The big blue tick congrats circle jerk jamboree

As the FT's Westminster Editor moves to a Tory thinktank, questions go unasked and unanswered.

Previously: Hancock’s Barf Hour

A special and targeted content warning for Conquest of the Useless subscriber and Onward advisory board chair, Lord Finkelstein: You should skip this one.

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With politics shifting back to policy, it’s a great moment for some real pep and fresh thinking…

That’s how Sebastian Payne, the Financial Times’ Westminster Editor, announced he’s making the short leap from lobby journalism to the comfort of a think-tank.

Payne previously appeared in this newsletter in Political hacks as pay pigs (June 19, 2021)…

Again, and it’s getting quite stomach-churning to keep writing this, [Dominic] Cummings is right. Westminster pundits — regardless of whether they pootle around Britain in a Mini as the FT’s Seb Payne, did — obsess over ‘moments’ in campaigns and often prize the “narrative” over reality.

In the eyes of the political press, the question of whether Boris Johnson would make himself available for an Andrew Neil interview at the BBC was the biggest “will they/won’t they” since Big and Carrie.

… This Property Is Condemned (June 14 2022):

And after the second round of eliminations, Sebastian Payne of the FT offered more fan fiction for people who can get sexually aroused by rubbing against a briefcase:

Forget the next prime minister, Kemi Badenoch and Tom Tugendhat have proven the Tory party isn’t intellectually dead yet.

He penned those words while ignoring the countless acts of necromancy happening around him and every candidate’s desperate attempts to secure the crucial Thatcher endorsement via ouija board.

… and Rebooting the Bastard Machine (September 24 2022):

The FT’s Sebastian Payne writes:

“The economic gamble is not wholly cynical: a lower tax economy is something Truss and Kwarteng believe in, have been writing and arguing about for well over a decade (see the Britannia Unchained book, Free Enterprise Group, Free campaign groups). Now we’ll actually see if it works.”

Commentators can treat the IEA lab experiment with the breeziness shown in that last line because politics and economics are largely a game to them. They are living by the river, not on the other side of the road.

As of the New Year, Payne will be the director of Onward, a Tory wonk-shop inspired by Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche, with corporate backers including BAE Systems, Shell, Uber Eats and Diageo.

While Payne’s tweet adhered to the tradition that all such announcements should be introduced as “some personal news”, the change from barely pretending not to be on the Tory team to exposing himself as bluer than a nudist Smurf in an ice bath, was first revealed as “a scoop” in Politico’s London Playbook:

SCOOP — FROM PINK TO BLUE: The Financial Times’ Whitehall Editor Seb Payne is leaving journalism to become the new director of conservative think tank Onward. After 12 years as a hack — seven of them at the FT — Payne will head up the center-right think tank, proven to be deeply influential in Rishi Sunak’s administration. Onward’s founding director Will Tanner became deputy chief of staff at No. 10 last month and at least two more people have since left to join government.

Moving onward: Payne, who is the author of two books on Labour’s 2019 collapse in the Red Wall and on Boris Johnson’s fall from power, told Playbook he’s been a “huge admirer of Onward.” “For the first time in some years, politics is thankfully focusing on policy and ideas and Onward is perfectly placed to inject some real pep and fresh thinking into the debate,” he said. “Its groundbreaking research on regional inequality, levelling up and the post-Brexit alignment has been a huge inspiration for my books and journalism. Onward’s values are my values and I can’t wait to take up the mantle from the outstanding work done by Will and Adam [Hawksbee, the deputy director].” He starts early in the new year.

A healthy political and media culture would ask a few more questions about this kind of career move. They might include:

• Why is a member of the political team at one of the country’s most influential newspapers pretending that the focus on soap opera drama and personalities was somehow like a weather system rather than something he could influence?

• Are we supposed to pretend that Payne — previously of The Daily Telegraph and Spectator — wasn’t reporting with a heavy bias towards the Conservative Party?

• Isn’t “a great moment for some real pep and fresh thinking” best translated as “a great moment to jump ship to a think-tank now all my best sources are likely to be either out of Parliament or languishing in opposition”?

Instead, the replies beneath Payne’s tweet are like an Eyes Wide Shut party where every mask is the face of a bored estate agent; a long queue of political journalists and politicians clapping and whooping as if the rest of us can’t see this backslapping orgy of sweaty chumminess.

