"How do you sleep?" How Mail hacks justify hit pieces is a waking nightmare...
After a hard shift blowing dog whistles at the gaslight factory, Mail journalists can always find a way to justify their deeds.
Lennon and McCartney continued to be pioneers after The Beatles disintegrated and one thing they were both early masters of was the diss track. Paul put the lightly scathing Too Many People on Ram, wagging his finger at John and Yoko as “people preaching practices”. John replied with the nuclear retort of How Do You Sleep? which declares “those freaks were right when they said you were dead…” and only get harsher.
The refrain, “How do you sleep?”, often runs through my head when I read pieces in The Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday in which hacks have been dispatched to do their own hatchet jobs on individuals who have displeased the editors of those morally puffed up, hypocritical rags.
There were two such stories in the space of two pages in yesterday’s Mail on Sunday; one which drew the attention of most of British journalism Twitter (yet another attack on ex-HuffPost UK editor-in-chief Jess Brammar and her family) and the other (a predictably bad faith attack on civil servants who took part in UKGovcamp) of which criticism was more limited and more muted.1
I’ve written before about the coordinated attacks on Brammar in the right-wing press which came after she was named as a candidate for a job overseeing the output of the BBC’s news channels.
The ‘row’ — it’s more like targeted bullying since a row implies two sides are fighting — began in July when The Financial Times broke the news that cursed ancient egg, Tory MP’s brother, ex-Director of Communications for Theresa May, sometime GB News consigliere, past head of BBC News’ Westminster political programmes turned BBC Board member, Sir Robbie Gibb, was attempting to block Brammar’s hiring.
The Times quickly bundled in with a story headlined No 10 supports Robbie Gibb over claims he blocked BBC appointment of Jess Brammar, which read like a typical piece of stenography from the paper of recording exactly what the government wants on record:
The government has backed a BBC board member after he raised concerns about appointing a journalist who shared left-wing views on social media as head of the broadcaster’s news channels.
The implication was, as I wrote at the time, that only people with ‘sound’ right-wing views, i.e. ones in complete accordance with the government line, need apply for roles at the BBC. That would explain the current Director-General and failed former council candidate for the Tories, Tim Davie, and why Rishi Sunak-mentor/Tory donor Richard Sharp was parachuted into the role of BBC Chairman.
Digging through Brammar’s Twitter account, The Times screamed:
On Saturday old tweets by Brammar emerged in which she claimed there was an “influential camp” at Downing Street that “doesn’t want to reach out to minorities and work with them”. She also accused Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and Nigel Farage of a “sleight of hand” in persuading people they represented “outsiders”. The role would put her in charge of the domestic BBC News channels and BBC World News, which has an audience of 121 million.
‘Emerged’ is a fun journalist’s word that means “we went digging to find these, strip them of context, and interpret them in the most bad faith way possible but want to imply to readers that these messages simply floated to the surface by a completely natural process”.
While The Times presented Brammar’s statements as the ravings of an AK-toting Marxist revolutionary, you could equally see them as a journalist indulging in the unfashionable act of stating the facts and applying a light but accurate amount of analysis to them.
How could she suggest that there was an “influential camp” in Downing Street that seeks to exploit division for political ends? Perhaps she’d read one of several pieces in The Times and Sunday Times that talked about the Spiked-adjacent head of the No 10 Policy Unit, Munira Mirza, urging the Prime Minister to “wage a war on woke” and discussed “how the Tories weaponised ‘woke’” with particular reference to Mirza’s husband, another culture warrior advisor.
Or maybe she just read the words of the Prime Minister’s former advisor on race relations, Samuel Kasamu, who told The Guardian:
There are some people in government who feel like the right way to win is to pick a fight on the culture war and to exploit division.
But was beyond the pale for her to suggest Boris Johson (Eton and Balliol College, Oxford), Nigel Farage (a Dulwich College-educated commodities trader turned pint waving populist tub-thumper) and Donald Trump (the bent billionaire property developer son of a bent billionaire property developer) are not truly tribunes of the working classes, right?
The newspaper attacks on Brammar were followed by a series of smears and sneers from perpetually thirsty, drink-driving enthusiast Paul Staines of running sore/political blog Guido Fawkes. He and his Muttley-like underlings first trawled through her Twitter account then stalked her personal Instagram in search of a smoking post.
Those ‘efforts’ culminated in a post that attacked Brammar for believing that Black lives matter and distorted obvious jokes:
Holding a woke book for toddlers open on the page “P is for Privilege“, she posts “Yes I am very happy to be a parody of myself”. In another post, she says she and her partner, Guardian media editor Jim Waterson, are anti-cars – except when they need to hire one.
