Ignoring the Truss deficit
The British political press is complicit again in offering the Tories a reset...
Previously: The trial of the trial of Boris Johnson
The Daily Mail has decided that British weather votes Tory. The rain stopping just before Liz Truss made her Downing Street speech was “a moment loaded with cheering symbolism” according to its front page today, rather than the result of the new Prime Minister’s team delaying the speech until the storm was forecast to end.
In the piece that follows, Jan Moir — a woman who should have been done in journalism after her notorious Stephen Gately column 13 years ago — writes that:
Just as suddenly as it began, the rain stopped… Somehow, the gods were on her side and Liz Truss made her speech at the podium just as she had planned and tradition demanded… She had snatched a great victory from the jaws of defeat, and she didn’t even get her hair wet. Very impressive.
The bar’s so low an ant couldn’t limbo under it. And after years of telling us Boris Johnson’s bonhomie and bullshit were the answer to ‘boring’ politics, Moir offered the Mail’s new line:
After the florid dramas of recent political times, what people want right now is a Liz Truss, a rock-solid Plain Jane who can get us in to see a doctor before next Christmas and maybe do something about the economy at the same time.
That’s the same Liz Truss who’s been in the Cabinet continuously for the past 8 years. But the line the Mail is again enthusiastically endorsing is that she represents “a change”, just as Theresa May and Boris Johnson did before her, another regeneration for the Tory time lords.
If Truss was someone the Mail wanted to attack, Moir would not be heralding her “sensible navy dress, fresh blonde highlights, and total lack of pizzazz” as positives — they’d find a fashion writer to call her dowdy — and the Prime Minister’s long history of ‘pivots’ on policy would be derided as “u-turns” rather than “a long waltz through politics and ideologies”.
Similarly, were Truss not in the paper’s good books, for now, Sarah Vine — who makes sure to mention that “Truss has sat around my dinner table…” — would not be writing to decry misogynistic commentary but actively contributing to it.
Vine was obsessing over the Duchess of Sussex again just this week and who can forget her 2015 column about a lawyer who objected to a man commenting on her looks via LinkedIn, which carried the headline: A glam lawyer and the Feminazi’s who hate men who praise their looks? Of course, it’s “the Left’s misogyny” that Vine is so keen to call out, while she avoids letting her eyes drift towards ‘the sidebar of shame’ that sits festering beside her articles on MailOnline.
Over at The Daily Telegraph, Allison Pearson also detects misogyny from anyone who has decided on the mere evidence of their eyes and ears that Truss is crap. She writes:
I don’t use the word misogyny lightly, but I have been shocked by the hateful abuse hurled at Liz Truss by lofty male commentators. “The worst PM ever,” suggested one. “Is Truss the new Corbyn?” demanded another. Not unless she is keeping her loony Marxist views very well hidden.
There seems to be a chappish consensus that this new woman is a bit dim. On Twitter, the monstrous regiment of lefties calls her Thick Lizzy (a variation on the Irish band Thin Lizzy). Although Truss ended up reading PPE, I’m told by one of her contemporaries that she got into Merton College to read maths. A girl from a Northern comprehensive does not win a mathematics place at Oxford without being seriously clever.
If anything, I reckon it is a slight spoddy tendency, inherited from her maths-lecturer father, which inhibits Truss’s ability to communicate with feeling. A deficiency in expressiveness and verbal felicity doesn’t mean a lack of thinking power. Quite the contrary. Wiffly, wordy arts graduates have had their turn running the country; time to let the numbers girl have a go.
As is so often the case with her columns, Pearson can’t keep her argument straight from one paragraph to the next; first, she patronises Truss (“a girl from a Northern comprehensive does not win a mathematics place at Oxford without being seriously clever…”), then she remembers her maths professor father in the very next sentence.
Having noted that Truss didn’t stick with maths and instead switched to PPE — the most cursèd degree of the British ruling classes — Pearson still pretends that we’re now "[letting] the numbers girl have a go”. It’s also notable that she doesn’t mention the “Is Truss the new Corbyn?” article ran in The Spectator, which is also owned by the Telegraph’s proprietor — the remaining Barclay brother — and edited by Telegraph columnist Fraser Nelson.
Pearson fills out the rest of her column with 10 pieces of advice for Truss, including one of the greatest examples of “I’m in the media but not the media” self-deception:
Ignore the media. Most of them hate you anyway. They brought down Boris and now they’ve developed a taste for toppling prime ministers whom they find ideologically odious. Go direct to the British people as often as you can. Be straight with them about the difficulties we face. Even if they don’t like your politics, they will appreciate your honesty.
This isn’t the same Allison Pearson who wrote, “my love affair with Boris is over” in June 2022 and she certainly hasn’t been a columnist in “the metropolitan bubble” she derides for 30 years and counting. Then again, like many columnists, Pearson has had her object permanence and medium-term memory removed for professional reasons. Give it three months and she’ll have no recollection of how keen on Truss she is now.
For The Times, Alice Thomson, Daniel Finkelstein and Matthew Parris — who used his notebook column today to mention again that he didn’t back her — all conclude that Truss won her first Prime Minister’s Questions. Henry Hill of Conservative Home comes to the same verdict for The Telegraph. It’s almost as if Tories back Tories and the copy could have been written long before Truss got anywhere near the dispatch box.
Andrew Sparrow for The Guardian, though he declared that Truss’s performance was “no triumph”, was still fooled by the superficial differences between her and Boris Johnson, writing:
Truss marks a very welcome change from Boris Johnson in that for the most part she was willing to answer questions and engage in an argument about policy and ideas. This, of course, is what is meant to happen. But for the last three years we have been governed by a prime minister much more interested in politics as performance and entertainment, and so it is refreshing to tilt back to ideas.
Truss is engaged in a performance; it’s just that this one is the pretence of seriousness, rather than the outright clown act that Johnson revelled in. Sparrow is as taken in by the presentation as Moir was by the “sensible navy dress”. And while The Guardian’s leader column says Truss offers “a new direction but nowhere to go”, it implicitly accepts that she is a change rather than a continuity candidate with superficial aesthetic differences, the latest chapter in 12 years of Conservative government.
The political press is also giving a performance. It was there in the assertion that yesterday was “a historic moment” rather than almost routine — the fourth ‘new’ Prime Minister in 6 years. It’s there in the post-match dissections of PMQs and the calls for us to “give Liz a chance”, which come most loudly from The Sun’s leader column — which says anyone not backing her “[does] not have Britain’s interests at heart” — and The Times’ comment section where William Hague led the charge.
The right-wing press is rowing in behind Truss now but she should think back to when The Daily Mail put a cartoon of Theresa May on its front page with the headline Steel of the new Iron Lady (January 18, 2017) and menacingly hailed her plan for a snap election as a chance to Crush the saboteurs (April 19, 2017). But then again, that’s 5 years and two Prime Ministers ago, so we’re meant to have forgotten all about that.
Allison Pearson surely has…
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It is eye opening that there's barely a mainstream journo/columnist dissenting from the ranks.
No column discussing "Is this best for Britain?" ; "Have the Conservatives failed?" ; "Is Truss up to the job?"
It's not as if there isn't material to go round!