Stig for clues: Solving the mystery of Mr Abell and the upwards fall...
Stig for clues: Solving the mystery of Mr Abell and the upwards fall...
It was Stephen in the dining room with the Katie Hopkins column…
Dreadful world, there you are: On the day that Sally Rooney’s third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You1, was released there was another bit big of publishing news, Stig Abell has signed a three-book deal with HarperCollins for two crime novels and a non-fiction book.
The news brought to mind the endlessly quoted Mrs Merton bit:
Mrs Merton: Unlike her husband Paul Daniels, who's known for his cunning stunts, my next guest is known for her stunning… costumes. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Debbie McGee… what first, Debbie, attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?
What first attracted News Corporation subsidiary HarperCollins to the Times Radio presenter Stig Abell?
Perhaps it had something to do with his decision back in August 2013 to jump from being Director of the Press Complaints Commission (the regulator since superseded by the equally toothless IPSO) to become Managing Editor of The Sun, where he served as a human sticking plaster over the gaping wound of the phone-hacking scandal.
The most notorious moment of Abell’s three years giving ‘respectability’ to The Sun as a gamekeeper turned tit-ogling poacher was the publication of the Katie Hopkins’ '“cockroach” column. It’s repeated so often now when discussing Abell that the grotesqueness of that decision has almost been flattened out to an easy punchline. Here’s a reminder; Hopkins wrote:
What we need are gunships sending these boats back to their own country.
Some of our towns are festering sores, plagued by swarms of migrants and asylum seekers, shelling out benefits like Monopoly money.
Make no mistake, these migrants are like cockroaches. They might look a bit “Bob Geldof’s Ethiopia circa 1984”, but they are built to survive a nuclear bomb. They are survivors.
That’s genocidal rhetoric which The Sun topped off with the headline Rescue boats? I’d use gunships to stop migrants. It placed Hopkins and the editors who enabled her, including Abell, in a history that includes the Nazis describing the Polish as “an Eastern European form of cockroach”2 and Hutu extremists during the Rwandan genocide who used a radio station and newspapers to urge people to “weed out the cockroaches”, a barely coded call to kill Tutsis.
In a 2018 New York Times profile of Abell, the issue of the Hopkins column and “some readers [who] will not forgive [him]” is dismissed quickly. The writer, Dwight Garner, merely informs us that, “Abell said he regrets the column was not better edited”. Not. Better. Edited.
How might a slice of genocidal, dehumanising propaganda have been better edited? What would have made it merely disgusting and not reprehensible? We’ll never get an answer from Stig. In a 2016 Reddit AMA, he replied to a now-deleted comment about Hopkins by saying:
Katie Hopkins left the Sun while I was there. She has a radio show on LBC on Sunday mornings; I have one on Sunday afternoons. If you listen, you will find that we have almost diametrically opposed views on everything!
In that same AMA, Abell talked about going beyond the “business-oriented and advisory” elements of being Managing Editor (“I edited the paper some Mondays, and had the sort of control you might expect an editor to have on those specific editions”). Asked how he felt about being associated with paper for the rest of his career he replied…
It's a long old career, and different people will remember you for different things…
… before responding with carefully calibrated condescension to someone saying he had been “a keen participant in publishing outright lies and stirring up xenophobia”:
I think that is unfair, but I respect people's rights to have opinions about me and express them.
I'm pleased that you can take pride in your own life, evidently.
But the comment from that Q+A that best sums up Stig Abell’s usefulness to News Corp is this one:
I can honestly say that I never saw anybody at the Sun setting out to lie about anything in my time. The paper got things wrong, of course, and published views with which many would disagree, but that is something different.
Public school (Loughborough Grammar) and Cambridge-educated Abell (no profile passes without a reference to his “double-first”3) was at The Sun to bring the hollow respectability of a former regulator — the PCC’s submission to the Leveson enquiry, written by Abell, ran to 140,000 words — without really seeing anything. In a 2016 interview with the equally morally dubious Roy Greenslade, Abell said of joining The Sun:
People could have been sniffy, but they were welcoming because they could see I was just trying to help them do their jobs.
I realised the need to restore confidence among staff who’d had the stuffing knocked out of them because so many had been arrested for paying public officials. I feel very protective of the Sun and the staff. There are so many nice, decent people who don’t get the credit they deserve.
