Neil before Sod: GB News goes full Fox, Giles Coren can’t apologise and… Boris Johnson in unreliable shit shocker
Neil before Sod: GB News goes full Fox, Giles Coren can’t apologise and… Boris Johnson in unreliable shit shocker
As the schools go back, we’re still stuck with a media class that refuses to learn even the most simple lessons.
It’s a new term but nothing much really changes in the deranged boarding school of British media and politics.
GB News, which anyone who was paying attention predicted would shift into a full-on Fox News for the continuity wing of UKIP is “mulling a plan to remodel GB News along the lines of opinionated American television channels such as… Fox”, Andrew Neil is still AWOL, Giles Coren remains the Keyser Söze of shitheads, believing a disappearing act can absolve him of all crimes, and Tory commentators are once again shocked to discover that Boris Johnson is a moral and political vacuum (stare into the abyss and the abyss stares back at someone else’s wife).
As recently as June, while he was doing pre-launch press for the new channel with the familiar taste of flat-roof pub opinions, Andrew Neil insisted to The Evening Standard that GB News would "not be like Fox… they come from a hard-right disinformation fake news conspiracy agenda. I have worked too long and hard to build up a journalistic reputation to consider going down that route.”
To rubes familiar only with Neil’s political interviews for the BBC the notion that he was a clearly right-wing but ‘balanced’ interlocuter is easy to sell. But look back to his time at the heart of Rupert Murdoch’s operation editing The Sunday Times and the notion that he disdains disinformation slides away like so much fake tan. Neil hired holocaust denier David Irving to work on the Goebbels Diaries and led a campaign of AIDS denialism at the paper as late as 1990.
In his 1996 biography, Full Disclosure, which covers his time at the paper, Neil claimed the denialism “deserved publication to encourage debate”. He also wrote an article for The Sunday Times in that same year under the headline The great Aids myth is finally laid to rest which read in part:
The Sunday Times was one of a handful of newspapers, perhaps the most prominent, which argued that heterosexual AIDS was a myth. The figures are now in and this newspaper stands totally vindicated...
The history of AIDS is one of the great scandals of our time. I do not blame doctors and the AIDS lobby for warning that everybody might be at risk in the early days, when ignorance was rife and reliable evidence scant.
Neil went on to attack what he called “the AIDS establishment” and claimed, “AIDS had become an industry, a job-creation scheme for the caring classes.”
On GB News’ launch night, Neil’s opening monologue talked about how the channel would “not push false narratives”. Just over an hour later, Dan Wootton began his very first show with a monologue straight down the lens that trafficked conspiracy theories and railed against “doomsday scientists and public health officials”.
In July — just after the news that some shows on the channel were, according to the TV ratings agency BARB, effectively reaching no one — a contract presenter, Guto Harri, was cut loose for taking the knee during a segment about England’s men’s footballers and racist abuse. As I wrote at the time, GB News had followed up its ripe rhetoric about free speech by screaming NOT THAT KIND OF FREE SPEECH! Harri quit before he was pushed.
Neil disappeared from GB News two weeks after launch, pleading a need to recharge his batteries but followed by rumours that his frustration with technical issues at the station had boiled over. He has only reappeared as a remote guest on Nigel Farage’s show since. Distaste for doing handovers with Farage, who he has shaded repeatedly on Twitter, on a nightly basis will likely be given as a major reason if Neil does quit the channel. But that’s horseshit.
While Neil and Farage have featured in professional wrestling-style televised bouts, they both grapple for the same franchise. Neil, who is chairman of The Spectator as well as of GB News, still deeply respects Murdoch, while Farage whose political ambitions were aided hugely by The Sun during the Brexit campaign pays homage to the News Corp boss so thoroughly that he told the makers of the recent BBC Murdoch documentary on camera that he wouldn’t have done the interview if the godfather hadn’t given him the nod.
Neil choosing to dip within two weeks of GB News launching, presenting only 8 of the 52 shows broadcast with his name on the marquee, left space for Farage to enter the fray. And while Farage’s initial flurry of ratings success has evaporated his hyper-partisan show with its literal pub-stylings (“And now, Nigel Farage’s Talking Pints…”) is more entertaining to its audience than Neil sitting in near darkness soberly sparring with risky Rishi Sunak about public spending.
Neil’s Super-Tedious act has been superseded by Farage’s full Zod nihilism.