The salvo from Staines & Co (“Your carpets pissed on, your rugs ruined…”) was followed by a series of revenge attacks from Jacob Rees Mogg, who Brammar had criticised after he made untrue comments about one of her journalists during her time as HuffPost UK’s editor-in-chief. Mogg used both his execrable podcast, The Moggcast, and an appearance in the House of Commons to cast aspersions upon Brammar’s professionalism and suitability for the BBC role.
Mogg’s comments were then used by The Times to justify another news piece on Brammar which offered a distorted version of the events leading up to them:
Brammar had become embroiled in a bitter dispute with Downing Street in January in her role as editor of the HuffPost UK website. Kemi Badenoch, the Treasury and equalities minister, used Twitter to accuse a HuffPost reporter of “looking to sow distrust by making up claims”.
Brammar responded by accusing Badenoch of fuelling the abuse of “young, female, black journalists”. Two months later Jacob Rees-Mogg, leader of the Commons, accused another HuffPost journalist of being “either a knave or a fool”. Brammar accused him of using the protection of parliamentary privilege “to smear a journalist”.
As I wrote at the time, there was a major and (intentional) omission in The Times’ reporting: Brammar was merely stating a fact: Rees-Mogg did use parliamentary privilege to attack Singh’s reporting. It also neglected to mention that the MP used those comments to big up The Times, his father’s old paper.
Rees-Mogg told parliament he thought such “poor quality, online journalism” was “not the sort of thing that would happen in The Times.” As well as being where his father made his name, The Times is owned by Rupert Murdoch, a firm friend of Jacob Rees-Mogg. Their last publicly declared meeting was listed by Rees-Mogg as “an informal lunch between friends”.
The anti-Brammar campaign flared back into life yesterday with a full page in The Mail on Sunday headlined So much for the BBC’s impartiality promise! — bylined to the paper’s Political Editor Glen Owen and its Showbiz Editor Katie Hinds — and a box out headlined The BLM supporter with toyboy from the Guardian, bylined to Hind alone.
Recounting ‘concerns’ from anonymous government sources, the article opens in traditionally dramatic Mail on Sunday style, declaring:
Relations between Downing Street and the BBC have been plunged into fresh turmoil after the Corporation ignored opposition to the appointment of a Left-wing journalist as head of its news channels.
Readers are assured in the lede that Brammar “tweeted rants against Brexit and Boris” but in the body copy it doesn’t quite sound like that:
Ms Brammar, 28, promoted a series of controversial opinions while she was working for the Huffington Post, the news website, including an article suggesting black people would leave the UK if Mr Johnson was re-elected in 2019. She also described Brexit as being like a popular TV comedy-drama but “less funny”. She has since deleted more than 16,000 posts including calling the term ‘woke’ a ‘dogwhistle’ phrase and promoting a job advertisement from of her own staff that sought only ‘non-binary’ applicants.
Just as “emerged” is a tricksy newspaper word, “promoted” is doing a lot of heavy-lifting here. The implication is that anyone who has worked as an editor for a newspaper or website cannot get a job at the BBC because they will have “promoted” controversial opinions. It’s not that Brammar wrote those pieces — which, by the way, fall well within the scope of being fair comment — but merely that she, as any editor would, promoted work being published by the publication which employed her at the time.
Nadine White, a former colleague of Brammar’s — who she defended against a public attack from Kemi Badenoch, the Treasury and equalities minister, wrote powerfully about the way her anti-racist statements have been twisted:
In December 2019, referring to an article I wrote, which said “black Brits” were “genuinely considering leaving the UK because of the level of racism, particularly if Boris Johnson wins”, Jess added that: “It won’t be a surprise to people who live this reality every day, and in admitting my shock I show my ignorance as a white woman.”
I can confirm that the article was factual and based upon the lived experiences of Black people. Jess, as a white woman, said she was shocked by the revelations. I see no controversy here.
The resounding message behind the attempted vilification of Jess seems to be this: being anti-racist is abhorrent and could potentially harm your career.
The bulk of the main piece is dedicated to unsourced insinuations (“This comes amid staff at the BBC having concerns…”, “An ally of Sir Robbie said…”) and the shock news that Brammar who was previously at the BBC as Deputy Editor of Newsnight knows people still working within the corporation.
Owen and Hind also make big play of asserting that “a spokesman for the BBC would not confirm that it had followed [its own fair recruitment] policy” and that “the BBC refused… to say when the job advert, which had a closing date of May 18, went on its website, or whether it was advertised more widely.”
They conclude the article with a quote from a BBC spokesperson saying: “We do not give a running commentary on recruitment processes. When we are ready to make an announcement about this, we’ll make one.”
But even that appears to have been extremely selective quotation.
When Hind tweeted, in response to criticism of the piece from The Daily Mirror’s Senior Political Correspondent Rachel Wearmouth, that “when I asked the BBC if a fair recruitment process had taken place — repeatedly — they would not say yes,” the BBC News Press Team replied:
For the record, this is the statement we sent you last night: “The role has been advertised under fair and open recruitment and we will make an announcement at the appropriate time.”