The Sun appears “nice and decent” to Abell because he is a Murdoch made man. He is, as the title of his forthcoming non-fiction book has it, “a useful idiot”4. Anyone who looks at The Sun on a semi-regular basis knows that it lies with the ease of a Boris Johnson, the ego of a Piers Morgan, and the ruthlessness of its ultimate boss Rupert Murdoch.
In an interview with News Academy, News UK’s journalism training outfit, given while he was still working at The Sun, Abell delivered these lines, presumably with a straight face:
Of course we get things wrong, sometimes spectacularly, but I believe that we have a higher standard than most other papers…
The Sun is committed to dealing properly with people and having a sense of ethics, and I am proud to contribute to that.
I’m fairly certain that most people at The Sun consider “ethics” an eccentric way of pronouncing the name of a county in the East of England where white jeans are considered acceptable.
Listen to Stig Abell on Times Radio — in a role he was appointed to by Times Radio launch director Stig Abell — and you’ll often find him chummily chuckling along with Rod Liddle, Melanie Phillips or Giles Coren.
Like readers who laugh or nod at columns from these creatures, Abell pretends he is kinder, more decent and fundamentally decent but he’s simply too chicken shit to let his darker thoughts out and say what he means with his whole chest. He prefers to stand by The Sun and laugh indulgently as Liddle delivers another hate flecked riff, the kind that — to borrow from Stewart Lee — he delivers for cash in The Sunday Times every week to a deadline.
Before he was gifted the Times Radio gig, Abell was given the editorship of the Times Literary Supplement, a publication to which he began contributing as Stephen Abell just after graduating from Cambridge, aged just 36.
You might think I’m being acerbic when I say he was ‘given’ the editorship but that is actually what happened. The New York Times profile of Abell explained:
He was asked by News UK management to apply for the TLS job after the paper’s editor of 14 years, Sir Peter Stothard, decided to step down. Abell wrote a memo that impressed people; no other candidates were considered.
The Greenslade/Guardian profile offered a little more detail:
With the planned retirement after 14 years of its editor, Peter Stothard, there were vague plans to approach a high-profile figure, such as Martin Amis5. But they were abandoned when Abell sent a two-page document with ideas for revitalising the weekly to News UK chief executive, Rebekah Brooks. She showed it to News Corp’s chief exec, Robert Thomson, who said: “Go for it.”
I understand that a similarly rigorous interview process took place at the BBC when Abell was parachuted in to become a presenter on Radio 4’s Front Row, having sharpened his teeth at LBC, first as a sidekick to Kay Burley then alongside Petrie Hosken, before getting his own show in 2015. Katie Hopkins joined him on the station’s roster in 2016.
With his ability to pretend that Liddle, Coren, Phillips and the rest aren’t vile and that The Sun is a bastion of ethics and good journalistic practice, it’s no surprise that Abell has shifted to fiction. He’s been peddling fantasies for years now.
The first of two books of crime fiction — Death Under A Little Sky — is due to be published by HarperCollins in 2023. The imprint’s commissioning editor, Kathryn Cheshire told The Bookseller:
[Stig’s] a hugely talented writer and I know this is the start of a long and successful career in crime fiction.
To Mrs Merton this again: What attracted you, HarperCollins (a News Corp subsidiary) to Stig Abell (an entirely owned subsidiary of News Corp who will be promoted and reviewed favourably by The Times, The Sunday Times and Times Radio, executive editor: Stig Abell)?
The description of Abell’s forthcoming non-fiction book for Harper, A Useful Idiot’s Guide to the Universe, comes very close to summing up the reason for Abell’s upwards fall through the media:
… a wide-ranging, hugely entertaining and informative guide to the universe and how it works, by a man who knows absolutely nothing about it — but is willing to ask the right people to find out the answers.
There’s no more useful idiot to the British media than someone who knows absolutely nothing and is willing to ask the Right people for answers.
There’s a telling line in Greenslade’s 2016 Guardian interview/profile of Abell:
Despite his lack of a journalistic background, Abell regularly edited Monday issues of the Sun.
