It’s beginning to look a lot like Shitmas! The Daily Mail's annual Christmas paranoia comes earlier every year.
The "Winterval" myth is dead but the Mail finds other anti-Santa conspiracies.
The 10th anniversary of an important event in British media passed without fanfare on November 8th. On that day in 2011, The Daily Mail finally admitted that one of its favourite stories was, in fact, a myth. In 1997, Birmingham City Council was working on a city centre rejuvenation campaign and needed a way of branding events stretching from Children In Need in mid-October through to its New Year’s Eve bash and including Diwali and, crucially, Christmas.
The council’s head of events, Mike Chubb, and his team came up with the name Winterval (a portmanteau of “winter” and “festival”). But what was a simply act of branding quickly became mutated into the myth of a council “cancelling Christmas”, through a story in a local newspaper which was repeated by BBC News then seized upon by the nationals.
As Kevin Arscott wrote for The Guardian in 2011 — the year of the miraculous Daily Mail correction — what started as a myth about one council rebranding Christmas became a narrative that many councils and other “authorities” were adopting the Winterval name.
By Arscott’s calculation, the story was repeated 44 times by The Daily Mail between 1998 and 2011, beating The Times and Sunday Times into second place with 40 mentions. The Sun featured it 31 times, The Daily Express 26 times, The Daily Telegraph 22 times, The Guardian 6 times, and The Daily Mirror on just 4 occasions.
The Mail’s 2011 admission read:
We stated in an article on 26 September that Christmas has been renamed in various places Winterval.
Winterval was the collective name for a season of public events, both religious and secular, which took place in Birmingham in 1997 and 1998.
We are happy to make clear that Winterval did not rename or replace Christmas.
… but it served only to correct an article by Melanie Phillips from September that year, which headlined Our language is being hijacked by the Left to muzzle rational debate and included the winterval myth. That left 43 other stories uncorrected but it was enough to provoke The Week, The New Statesman and The Guardian to publish stories celebrating the Mail’s climbdown.
But dig into the Mail’s online archive and you’ll find that the myth soon returned. Just over a month after the correction, Mail columnist Michael Hanlon brought the myth back to its pages, claiming that it was, in fact, “something of an urban myth that this is an urban myth”.
In 2013, the Mail revived the myth again in a piece lambasting then Lib Dem MP Lorely Burt for being “un-British” and “[smacking] of political correctness” for using the phrase “happy holidays” in her Christmas cards. This, said the Mail, had “[drawn] comparisons to the 1990s Winterval furore in Birmingham”. And who had their pencil out to draw those comparisons? A Daily Mail reporter.
After several fallow years — it’s the Glastonbury of maddening tabloid myths — the Winterval story was back with a bang in 2016, appearing in three stories Mail stories — two on the back of an Equality and Human Rights Commission report that recycled the ‘Winterval’ meme1 and one promoting a book about an even bigger myth “the War on Christmas”2.
“Winterval” made another appearance in 2017 as an aside in a story praising the owner of The Entertainer toy stores for closing on Chrismas Eve as it fell on a Sunday3, but hasn’t been seen since. But that hasn’t stopped the paper from ginning up other ways to foster festive paranoia.
Today’s Mail on Sunday front page howled:
As mutant strain throws winter holidays into chaos and forces return of masks, Ministers are warned that using the world Christmas in jab drive will offend minorities…
The Woke Blob is not the movie sequel Theodore Simonson didn’t live long enough to write, in which the alien creature is placated by being referred to by the right pronouns and treated properly. Instead, it’s a phrase pushed by Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings during their time at the Department for Education and used by both Paul Dacre in his recent letter to The Times and Sarah Vine in her Mail on Sunday column today to refer dismissively to any group of civil servants deemed to be insufficiently doctrinaire.
Glen Owen, the Mail on Sunday’s permanently furious Political Editor (imagine every school bully from Grange Hill melted into a single man), is byline on the ‘woke blob’ splash and balances the outrage of three — yes, three! — leaked emails between civil servants. He writes:
The Government plans to use social media ‘influencers’ on sites such as TikTok, to urge the 1.2 million students who will be travelling home at the end of term to take a Covid test before they do. But in an email sent on Thursday, an official said: “We have been advised by the Cabinet Office that we should not use the word Christmas — as the Government campaign needs to be inclusive and some religions don’t celebrate Christmas…
The other option was ‘festive season’ which keeps the emotional motivation. We have done with ‘Don’t take Covid-19 home for the holidays” — as it links to school and university Christmas holidays. The alliteration with “home” and “holidays” scans well and is memorable.”