While the main article is such a parade of bad faith it’s like a bunch of monks listing their cassocks and windmilling their wedding vegetables at passersby, it's the boxout where the most grotesque elements lie. Not a line passes without a nasty insinuation, personal dig, or unnecessary reference to an element of Brammar’s private family life.
Let’s start with the headline — The BLM supporter with toyboy from the Guardian. As Nadine White said, “being anti-racist is abhorrent and could potentially harm your career” and revenge is being taken on Brammar for standing up to kneejerk claims that there is ‘no racism’ in the British press following Harry and Meghan’s Oprah interview.
The framing of her partner and the father of her child as “a toyboy from the Guardian” is such a shrill dog-whistle that most of the hounds in southern England are still howling. Hind affected amusement at objections to the word “toyboy” (“Oh dear, Twitter doesn’t like the word ‘toyboy’ 🤭”) and pretended it was a compliment (“Come on, what woman doesn’t want a toyboy?”). But the implication was clear to anyone not playing dumb for a salary: “Look at this dreadful leftie and her dreadful leftie younger boyfriend to whom she hasn’t even had the good grace to get married.”
The piece begins with a series of hyperbolic statements:
There are few in the media industry who are not aware of Jess Brammar.
One of the most prolific users of Twitter and Instagram over the past decade, she would regularly share her opinions on anything from politics to restaurants with her thousands of followers.
Katie Hind has 13k Twitter followers and has tweeted thousands of times, sharing her opinions on many things, including, shock horror, Brexit! Glen Owen lurks somewhere on Twitter, either behind a locked account or a different name.
Hind goes on to comment that Brammar “would also regularly share pictures of her partner Jim Waterson, the Guardian’s media editor, on their holidays and nights out” as if that is some incredible revelation before noting that “her tweets were swiftly deleted and her Instagram set to private” when news of the potential BBC job broke. What about hacks like Hinds and the ever-creepy Guido Fawkes rifling through pictures of her family might have made Brammar set her Instagram to private? It’s a mystery.
In a thoroughly feminist move Hind yokes Brammar’s career to Waterson’s, bringing up his 2019 scoop about the row between Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds (a couple whose 24 year age gap rather puts the mere 7 years between Brammar and Waterson into context). The piece names where the couple live — for no good reason — and snidely claims that a Politico ranking that included them among Westminster ‘power couples’ led to “much amusement [among] colleagues at the time”.
But the most unpleasant inclusion in this swamp of insinuation, innuendo, and insults as badly veiled as a bride forced to make do with a doily is mention of Brammar and Waterson’s baby son, who is named, and a reference to fertility treatment. Again on Twitter Hind justified the inclusion of that detail by saying:
So a newspaper can no longer refer to some information put out into the public domain by the person herself?
She was referring to a piece that Brammar wrote for Grazia ('We May Have Been Alone, But Covid Mums Shared A Unique Experience, One Defined By The Depths Of Female Strength And Resilience'), which she began by saying:
We named our baby Jude after my nan’s favourite saint – the patron saint of lost causes. Born when I was 37 after a year of gruelling fertility treatment, I had picked the name partly as a lighthearted nod to all that, with no idea what the first year of his life would hold for me and so many other new mums.
So yes, Brammar’s son’s name was in the public domain, as was the way in which he came to be, but while Hind acts like context is a term for WhatsApp messages from government ‘sources’, it actually matters.
Brammar chose to write about her experience with fertility treatment as part of an article about mothers. Hind and her editors included it as the kicker of a hit piece, at the conclusion of an entire page of insinuations and cruelties.
The references to Brammar’s child were not included to engender sympathy amongst Mail On Sunday readers for her but to imply, after comments about her “[enjoying] a 15-year career in television and online media” — as if it were simply handed to her — that she ‘left it too late’ to have a child. “Just saying,” is an unofficial slogan among Mail journalists. You can never let on that you know exactly what you’re doing.
In February, Hind wrote a piece about political misogyny and Carrie Johnson. She concluded it by saying, “Here's a novel idea… let's stop looking at the woman and focus on the men.” Curious that she and Owen didn’t put this advice into practice by looking into Sir Robbie Gibb, his politics, and the fact that he didn’t declare his membership of a Tory lobbying forum when he took up the role on the BBC Board. Perhaps only right-wing women are worthy of defending.
I wouldn’t waste my time asking Hind — who pointedly posted video of playing with her dog and photos of afternoon pints at the pub yesterday — or any other Mail employee how they sleep at night. They sleep the uninterrupted sleep of those who have convinced themselves that they are morally just.
For Hind, Owen and the editors who assigned them to write the Brammar hit piece, it was all in a day’s work.
I’ll write more about this story soon.