Living in the Mailocracy: Forget Murdoch, as the war on GPs illustrates, it's Rothermere who really rules Britain
Living in the Mailocracy: Forget Murdoch, as the war on GPs illustrates, it's Rothermere who really rules Britain
Sajid Javid debasing himself and disparaging GPS for the benefit of the Daily Mail is just the latest example of the paper's chokehold on public debate.
“The Murdoch press” is one of the most common bits of shorthand used for the British newspapers, but in many ways that gives the acidic Antipodean despot far more credit than he deserves; it buys into a myth polished and pushed by his own papers: We’ll never be allowed to forget 1992’s It's The Sun Wot Won It front page or the deal with the devil done by Tony Blair.
But even though Murdoch has been a dominant figure in the British media since 1968 when he snatched The News of the World after a fairly one-sided battled with Robert Maxwell, he’s a newcomer compared to the Rothermere family. Lord Rothermere (Jonathan Harold Esmond Vere Harmsworth) is the fourth Viscount Rothermere, a title that originated with his great-grandfather, the Daily Mail co-founder — along with his brother Viscount Northcliffe — and British Union of Fascists fanboy Harold Sidney Harmsworth.
Viscounts Northcliffe and Rothermere were two of their barrister father Alfred’s fourteen children; of the eleven who survived to adulthood, five were given hereditary titles, two became prominent politicians (Cecil and Leicester), three were newspaper proprietors (two who were spectacularly successful and one spectacularly not) and one (William) founded the Perrier brand and designed its famous green bottles.
The life of the unsuccessful Harmsworth newspaper baron — Sir Hildebrand Aubrey Harmsworth — throws up an early example of The Daily Mail’s hypocrisy. Hildebrand dropped out of Oxford, twice failed to get elected to parliament, edited the short-lived New Liberal Review with his politician brother Cecil and was briefly the proprietor of The Globe newspaper (between 1908 and 1911).
He was made a baronet in the 1922 Birthday Honours, a long list of controversial choices proposed by David Lloyd George, which led to the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925 (that worked well, didn’t it?) and when he received the title his family, well aware of his fecklessness, sarcastically telegrammed him, “At last, a grateful nation has given you your due reward.”
However, the clash between the ‘morality’ of The Daily Mail and the reality of the Rothermere family came 17 years before Hildebrand’s unearned honour. In 1905, in the midst of a fevered national debate about the safety of new-fangled motor cars, The Daily Mail reported on Britain’s first hit-and-run, the killing of four-year-old William Clifton in the Hertfordshire village of Markyate.
In Representation of British Motoring (2007), David Jeremiah writes of the case:
Initially, the motoring journals regarded the reports as another attempt to discredit motorists. However, as events unfolded, an extraordinary story of deception came to the surface.
On 19 April, The Daily Mail carried its first brief not that a child had been killed and, as the driver had failed to stop, the police were making inquiries into the incident and the whereabouts of the vehicle. The next day, the accident was the subject of the editorial and after making the demand for driving tests and certificates of competence, it announced that the newspaper would offer a £100 reward for information that would help catch the ‘motor criminals’…
I suspect you know where this is going…
Two days later, the mystery was solved… the motor-car was owned by Hildebrand Harmsworth, the brother of Sir Alfred, the proprietor of The Daily Mail. At the time of the accident, the motor-car was being driven by the chauffeur, who was carrying two of Harmsworth’s political supporters.
At first, he denied any involvement and then said that, having only dealt the boy a glancing blow, he had not thought it serious enough to stop.
The chauffeur, Rocco Corpalbas, was found guilty of feloniously killing and slaying William Clifton and sentenced to six months of hard labour. Harmsworth, as Jeremiah writes, “announced that he would give £300 as a fund to be administered by the vicar to help the mother of the dead child”, his ‘generosity’ was mentioned in court. The passengers who had not told the Corpalbas to stop were merely “censured”.
Alfred and Harold’s Daily Mail never did payout on that £100 reward and seem not to have covered Hildebrand’s connection to the hit-and-run.
The Daily Mail of 2021 is no less than selective in its reporting. This week its obsession has been a new round of attacks on GPs, branded as the “Let’s See GPs Face To Face campaign”.
It’s one of the Mail’s favourite tactics: Create a campaign, hammer away at it day after day (and sometimes week after week or month upon month) until you’re able to force some concession or even something resembling a policy out of government or, at least, make it appear that that has happened.
In fact — as was the case in 2004 when The Sun and the Labour government colluded to link a campaign on the “immigration crisis” with the announcement of a crackdown from Home Secretary David Blunkett — the Mail and politicians are often working hand-in-hand.
On Monday, The Daily Mail splashed with the headline Just A Single GP For Every 2,000 Patients, on Tuesday it went with an op-ed from a retired surgeon arguing If family doctors will only work part-time, our GP system needs radical surgery and then — surprise! — on Wednesday it hooted Victory For Mail As GPs Freed From Covid Rules, touting a government briefing that the Health Secretary Sajid Javid would “hold to account… the small minority of GPs resisting a return to face-to-face appointments.”