There was no need for a journalistic background in that job, just as Abell now has a contract to write a science book predicated on the idea that he — and these are his words, not mine or Des Lynham’s — is “a useful idiot… who only did one science GCSE.” Abell went to public school and Cambridge and therefore, in the logic of media and publishing, he is qualified to talk about anything. The only way he could have been better is if he’d studied PPE at Balliol.
As a frequent Times Radio listener — for professional reasons rather than personal ones (such as being related to one of the presenters or suffering from an incurable infestation of brain worms) — I have heard Abell offer such sharp-edged analysis as pondering whether the poisoning of Alexy Navalny was “any of our business” and declaring the Nolan principles for ethical standards in public life “an anachronism”. He achieves this level of presenting excellence while dressed like he’s been chained to a radiator for months.6
In How Britain Really Works, one of his earlier non-fiction books, Abell shows more gall than an erotic Asterix calendar by beginning the chapter on the media with this quote from Hunter S. Thompson:
As far as I’m concerned, it’s a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity.
That could be a summation of both Abell’s career and Times Radio’s output. But he considers himself unsullied and untouched by the filth he has waded through to become the radio presenter who titters in the background while reactionary columnists twist news stories into unrecognisable shapes and the novelist who leapt over the slush pile thanks to the little coincidences that he was recently editor of TLS and his ultimate boss owns the publisher.
Writing in How Britain Really Works about his time at The Sun and the fact that he is still criticised for it — may that continue long after he is a footnote to a footnote — Abell writes:
On Twitter even now, I get people abusing me for having worked at The Sun, when they see my liberal opinions on immigration or sexual rights or whatever. ‘You edited The Sun,’ the argument goes, ‘How can you be supportive of immigration?’ Here is my response. I was never in a position to control the politics of a newspaper and the attendant story selection: that is decided by a combination of the proprietor, the editor, and the bulk of the readership.
My role was to try to make sure the journalism was working as well as it could, and the employees were as supported and healthy as they should be.
Translation: I didn’t make the shit, I just ensured that it flowed through the pipes efficiently and the plumbers were happy.
The words “Katie” and “Hopkins” do not appear in the body copy of Abell’s book. He buries his thoughts on that incident in a footnote that reads:
My biggest regret at The Sun was that I did not read in advance a column by schlock pseudo-figure of hate Katie Hopkins, which described refugees metaphorically as “cockroaches”. This column had not been sent to me (as it normally would) and I learned about it the following evening when — thanks to a Twitter storm — the complaints came flooding in. Hopkins should not have written those things; and they should have been edited out.
He didn’t see it. Someone else failed to send it to him. The word was used metaphorically. The anger was down to a “Twitter storm”. The excuses pile up.
Abell’s ‘explanation’ of his work as The Sun’s Managing Editor is like Giles Coren’s recent ‘apology’ for gleefully tweeting about Dawn Foster’s death: An exercise is omission and excuses. And his commitment to gall continues later in the chapter when he quotes from Harry Frankfurt’s essay On Bullshit:
It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth — this indifference to how things really are — that I regard as the essence of bullshit.
Without bullshit, Stig Abell wouldn’t have his glittering career. He reeks of it while his friends, colleagues, contemporaries and bosses assured us it’s all rosy.
The world would be a better place if Abell had confined his taste for fiction to novels from the very beginning. Sadly he’s been working in the news for 20 years now and doesn’t seem likely to stop any time soon.
Dreadful world, there you are.
The title stubbornly refuses a ? mark, perhaps to provoke howls of rage from Simon Heffer in particular.
Germany, Hitler, and World War II: Essays in Modern German and World History
— Gerhard L. Weinberg (1996)
It’s a fairly meaningless accolade since before October 2020, only the results you achieved in Part 2 of the Tripos actually contributed to your final degree classification.
A Useful Idiot's Guide to the Universe is due in 2024, following Abell’s first crime novel, Death Under a Little Sky about “a former detective who leaves the city in search of a simpler way of life in the English countryside.”
Amis worked on the TLS straight out of Oxford where his greatest qualification — being Kingsley Amis’ son — no doubt came in handy.
I suspect his co-host Aasmah Mir would not be allowed to get away with wearing The Disconsolate Tramp collection to work on a daily basis as Abell does.