The departure of John McAndrew, GB News’ director of programming a day before Farage’s arrival, was instructive. A 14-year veteran of Sky News alongside ITN, McAndrew was one of Andrew Neil’s guys but was also key to elements of the channel that the desperately dopamine-addled audience, such as it is, had no interest in. He told Press Gazette before launch that GB News would:
… be a very warm, inclusive channel where disagreements will be had, tough subjects will absolutely be taken on, but they’ll be taken on in a classy and courteous fashion. What this won’t be is a hate-filled divisive shout-fest that some people seem to have characterised it as, which is 180 degrees away from where we want to be.
But a broadcaster that hires Nigel Farage is not remotely interested in being “classy and courteous” nor of avoiding “hate-filled divisive shout-fests” and neither are the viewers who have stuck with GB News. They want to shout “you lost!” and, in common with… err… The Economist, rage about the “illiberal left”. As I wrote at the time, Farage’s signing on a free from Political Wilderness Albion was announced:
Bringing on Nigel Farage to enhance your channel’s classiness is like getting Fred West to do your patio or hiring Gary Glitter as a children’s party clown. Farage’s entire reason for being is to stoke division which will benefit him both personally and politically. He will do and say whatever it takes to keep himself in the spotlight.
Similarly, GB News’ next page from the Fox News playbook — hiring a politically reactionary blonde to front a major show — reveals the howling void at its heart. Hiring Isabel Oakeshott — burner of sources, vendor of dubious pig fucking anecdotes, Brexit Party… uh… booster in more ways than one and keeper of Russian secrets in her attic — as a presenter for a morning show tells you all you need to know about where the channel wants to find its audience.
And on the subject of moral bankruptcy, let’s move on to the Prime Minister. His signal this week that he considers the Conservative manifesto promise not to raise National Insurance about as binding as the marriage contract and as realistic as big numbers daubed on the side of buses has provoked performative outrage among columnists, notably those still plying their trade for that fanzine for tweedy racists, The Daily Telegraph.
Far-right fanatic enabling, oddly-accented, Rod Liddle-editing Caledonian coward Fraser Nelson dedicated his Friday Telegraph column to disappointment with Boris Johnson, his predecessor at The Spectator, under the headline Boris promised not to raise taxes. So why betray his manifesto now? to which the simple answer is “He’s a mendacious shit” and the more complex answer is…
Boris Johnson doesn’t have beliefs; he has the cynical gut instincts of an alley cat that other alleycats consider “a bit of a shit”. He believes he’s entitled to whatever he wants at any particular moment — his childhood dream of being “world king” has never left him — and is perfectly content to smash your things to get it.
Nelson ludicrously ends his column by saying…
“We not only want to freeze taxes, but to cut them too,” promised the last Tory manifesto. If this is to be junked in favour of the opposite agenda – big-government Conservatism with spending (and taxes) pushed higher than New Labour ever dared – it would need a fair bit of explanation. It may be a decade, perhaps more, before the Tories can fight another election promising not to raise taxes – quite a political price to pay. The Prime Minister will have to hope that it’s worth it.
… as if the Tory-supporting press wouldn’t develop situational amnesia about the broken promises of the previous parliament as soon as an election is called. They’ve only done it… every single time.
Today, Camilla Tominey — taking time out from her relentless obsession with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex — uses her Telegraph column to wail Boris has totally lost touch with conservatism, expecting a man who can barely be bothered to keep count of his children to show fealty to a political philosophy that has only ever been a convenience to him. Remember ‘liberal Boris’ when he was Mayor of London? And ‘bumbling Boris’ when he was Have I Got News for You?’s favourite tame Tory? Oh and what about ‘beat ‘em up’ Boris on that notorious call with Darius Guppy about having an inconvenient hack smacked about?
Boris Johnson is a Russian doll and that’s not just a reference to his willingness to open his legs and wallet to any rich Russian passing by. Whatever version of ‘Boris’ a commentator believes to be the real one is soon revealed to be flimsy as another version is uncovered. If you get to the centre of the doll, you’ll find only an empty space where the smell of ambition lingers like cabbage farts in a glass elevator.
Tominey, whose ideal government would be a dictatorship of the columnists under a puppet king who’d grant her endless opportunities for fawning interviews, begins her piece by quoting Mylene Klass:
People mistakenly think that Ed Miliband’s leadership of the Labour Party ended over a bacon sandwich. But it wasn’t that unedifying spectacle, or even the monumental folly of the “Ed Stone” that finished him off. It was a primetime TV encounter with Myleene Klass from the band Hear-Say.
Discussing the lunacy of introducing a “mansion tax” to “save the NHS” on ITV’s The Agenda, the incredulous singer asked: “Is that your only option? You might as well just tax me on this glass of water. You can’t just point at things and tax them. You need to have a better strategy.”
