sneered:

Almost as if they don’t know how normal people think…

Pearson hasn’t published a column since 29 September so we’ve yet to get her thoughts — another word I’m using in its loosest sense — on Truss’ travails.

However, The Daily Telegraph has no shortage of commentators already acting as though they played no role in the Prime Minister’s “astonishing rise to power” (credit: Harry Cole, star biographer).

Builderphobic, bowtie-enthusiast and haunted marionette, Tim Stanley, writes in his latest column (Truss offered us risk and ambition but is now left flogging an utterly dead horse) that:

When Boris gave a speech this deluded, I wanted to reach into the screen and slap him. When Truss does it, I want to hug her. Call it chivalry, call it sexism, but I feel genuinely sorry for a woman who offered us risk and ambition with the fire of a true believer, only to be let down by bankers, traders and MPs, all of them supposedly acolytes of the same macho religion.

Stanley’s sketch from September 5th, the day Truss won the leadership election, was headlined Liz Truss has resurrected the idea of conservatism, and the Left will hate her for it. In it, he wrote:

[Truss] promises to be coherent in a way we've not seen since the Tories privatised the brontosaurus and Lord Tebbit told Piltdown man to get on his wheel and work. 

… A widely-read Westminster email briefing that morning referred to Tory members as "swivel-eyed loons", and by the time Liz had thanked those present for making her the happiest woman in the world, the pundit verdict on Twitter was that she was weird, hopeless, an empty vessel doomed to failure and divisive. She only got 57 per cent of the vote. "What a loser!"

Now that Truss has turned out to be as coherent as a bad day at a head injury clinic, Stanley simply displays a guppy-like memory loss; was that castle he just swam past there the last time around? Who’s to say? What remains certain is that the Telegraph pays his salary so the Telegraph is right no matter what it was saying yesterday.

For Allister Heath — the angry egg who in the dim and distant age of… late September was assuring his readers that “Liz Truss [was] about to deliver a Brexit that actually works” — not even the Prime Minister can be wrong. His particular kind of paranoid worldview requires endless ghost arms to tilt against. So now he machine guns his blame in every direction but towards himself or the politicians he’s praised:

There are now too many zombies, with too much to lose: over-indebted companies, too many homeowners and buy-to-let investors whose lifestyles, tragically, are only sustainable on 1 to 2 per cent interest rates, too many car buyers who thought that the cheap credit would be available forever. There was even more of a sense of entitlement to cheap debt, especially among the middle classes, than Truss realised, and they all blame her for their pain, even though mortgages are now nearing 7 per cent in the United States.

This is the same Heath who opened his column on 23rd September by declaring:

This was the best Budget I have ever heard a British Chancellor deliver, by a massive margin… Hardcore, unapologetic liberal Toryism is back.

The Seymour-Skinnerish belief in The Telegraph’s eternal rightness is there in its leader column today, which grumbles:

… the Prime Minister deserves a chance to see the rest of her agenda through. Although they fumbled the execution disastrously, Ms Truss and Mr Kwarteng’s central analysis was right. The status quo has failed. The wrong people with the wrong ideas have managed the economy into decline. There has been too much focus on the redistribution of limited wealth, rather than on creating more of it. Successive governments have been unwilling to address obvious deficiencies – particularly in areas such as energy policy – out of cowardice and short-termism.

With varying degrees of sufferance, The Daily Telegraph has backed every single one of the “wrong people with the wrong ideas” who have sat in Downing Street since 2010. But it doesn’t stop for a moment to question its role because it cannot, any more than a shark can contemplate whether shredding a seal into a soup of bloody chum might contribute to a decline in population numbers.

The Times has earned easily plaudits for Matthew Parris’ predictions that Truss would be a disaster, but others like Iain Martin have been allowed to magic away their earlier enthusiasm for the Prime Minister. In July, during the heatstroke-inducing height of the Roy leadership contest, he wrote:

Call her crackers all you like, berate her for supposedly being bonkers, but Liz Truss is winning the race to be Conservative leader and giving her party’s establishment a good thrashing in the process.

… Truss’s adaptability on the Bank, taxation and hopefully energy policy is an asset. Part of the reason she’s winning, I suspect, is that Tory members have picked up on the notion that Sunak is too rigid.

None of this is to understate the seriousness of the problems Truss would face in a future general election. The polling suggests a public unconvinced. She induces in some an intense dislike I struggle to square with the person I’ve encountered down the years. If she wins she will have a tough job changing perceptions. But she is tough.

Now, responding to the Prime Minister’s 8-minute press conference — an occurrence so sleight it would barely be worth monetising on YouTube — Martin says:

This was a strange, unsettling, robotic performance. The statement began with unsteady incantation, a wooden reiteration of her pro-growth agenda, a programme that has now gone up in flames. Only when she paid tribute to her friend the former chancellor was there a glimpse of feeling.

… In human terms, it is difficult to avoid feeling sympathy for a person going through this collapse. For all that Truss likes photo-calls, she is not comfortable with genuine argument or adapting her thinking.

For so long her aim was to become prime minister. Her assumption that a spirit of radical adventurism, a can-do libertarianism, would carry her through and unleash optimism and growth has turned out to be wrong.

And so did Martin but he won’t say so; instead, his inability to understand why people so disliked Truss before she became PM is waved away, and his assurance that “she is tough” rather than “rigid” like Sunak isn’t quoted back to him, soundtracked by the most derisive canned laughter the sound effects library has to offer.

In July 1940, Guilty Men — a broadside written by Cato (a collective pen name shared by Michael Foot, Frank Owen, and Peter Howard) — laid out a case against appeasers and others who had failed to stand up to Hitler. The book’s blunt slogan was “let the guilty men retire”.

In 2022, the gilty men¹ (and women) include many with national newspaper columns and regular slots on TV and radio. But they will not be called to account for trumpeting Truss or the inadequates, crooks, con artists, grifters, and fools who came before her. Their views will continue to be quoted as if they carry great merit, and the positions of the newspapers and broadcasters for which they work will go on being treated as important.

Telling their readers and listeners that Truss was anything but a disaster not simply waiting to happen but already in progress required a combination of monstrous over-confidence and casual contempt. Despite easily searched archives, columnists assume their readers have incredibly short memories. Remembering is a curse but it’s one with which I hope you are afflicted. Don’t forget and don’t forgive.

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Read more: Rupert Murdoch Death Party

1. It’s a terrible pun and I stand by it.