Another official then objects: “We don’t refer to Christmas as the holidays (that’s an Americanism). Please can we say, ‘Don’t take Covid-19 home’.”
Earlier in the story, Owen claims the emails have “sparked a row over ‘wokeism’ in the Civil Service — which has been disparagingly nicknamed ‘the Blob’ by critics — with one Muslim Tory MP branding the ban ‘ridiculous’.” Let’s unpack that sentence a little.
The “row” is most likely entirely of the Mail on Sunday’s creation. Someone in the civil service has leaked the emails to cause trouble, get their own way, or drop someone else in the shit and Owen is facilitating that because he gets to blow his well-used dog whistle and imply the government is pandering to Muslims and that it’s “political correctness gone madder”.
The reason Owen is able to write that “one Muslim Tory MP [has branded] the ban ‘ridiculous’” is because he rang him up and solicited a quote. Saqib Bhatti — who was previously a guest on Andrew Pierce MailPlus podcast — says:
As a Muslim, I find it ridiculous we can’t enjoy this special time of year. I look forward to showing my new son his first Christmas tree. The idea you can’t mention Christmas is completely ridiculous. It’s a time to celebrate, whatever your background. It’s part of the British culture I love. It’s the celebration of all cultures that makes this the most welcoming country in the world.
I’m proud of that and proud to celebrate Christmas. The Blob needs to stop waging war on Christmas and get on with delivering for the British people.
An “as an… X” quote is golden for a hack. It allows the writer to disparage and make insinuations about a whole group of people while having a representative from that group — carefully selected — who is willing to agree with the line. The mention of “the Blob” in Bhatti’s statement is a big flashing indicator that he’s lashed together a ‘suitable’ response with Owen.
Of course there’s no mention of a “ban” in the emails that Owen presents in the piece — in fact there’s no detail on which department wrote them nor on which Cabinet Office officials decided “Christmas” shouldn’t feature in the campaign — but most readers in print won’t look on page 2 for the rest of the story and people reading online are unlikely to scroll down that far. The headline does the job and it doesn’t really matter much if the copy has the goods to deliver on it.
The Mail has been implying, insinuating, and outright saying that Muslims are offended by people celebrating or even mentioning Christmas for years. As with Owen’s front page splash it doesn’t have any evidence beyond the odd fringe group making noise but that won’t stop it because it knows a significant swathe of its readership will believe it.
In 2006, for instance, it joined The Sun and The Daily Express in propogating the tale that a navity scene had been taken down in a Belgian town for fear of offending one of four Muslims living in Holsbeek. In fact two nativity scenes had been removed from the municipal hall in order to preserve the separation of church and state.
The original Mail story is still up and while it notes that church/state explanation in the fourth of four intro bullet points, the headline still reads Nativity scene is 'banned' in case it offends one of the FOUR Muslims living in a Belgian town and the copy begins:
A traditional nativity scene will not be put up in a Belgian town this year, amid claims it was scrapped in order to avoid offending Muslims.
A 2008 story headlined Primary school cancels nativity play because it interferes with Muslim festival of Eid boiled down to poor scheduling on a Nottingham school’s part rather than a sinister Muslim plan to usurp Christmas.
In 2017, a seemingly innocuous MailOnline story which rehashed a BBC Good Food column in which the Great British Bake Off winner and BBC presenter Nadiya Hussain talked about making Christmas dinner provoked over 1,500 comments, many of them virulently racist. Hussein wrote in response:
I get abuse for merely existing. Too brown to be English. Too Muslim to be British. Too Bengali to eat fish fingers. There is no end! I exist, we all do!
The mindset that led to those hundreds of rage-filled comments at the mere idea of Nadiya Hussein making Christmas dinner and daring to talk about it is fuelled by the Mail’s yearly — and year-long — campaign to persuade its readers that there are ‘others’ trying to destroy Britain. And when it comes to Christmas it is so often Muslim people in the frame.
Owen’s story is focused on “the blob” — the civil servants that Vine castigates in her column as “not [having] the skills and experience to address the country’s biggest challenges” (and her ex-husband and Boris Johnson do?) — but it still rests on the insinuation that the problem was “[offending] minorities” and makes it clear precisely which minority Mail readers should be enraged with.
Predictably the 5,000+ comments beneath the article at the time of writing are a cesspit, but among them there’s a very canny contribution:
There's very little substance to this story. A "leaked" claiming civil servants have blocked the word "Christmas". Who was the email from ? Which cabinet office officials vetoed the use of the word? This story gets recycled most Christmases, I'd be really surprised if it was true.
It took 14 years for The Daily Mail to retract the Winterval lie. Will we have to wait that long for Owen and his bosses to come clean about this one?