Klass’ comment belongs in the category of “quips that stupid people consider very clever”. The glass containing the water is taxed and the contents isn’t free either.
Tominey, reporting from the deranged parallel universe of Telegraph HQ, decries Johnson’s government as “Labour-lite” (and there I was thinking that was Keir Starmer’s branding) and accuses it of pursuing “the sort of nanny-state policies that would not have looked out of place in 1970s Cuba”.
Tominey is disappointed that Boris Johnson isn’t a more hirsute Winston Churchill or Margaret Thatcher with a less assiduous hairdresser. She believes she’s a hard-headed political analyst but she’s gripped by a desire to hear the slogans she remembers from childhood and is still pretending that there is a ‘real’ Johnson who believes the same things as her but has been pushed off course by focus groups.
And so we move from the childish Tory desire to replace the incompetent nanny with the one who delivers the firm smack of “fiscal responsibility” (as long as it’s the poor, the disabled, the immigrants and the ‘lefties’ getting a clump), we move to British comment writing’s greatest example of arrested development: Giles Coren (or to give him his full name Giles Fucking Coren).
Since he gloated about the death of the desperately missed Dawn Foster, Coren has been the subject of this newsletter twice. It’s a bad habit. A very bad habit, in fact; less a cheeky cigarette at a house party and more smoking angel dust while planning to retreat to the woods in anticipation of the imminent apocalypse. But as long as Coren and his enabling editors at The Times continue to pretend that he did nothing wrong it’s likely I will return to him.
The catalyst for today’s reference is a section in his latest column, a Facebook-meme level slice of greeting card emotionalism about the new school term and the idea of fresh starts. Beneath the cascading cringe provoking headline Schools are back but I want a new term, too, Coren uses the return of his son — the same one he fat-shamed as a toddler for an Esquire article — to school to write about how “it doesn’t seem fair [children] get to begin all over again, to reinvent themselves every year, and we grown-ups…don’t.”
The thing is Coren could change but he’s simply too well-remunerated for doing the same crass act twice a week to a deadline in The Times. He has been failing to learn and grow for 28 years now and his editors indulge him in that. After he used Twitter to laugh about Dawn’s death, he simply disappeared on holiday and since he has returned his editors have either pre-modded comments beneath his pieces or simply sent those that mention his actions straight into the memory hole.
That’s why there’s more gall in the following paragraph than a vast statue of General de Gaulle filled with miniature de Gaulle figurines:
I want a chance to put behind me all the damn stupid things I said and did over the last 12 months, and start again with a clean record. If I failed last year, then this year I can try to do better. Be better. Be different. And I want that chance EVERY year. Don’t you? Don’t we deserve that? So why do only kids get it?
1) Most kids, i.e. kids whose fathers weren’t “national treasures” and weren’t in the media their entire careers, kids who didn’t go to expensive schools before sliding into Oxford, don’t get that chance to “be better, be different”. Many children — especially white working-class and Black boys — are branded early and rarely get the opportunity to ditch the labels slapped on them long before they’re even aware they even exist.
2) No, adults don’t get the simple comforts of the school year because they get the rich comforts and complications of adulthood. Adults are meant to find ways for themselves to grow and to know better. Adults should know how to apologise.
Playing ‘indulgent dad Giles’ this week rather than ‘spoiled brat Giles’ as he does the rest of the year, Coren wants to seem philosophical, but we don’t forget.
We remember his sockpuppet account for attacking critics, his xenophobic rants about Polish people, the time he used Twitter to drunkenly threaten to stab another journalist, the time he used Twitter to fantasise about killing, fucking and then burning a neighbour’s child for playing the drums, the time he wrote a weird sexualised column about holidaying with his tiny daughter, the fat-shaming of his son, and most of all the time he laughed about the death of a talented journalist at just 34 because of a years old tweet that his expansive ego could simply not let go.
And that’s far from a complete list.
Giles Coren does not get to “put behind me all the damn stupid things I said and did over the last 12 months” because he pretends he never said them, refuses to apologise and has spent almost three decades saying cruel, crass, and crude things for money.
Whether it’s Andrew Neil’s pretence of journalistic excellence (and his credulous fan club believing it), Nelson and Tominey acting shocked at the Prime Minister’s mendacity, or Coren getting away with the same shit week in, week out, we’re cursed with a media that will never learn and simply refuses to do so. Why would it when ignorance — both real and feigned — pays so well?