The c-words: Of course British journalists don’t deal in conspiracies, just cosiness, collusion, corruption, cronyism and ‘common sense'...
When you might want to work for Rupert or Rothermere one day it's best not to believe that conspiracies happen.
Previously: Uncandid Camera and Gove Us A Clue: The Hancock affair has now shifted to the stories behind the story
One of the most misunderstood concepts in political communications is that of the “dead cat strategy”. Brought into the public consciousness by Tory election guru and animated antipodean bin bag of entrails Lynton Crosby, the term means adding a shocking or sensational topic into a debate to distract from an area that is more damaging for your candidate.
Crosby has advised the Conservative Party on and off for years and was Boris Johnson’s campaign manager for his winning 2008 and 2012 London mayoral campaigns. Johnson explained Crosby’s advice to him like this:
'Let us suppose you are losing an argument. The facts are overwhelmingly against you, and the more people focus on the reality the worse it is for you and your case. Your best bet in these circumstances is to perform a manoeuvre that a great campaigner describes as “throwing a dead cat on the table, mate”.
There is one thing that is absolutely certain about throwing a dead cat on the dining room table, and I don’t mean that people will be outrage, alarmed and disgusted. That is true, but irrelevant.
The key point, says my Australian friend, is that everyone will shout, ‘Jeez, mate, there’s a dead cat on the table!’ In other words, they will be talking about the dead cat — the thing you want them to talk about — and they will not be talking about the issue that has been causing you so much grief.
Johnson offered such a direct explanation of his tactics in The Daily Telegraph in 2013, just after his second term as mayor began. He was so over-confident and comfortable in the confines of The Telegraph’s metaphorical smoking room full of tweedy home counties racists that he spelled out his tactics baldly as an aside in an attack on “EU autocrats”.
Every since then almost any big story involving Johnson — be it burbling about painting buses as a hobby, buying a dog or comparing Theresa May’s Brexit deal to a “suicide vest” — instantly draws crowds of people asserting confidently that he’s just thrown a dead cat on the table. If Boris Johnson handled as many dead cats as some people believe, he’d be permanently banned from Croydon.
While it’s obviously true that Johnson has a taste for deadcatting as a strategy, which works well with the bumbling persona he has layered over the gimlet-eyed schemer that he really is, not everything stinks like a fatally-wounded feline. Sometimes he’s just crap or scrabbling for a lie or dealing with an event that he most likely did not expect.
If David Cameron was an “essay crisis Prime Minister” and Theresa May always turned in tedious homework, Boris Johnson is the Prime Minister who will say he read the book then make up his own story.
The big problem with having so many people rush to cry “dead cat” whenever a political story breaks is that it allows the actual machinations behind some tales to be obscured. If critics can all be trussed up in tinfoil hats and categorised as basement-dwelling obsessives, the reality of British politics and media can be denied and dismissed, all suggestions of conspiracy and collusion waved away as fantasy. That was how The Times columnist Hugo Rifkind framed things in a much-debated tweet yesterday:
It was a bold position to take from an employee of News UK — especially in the wake of the recent Daniel Morgan Independent Panel report and the ongoing settlements in phone-hacking cases — and was triggered by the speculation and theory crafting around Matt Hancock’s affair hitting The Sun’s front page.
I don’t think Hancock’s handsy antics being leaked — the question of who filmed the CCTV images and shoved them into the sweaty hands of the Sun hacks is unanswered and the internal inquiry into it will take superhuman steps to ensure it remains so — was a dead cat.
The stories about corrupt PPE deals, Track & Trace fuck ups, and the general contempt held by Johnson’s administration for the rule of law aren’t damaging the government. Boris Johnson doesn’t think he needs a distraction because he’s fairly certain that most people don’t care as long as the vaccine rollout keeps rolling along.
As I’ve written in previous editions, I’m of the opinion that Hancock’s hands, face, snog in an office space moment coming out was useful to the Prime Minister. He has got shot of a Health Secretary that he called “totally fucking useless”, in a WhatsApp message to human leaky pipe Dominic Cummings, without having to admit that his former advisor was right. And when the public inquiry finally limps into view, he’ll still be able to shovel a lot of shit onto Hancock.
Rifkind’s tweet is a kind of tactical ignorance. It's common among columnists on The Times to try to put clear red water between them and their tabloid cousins at The Sun, despite their paper being equally as reactionary but in possession of a more expensive thesaurus. For a politician’s son — Rifkind’s father is the former foreign secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind — to claim that relations between the press and politicians are mere chaos stretches credulity beyond breaking point, splattering observers with blood, guts, and bullshit.
Take today’s Times front page which leads with Priti Patel plans for migrants to be held in offshore hub. Variations of this specific story have been bouncing around since last October and today’s report from Matt Dathan, The Times’ Home Affairs Editor, has come straight from the Home Office. When he writes…
The Times has learnt that Home Office ministers and officials have discussed their proposals with their counterparts in Denmark…
… he means, “The Home Office rang up to brief us about this and to use our front page as a means of trailing this announcement.” Barely a day goes by without The Times or The Daily Telegraph having ‘news’ of a new policy or plan from the government splashed on its front page but this is not usually testament to the reporters’ investigative powers but their effectiveness at answering the phone.