Yesterday, saw The Daily Mail front page once again dedicated to explaining the brilliance of The Daily Mail with the headline GPs: The New Face-To-Face Revolution, a news story praising Sajid Javid for “[launching] a revolution in GP access” and a box out declaring it “not our victory alone” but one for “millions of anxious of patients”.
GP, Dr David Lloyd, told Sky News yesterday:
This is the health service being run by The Daily Mail and they have worked tirelessly… and I’m sure there are examples of things that have gone wrong because of Covid and not being able to being able to see patients face-to-face, but I promise you GPs are working harder than they have ever done before and so to have a series of targets set at this stage, when we are trying to change things and make things for the better is an interesting comment from our health secretary. The average GP is now working 1.3 whole time equivalents per week so we’re working 30% harder than we should do. We’re seeing 40 or 45 patients a day, rather than 27, which is accepted to be safe. We’re working as hard as we can so these instant texts rating our service as they leave and turning us into an Amazon or Google commodity is an interesting concept.
“Interesting” is used there in its British sense, meaning “total horseshit”.
Earlier in the day, Kay Burley had interviewed Sajid Javid and asked him, “Who runs the NHS — you or The Daily Mail?” The minister replied, flustered and with visions of Daily Mail editorials flashing through his pickled egg brain:
Well, the NHS is… err.. run… err… everyone knows how the NHS is run through professional serious management. We’ve just appointed a new CEO of the NHS and its GPs that will decide in their particular surgery how they’re going to run that day today but what they’ve also said is that they need more support…
“They’re burned out, they’re knackered, they’re depressed and they feel like you are bashing them,” Burley countered and Javid changed the subject:
Well, actually, there have actually been over the last few months… some horrid cases of abuse towards health workers, to social care workers, to GPs included in that, and I have to say that is totally unacceptable at any level. There is zero tolerance to abuse to anyone in health and social care…
Except, of course, if that abuse is conducted via the pages of The Daily Mail, where, on Thursday, an op-ed by Javid headlined The Mail’s right. Patients MUST be able to see their doctor the way they want — now they can was printed alongside a story promising League Tables To Keep GPs On Track and a pull quote from the Prime Minister praising the Mail.
Over the page, alongside a collage of Daily Mail headlines attacking GPs, that new Chief Executive of the NHS who Javid boasted about to Kay Burley, Amanda Pritchard, contributed her own editorial sucking up to the Mail (“The Daily Mail continues to be a strong voice for patients, and throughout the pandemic, the newspaper has given fantastic backing to NHS staff…1”).
In today’s Mail, Dr Renee Hoenderkamp — an NHS GP, broadcaster, and frequent Daily Mail contributor who has written several articles attacking lockdowns and arguing against Covid vaccinations for teenagers — contributes another op-ed, this one attacking unions ("As a GP, I’m appalled by militant doctor union’s hostility to Sajid’s2 face-to-face crusade”). It shares a double-page spread with a story that promises a Probe to single out failing GP practices.
In 2016, a large scale study by the King’s Fund (Understanding pressures in general practice) found that a large number of GPs working less than full-time hours was deceptive. It wasn’t just about mothers cutting down their hours after having children or GPs slowing down as they neared retirement but was, in fact, a way of continuing in the profession and trying to avoid burnout. The study found lots of GPs were using their ‘days off’ to deal with paperwork.
But that kind of subtly doesn’t make for ‘powerful’ Daily Mail editorials or lead to the paper-shifting anger that strident campaigns do. Does The Daily Mail run Britain? Well, Sajid Javid turned up in its pages rather than speak to the Royal College of General Practioners’ conference in Liverpool yesterday as he was scheduled to do. And while he preaches the gospel of the NHS by rote, he’s still giving the Mail the fire and brimstone answers it demands.
Lord Rothermere keeps his head down much more than Rupert Murdoch, but his publications are the most effective propaganda organs in the world. That’s why the Prime Minister debases himself to praise their campaigns and the Health Secretary offers sycophantic op-eds. They don’t ‘love’ the NHS — they tolerate it — but they love The Daily Mail and its ability to turn anyone but its tame politicians into the enemy.
It was once said by Richard ‘Dick’ Crossman, the Labour politician, News Statesman hack, and Second World War/Cold War propagandist that, “The way to carry out good propaganda is never to appear to be carrying it out at all.” If that rule still applies then The Daily Mail is not good propaganda — you can see the mechanism of its means of persuasion at all times — but it is effective propaganda nonetheless because the government bends to it, the broadcast media repeats it, and a large portion of the population believes it.
Of course, Lord Rothermere doesn’t really run Britain. That would require getting his hands dirty and he has underlings to do that for him. Some work for The Daily Mail, while others work in Downing Street.
Citation very much fucking needed.
First name terms, is it?