Not taking the Mick
Not taking the Mick
Mick Lynch's fleet footed approach to interviews means the dirty tackles are coming.
Previously: Kay Burley’s Super Sounds of the 70s
When the Detroit Pistons were confronted by a rampaging Michael Jordan, they developed a set of tactics for shutting him down — the imaginatively titled Jordan Rules. While there was a whole set of ‘rules’ and Pistons coach Chuck Daly told Sports Illustrated that “[they] didn’t want to be dirty”, it was the one that amounted to physically fouling Jordan that had the most effect.
Frustrated at being out-manoeuvred and out-classed by RMT general secretary Mick Lynch, the British media is doing a Detroit Pistons. Having assumed it would be easy to goad the trade union leader into angry responses with bad faith and frankly ridiculous questions, hacks have discovered that he’s hard to fluster and can make his case in a way that audiences appreciate.
Today’s best example of a clumsy two-footed tackle came from BBC Two’s Politics Live. Host Jo Coburn introduced a discussion of Lynch by saying:
Since we’ve mentioned Mick Lynch himself — he’s trending on Twitter (lucky him, social media) — Moya, are union barons back?
Freelancer and Novara Media host, Moya Lothian-McLean, ably batted back the foolishness:
Union barons? No, I think collective action is back. I think we keep talking about Mick Lynch as an individual because the way our media is set up is we focus on one person…
At that point, Coburn cut in again, “Nothing to do with Mick Lynch himself? Do you not think he’s promoting himself in that way?” Again Lothian-McLean knocked down the disingenuous line of argument:
No, I think he’s the union boss. Every single media programme has invited him on to speak for the union but he’s representing a big ballot…
Coburn knows that, just as she knows that the premise she set up in her next question is entirely a product of the media’s framing of the dispute:
Is it healthy for this to become a personality contest between Mick Lynch and Boris Johnson?
It suits political journalists to frame the issues as a slugging match between Lynch and Johnson because a soap opera is easier to analyse than a complex industrial dispute. And implying Lynch now thinks he’s a star is easier to handle than the realisation that a series of media ‘stars’ have been shown up as conjurors of cheap tricks.
Richard Madeley teed up his encounter with Lynch yesterday by suggesting he was brave to ask if the RMT leader was a Marxist. When he did, he immediately fell flat on his face as Lynch laughed and pointed out he was talking twaddle. Kay Burley tried to do a Paxman by asking Lynch the same question repeatedly but ended up frustratedly accusing him of being flustered. But best/worst of all was Piers Morgan.
While few people will have caught the interview live on Piers Morgan Unwatched, a clip from their 15-minute conversation last week has done good numbers on social media. Morgan brought up Lynch’s use of an image of the Hood from Thunderbirds as his Facebook profile picture as if it were some kind of big gotcha:
Why don’t you just confirm or deny if this is your Facebook page. It’s a picture of The Hood from Thunderbirds… I’m just wondering where the comparison goes because he was obviously an evil, criminal terrorist mastermind, described as the world’s most dangerous man who wrecked utter carnage and havoc on the public.
Lynch pointed out that the Hood is not, in fact, real but a vinyl puppet from a TV show and asked:
Is that the level journalism’s at these days?
Of course, Morgan is taking the success of the clip as a vindication for him and claiming that those who’ve shared it are “mugs [who] still don’t realise you’ve not just taken my click-bait but swallowed it deep into your gullible innards.” Aside from that reading worryingly like an insight into Morgan’s dirty talk, it’s effectively a man explaining that he’s only pissed himself in an elaborate attempt to troll tailors.
As the dispute goes on, we’ll see more and more desperate attempts to ‘win’ by media figures. Robert Peston tweeted ahead of his interview with the RMT leader:
Mick Lynch of the RMT Union is on #Peston show tonight. What’s the very silliest question I could ask him?
While it sounds like desperately begging to go viral, I think Peston should back himself, his track record shows he has no trouble in coming up with silly questions without any outside help.
It was also notable that The Daily Mail didn’t put Lynch on its front-page today (preferring instead to slap Keir Starmer about) and barely mentioned him on its inside pages, giving the reappearance of the 84-year-old Arthur Scargill a full page instead.
The Sun used its front page to pre-emptively attack teachers for even contemplating a strike and dedicated a dire spread to calling Lynch “mad” and using a picture of him with his mouth slightly up-turned to support the headline “Smirker v. Workers”.
While the effort of The Mail and The Sun were clumsy, there was a marginally more subtle approach at work in The Evening Standard’s profile of Lynch. Beneath the headline How RMT boss Mick Lynch became the unexpected star of the rail strikes and before a round-up of praise for his media appearances, it wrote:
[Lynch has] proven himself to be just as militant as the late “firebrand” RMT boss Bob Crow, who died in 2014 after being branded “the most hated man in London” during Tube strikes - if not more so. Lynch has long been known for his desire for the railways to be nationalised, saying they’d reduce the need for subsidies, and the RMT has balloted for strike action on more than 200 occasions since he took the job in May 2021 (even Crow never once managed a national rail strike).
Who branded Crow “the most hated man in London”? The Evening Standard. And renationalisation as a “militant” demand? 64% of the public supported the policy in a 2019 YouGov survey and 73% in a poll by Survation in 2020.
If Lynch continues to bamboozle the media, you can expect some of the tactics that The Sun used against Bob Crow to make a return. It parked a bus outside his house, followed him on holiday, tried to make a story out of him singing Fly Me to the Moon at a union Christmas party, and was forced to apologise when it falsely claimed he had a union-subsidised home and luxury car. He didn’t even own a car.
In 2007, James O’Brien told LBC listeners that Crow was…
… inflicting misery on millions of Londoners so let’s give him a flavour of the havoc he and his union are wreaking. If Bob Crow turns up at your shop, pub, cafe, or minicab firm, don’t serve him.
It’s not a line I suspect that O’Brien would take these days — his show today featured a rundown of Lynch’s most memorable media appearances so far — but there remain plenty of figures in the media who are happy to play the man and not the ball.
Lynch is not trying to be a star or the centre of attention; he’s merely appearing in the media to represent his members. But as the level of embarrassment, he is causing the newspapers and wider media grows, you’ll see the deployment of ‘Lynch rules’ increase. For a working-class representative of workers to be seen to win and win decisively simply won’t be allowed.
If you don’t think the media is playing fair now, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
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