A look at the archive of recent stories from The Times’ deputy political editor, Steven Swinford, whose byline is a fixture on its front pages, reveals how often big splashes come from government sources simply dripping a line into his ear.
If you suggest to journalists that the ongoing closeness between political hacks and the government — James Forsyth has a Friday column in The Times which never mentions that his wife Allegra Stratton is a senior official in government communications, for example — is a form of collusion they’ll throw their toys out of the pram in an instance. “We have to talk to sources! That’s our job!”
And it’s true. Reporters do need to cultivate and talk to sources. But the British political press has over the years gained a taste for accepting tasty morsels from anonymous sources with all the care and attention of a starving baby starling.
Peter Oborne effectively described and deconstructed this relationship in his 2019 Open Democracy article British journalists have become part of Johnson’s fake news machine. In it he wrote:
I’ve found it hard to get this article in print. One editor explained reluctance to publish on the grounds that the newspaper’s political team had cultivated excellent insider sources and publishing my piece would invite charges of hypocrisy.
There was a searing honesty of sorts to this remark. Papers and media organisations yearn for privileged access and favourable treatment. And they are prepared to pay a price to get it.
This price involves becoming a subsidiary part of the government machine. It means turning their readers and viewers into dupes.
This client journalism allows Downing Street to frame the story as it wants. Some allow themselves to be used as tools to smear the government’s opponents. They say goodbye to the truth. Social media has provided new ways of breaking the boundaries of decent, honest journalism.
Of course political journalists have always entered into behind-the-scenes deals with politicians, but this kind of arrangement has gained a new dimension since Boris Johnson entered Downing Street with the support of a client press and media. As a former lobby correspondent (on the Evening Standard, the Sunday Express and The Spectator) I understand the need for access. The job of lobby journalists is to produce information.
It’s easy to dismiss the idea of conspiracies within British politics and the media with other c-words — cooperation, for instance — but the cosiness, cronyism, and client journalism do amount to a conspiracy in the end. It’s just that it’s not usually a dramatic one of spies, dead drops, and daring double-crosses, but a more prosaic daily set of dirty-fingered deals and compromises.
There is a space between cock-up and conspiracy. That’s where most of the British press exists on any given day. It is a place of convenience, a space where access can be secured by asking questions but not too many questions, where keeping some stories in your peripheral vision is tactically useful. There are reasons why Matt Hancock’s affair hit the front page of The Sun while other similar stories that mix personal and professional hypocrisy are not investigated.
In the Hancock case, there was clear public interest — he had literally put his name to the social distancing rules and was snogging someone from outside his bubble in his ministerial office — but the way the story got to The Sun was murky at best. There needn’t be a deviously complicated plot when opportunism and convenience have the same effect.
Yes, the internet is awash with people who confuse correlation with causation and make leaps of logic that would smash the Olympic long jump record, but to say, as Rifkind did, people conspiring together “never happens” is farcical. In any given paper, you can find numerous stories that have been dropped in a hack’s lap or are the product of a cosy relationship between them and their ‘sources’.
A common way of dismissing the idea that conspiracies ever happen is to mutter that anyone who has ever worked in a big organisation would realise that no one is ever sufficiently organised nor sufficiently discrete to pull one-off. But history is littered with actual conspiracies — from the Gulf of Tonkin incident which acted as a spark for the Vietnam War not actually happening to the British government colluding with loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland — which were dismissed by contemporary commentators as ludicrous.
Top News Corp executives, including Rupert Murdoch, met with Boris Johnson’s government 40 times in the first 14 months of his administration. Presumably, they discuss nothing of consequence over tea and cakes. And Priti Patel having private lunches with her ‘friend’ Mr Murdoch is just too old chums having a chat.
After all, the three billionaire families (the Murdochs, the Rothermeres, and the Barclays) who control 68% of national newspaper circulation do so out of the goodness of their hearts.
Upton Sinclair’s maxim — “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” — is over-quoted because it is so true. It’s in the interest of British journalists who want to work for Rupert or Rothermere to fully convince themselves that this cursed island’s press and media are free-wheeling and chaotic rather than relentlessly engaged in manufacturing consent and reflecting the opinions of their proprietors.
There’s another over-quoted line — in fact, I’ve used it in several previous editions of this newsletter — is Noam Chomsky’s response to Andrew Marr during an interview in 1996. Asked by Marr how he knew that the BBC man was “self-censoring”, Chomsky replied:
“I’m not saying you’re self-censoring; I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”
If the best-paid columnists and commentators in the British media accepted that there are all kinds of everyday conspiracy at work in their industry they would not have those jobs. Instead, the ‘conspiracy’ word has to be a joke, tossed aside in favour of others — cooperation and ‘common sense’.
Things that the papers agree with are ‘common sense’ and face little if any questioning while things they disdain can be dismissed as ‘conspiracy theories’ or, if it’s really serious, tagged as ‘communism’. Remember that terrifying plan for broadband ‘communism’?