Shorting shame

The value of shame in the British media is even lower than the pound.

It’s five days since The Daily Mail greeted Kwasi Kwarteng’s “fiscal event” with the front page headline At last! A True Tory Budget. In the same edition, the paper’s City Editor, Alex Brummer, told readers Kwarteng had delivered “a genuine Tory Budget that spells the end of Treasury doomsters”. For The Telegraph, the never knowingly hinged Allister Heath crowed Kwasi Kwarteng's Budget is a moment in history that will radically transform Britain, which is true in so far as a wrecking ball can be said to “radically transform” a building from upright to rubble.

Today’s print edition of the Mail trails stories on the economic crisis at the top of the front page (“Financial Markets Turmoil” in red alert capitals) but they don’t begin until page 8. Instead, its splash is day two of coverage of one of Stephen Lawrence’s killers having a smartphone in his cell. Today’s exclusive: It was hidden up his arse, though with faux-Victorian squeamishness the paper says it was “located… in an intimate place.” We can only assume they don’t mean a candle-lit bistro.

When readers do get to the stories on the economy they’ll find everyone but ministers getting the blame, from “jittery backbenchers” and traders investing in “risky funds” — they were and the government had no idea — to those unacceptably left-wing coves at the IMF and the Bank of England. Brummer, who just last week was complimenting Kwarteng’s “boldness and courage”, pushes understatement to its limits by noting the mini-budget was “badly received” before blaming the Bank.

In its leader column, the paper swings for the IMF…

The truth is the organisation detests Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s bold low-tax, pro-growth mini-Budget, because it challenges every grinding liberal economic orthodoxy that it and its fellow travellers have preached for over a decade.

… and demands that “jittery Tories” remain on the Truss train:

Some Tory MPs are so twitchy that they have intimated the PM and Chancellor should quit — less than a month in post. But that would be suicidal. With Labour streets ahead in the polls, the Tories are drinking in the last chance saloon.

It’s clear that the Mail still wants to extend the lock-in at that saloon, and its reference to “fellow travellers” is a clod-hoppingly obvious attempt to frame the IMF… the IMF! … as a nest of commies. So much so that it gives Matthew Lesh, Head of Public Policy, at the IEA — the opaquely-funded, media-saturating think-tank that inspired much of the Kwamikaze policy — a full page to claim the organisation is “entangled in left-wing ideology”. Ask the Greeks what they make of that theory.

The Mail assumes most of its readership has very short memories/attention spans and knows the rest of the media does. It doesn’t matter to the Mail that its calls on the mini-budget already look catastrophically wrong five days later. It wouldn’t matter if it was one day later. The Mail will simply make a lot of noise about other things and pretend articles that are there for anyone to read in its online archives don’t exist.

An unnatural lack of shame is a powerful professional advantage for British newspaper columnists and that lack of shame is present at an institutional level at the Mail. It can never be wrong and if it seems like it was wrong, you’re surely misremembering. The Mail is always quoted on the Today programme and held up to be discussed on late-night newspaper reviews and Sunday morning politics shows; it is accepted as the voice of Middle England with that charlatan ventriloquist’s act unquestioned.

A large part of that is because employees of other publications might want to make the jump to the Mail one day and lots of ‘stars’ from the BBC follow their careers there with columns in its pages decrying their former employer. But it’s also a hangover from a time when the influence of the newspapers was more significant, a time that broadcasters have yet to shake off — day after day, many radio and TV shows shape their running orders as a reflection of the Mail’s agenda.

The Telegraph’s Taliban: The paranoid style in British newspaper commentary...

Unlike the pure opportunism of the Mail, Allister Heath represents the columnist as true believer; it’s just that what he truly believes is bat shit. Last week, he wrote:

At a stroke of a pen, Britain’s competitiveness, its attractiveness to investors and top talent, has been transformed. Money and jobs will flow in, especially from the Eurozone. Britain’s central pathology is low growth, held back by faulty economic, fiscal, monetary and regulatory policies: higher spending begets higher taxes, which lead to a vicious cycle of even lower growth, and hence yet more taxes, and so on. 

There was no prediction of a market meltdown or sterling in the toilet. This week, he explains his lack of foresight with an act of projection in defence of the chancellor:

It is easy to see why the Chancellor didn’t predict such a response. When it comes to fiscal impact, the overwhelming bulk of the policies announced had already been trailed, and the cost of the energy bailout looks a lot lower. Spending is being cut already because inflation is depressing public sector wages, and fiscal drag continues to do its dirty work.

This was an ideological, visceral reaction to a Government financial institutions don’t properly understand. The elite mood music in 2022 is set by Left-wing American economists and a hysterical Twitterati that loathes Truss, Brexit and supply-side economics. It is desperately important therefore for a Government that rightly wants to smash the orthodoxy to be a lot more proactive in explaining how it will grow the economy and stabilise the public finances, and how Middle England will be better off.

Heath — who rattles on about “elites” with Alex Jonesian frequency — never has to admit he’s wrong because he has an endless stream of enemies to blame. In his mind, the Tories have been in power for 12 years but were never the right Tories, and the people who mock his poorly-painted egg appearance on Twitter are behind the chaos.

There’s something particularly laughable about someone railing against “the elites” from the pages of The Daily Telegraph and fantasising about “[smashing] the orthodoxy” while looking like they would struggle to smash the skin off congealing rice pudding.

Dr Strangehack

In an earlier column, Heath could barely damp down his erection at the thought of Truss delivering “a Brexit that works”; when she fails to breed that unicorn and instead presents a Shetland pony with a Cornetto glue-gunned to its forehead, he will pretend to never have shown such enthusiasm, looking to the horizon and cockin his ear, certain that he’ll hear the sound of hooves next time.

It’s ironic that Heath is obsessed with communism — in his latest piece he says “In the past 25 years… the global economy [took] a disastrous wrong turn… one of the gravest intellectual errors since communism.” — because he endlessly makes the kind of argument that communists are always accused of relying upon (“real communism has never been tried!) but with Brexit in place of Marx.

Shameless in the British press and media goes far beyond the Mail in general and Heath in particular. They’re just today’s examples. Putting stock in the predictions of Britain’s columnists and commentators is a very bad investment for anyone but the proprietors who insist on flooding the market.

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