Narcissistic Journalism Disorder: Isabel Oakeshott shows how to make the story all about you...
Narcissistic Journalism Disorder: Isabel Oakeshott shows how to make the story all about you...
... even when you had it and missed it.
Now: Guest writer, Greg D Smith, offers his response to Isabel Oakeshott’s effort to insert herself into the ‘Matt Hancock affair’ story…
I want to apologise…
That’s how Isabel Oakeshott’s latest contribution in The Spectator begins…
I have let myself down. I let others down too, and I’m sorry.
Looking back on Oakeshott’s career as a journalist, there are many things for which she could apologise. Not least among them is forcing the entire nation to envision its then-Prime Minister waggling his genitals in the dismembered head of a pig as part of a bizarre Bullingdon Club initiation ritual only to admit that it probably never happened and that her single source for the story may well have been “deranged”.
But Oakeshott is not apologising for any of the real sins of her career — detailed in Mic’s newsletter this morning — in this lengthy mea culpa. No, she wants to apologise to you and the rest of the country for… not having broken the Matt Hancock story before The Sun did.
In fact, Oakeshott is happy to list the greatest (s)hits of her career to date. “Over the years,” she writes, “my scoops have led variously to…” and goes on to list a series of lives she has upturned and careers she has cut short before ending on that dead pig story. She writes:
Say what you like, but only the shock departure of teen heartthrob Zayn Malik from the band One Direction attracted more tweets and memes that year.
And so to the Hancock story. Oakeshott says she received a screencap of the now infamous high school disco-style fumble between Hancock and Gina Condangelo — frequently reported to be his “aide” but, in fact, a non-executive director appointed by Hancock to a board meant to scrutinise him and his former department — from an “important contact” on 20 June.
She goes on to describe that ‘contact’ as “a successful entrepreneur” and “an anti-establishment figure with a dim view of politicians in general and a disdain for the architects of the lockdown policy”. Given Oakeshott’s relationship with Richard Tice and ties to the ‘Bad Boys of Brexit’ that points to a fairly small pool of potential suspects.
But Oakeshott didn’t believe the image. She wasn’t convinced that her contact — as important as she claims them to be — would have been the sort of person to receive “this kind of kompromat”. She says the screengrab was poor quality, seemed faked, didn’t look like Hancock, and had been sent from an untraceable email account. It’s at this point that the story gets weird… well, weirder.
Having presented herself as a go-getting journo who pounds the mean streets to get scoops others envy, Oakeshott then dedicates a paragraph to moaning that it’s difficult to be a journalist beset by cranks and pranksters, their bothersome meddling meaning you actually have to verify information, check sources, and confirm evidence. You know, exactly the kind of stuff you might expect an award-winning former political editor of The Sunday Times to take in her stride…
… but no. “Over the years, even the most brilliant journalists have fallen victim to hoaxes,” Oakeshott writes, before listing Piers Morgan’s dismissal as Daily Mirror editor after he published fake photographs purporting to show British soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners, and Frank Giles’ publishing the Hitler Diaries.
I’m not sure what’s worse: That she writes as if these two examples are a reason for a journalist to just throw up her hands and admit defeat, or that she feels that Piers Morgan is “an excellent reporter” rather than a rent-a-gob of such fragility that he stormed off set on live TV the second someone offered him the tiniest spoonful of criticism, despite Good Morning, Britain being a show where he shouted, harangued, and chuntered over guests and co-presenters endlessly.
After having meandered through several paragraphs of “apology” to her readers, Oakeshott closes by assuring them that she is “hungrier than ever for the next political scalp” and issues a threat to “other politicians with skeletons” — “the next one won’t slip through my grasp.”
In just under 800 words, Oakeshott relays just one relevant fact — she missed the story because verifying it looked like hard work. Only in the current onanistic world of UK journalism and political journalism particularly could someone who identifies as a journalist be given 800 words in a magazine to detail how they failed to do their job because they couldn’t be bothered with the basics.
The Sun also made the story all about itself. It skimmed over the more serious questions about conflicts of interest and how CCTV footage from a cabinet minister’s office ended up in its hands so easily. Other news organisations broadly followed suit, allowing Hancock to slither away mostly unscathed for now, “setting up a new life” with his new “love”.
But only Oakeshott had the levels of narcissism required to toss all other elements of the story to one side to focus on the real ‘scoop’ — herself.