Payne calls Onward “Westminster’s finest think tank”, which is a little like scientists at Porton Down debating over the finest strain of botulism. Will Tanner, the previous director, left to become Rishi Sunak’s deputy chief of staff, a short-term role with the guarantee of a spot in the House of Lords when it’s done.

I suspect Payne would have stood as a Tory MP if the party wasn’t about to have fewer safe seats than a condemned rollercoaster. Instead, he’s following the Michael Gove¹ route: Media jobs > think-tank > parliament. In 2002, Gove co-founded the Policy Exchange think-tank, and three years later he was elected the MP for Surrey Health.

When Onward was launched in 2018, it was billed as:

… a powerful ideas factory for centre-right thinkers and leaders.

We exist to make Britain fairer, more prosperous and more united, by generating a new wave of modernising ideas and a fresh kind of politics that reaches out to new groups of people.

“Ideas factory?” Well, close; it’s consent manufacturing. Think tanks exist to provide people that serve a particular political ideology with a nice title to stick in chyrons on news programmes. Lazy producers rely on them and companies fund them with the expectation that they will produce policies for equally lazy politicians that will benefit corporate interests.

Beneath Payne’s tweet, the presenter of Radio 4’s PM, Evan Davis, wrote:

Seb… congrats. Fascinating move.

Hope you’ll still come on PM as regularly as you do now.

Virtually nobody within the media sees this as a problem. To Davis, the switch from journalist to think-tank director is worthy only of congratulations. There’s no sense that the relationship will change or that Payne’s motivations and positions might require a different sort of scrutiny.

Emily Maitlis, co-presenter of LBC’s News Agents podcast, told Payne:

I actually can’t believe this yet, Seb. But congratulations. Am sad and happy.

That’s the same Maitlis who said in her MacTaggart lecture/extended ad for Global:

Whatever our journalism does, it must earn the trust of our listeners, our audiences, our readers, otherwise we are mouthpieces, mere clients, cosy with those in authority, disconnected from those we are trying to serve.

The response to Payne’s career change is the epitome of “cosy with authority”. Other replies say his decision is “a big loss to journalism” and the features journalist Harry Wallop says he “[hopes Payne] will keep on writing sometimes for newspapers”. It’s likely to happen; think-tank directors pop up in the pages of the broadsheets often and some, like the IEA’s Mark Littlewood in The Times and Centre for Policy Studies’ head Rob Colville in The Sunday Times, have regular columns.

Others taking part in the congrats spaffing include Matt Frei (Channel 4 News), Christian Calgie (sidekick to the perpetually thirsty, drink-driving enthusiast, Paul Staines, at Guido Fawkes), Jonathan Freedland, Gaby Hinsliff and Pippa Crerar (The Guardian), Paul Brand (ITV News), Alex Wickham (Bloomberg), Jess Brammar (BBC News), Ayesha Hazarika (Evening Standard, i paper and Times Radio), Kate Andrews and James Heale (The Spectator), Beth Rigby (Sky News), David Hughes (PA), Ryan Sabey (The Sun), Michael Savage (The Observer), Christopher ‘Chopper’ Hope (Daily Telegraph) and a large number of FT hacks, including the paper’s editor, Roula Khalaf.

The only journalistic voice of dissent — alongside many, many ‘civilian’ objections and principled shitposts — came from Peter Oborne who wrote “strongly disapprove” and asked about Onward’s funding.

The reason I’ve listed so many of the people who sent congratulations is to show the extent of media class solidarity, which is a phenomenon that overlaps heavily with political class solidarity. Of course, friendships will exist across publications in such a small world as British political journalism but the brazenness of “congrats Twitter” is a slap in the face to readers, listeners, and viewers.

These eruptions of delight when a journalist skulks off to a think-tank or to lobby for the gambling industry or a giant corporate make the flea-bitten promise of “speaking truth to power” look even more rotten. Liz Truss’ pathetic period as Prime Minister could have led to an ongoing interrogation of the influence of think tanks on politics but it couldn’t because so many people in the media are keeping their options open.

It doesn’t do to even acknowledge the revolving door in case it stops spinning when you decide to step into it.

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Thanks to John Hill, EBlair_Fan, Panicked Future, and Antifa Flour Thug for taking a look at the draft of today’s edition.

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1. Gove spoke at Onwards’ launch event in May 2018