The Gove War Did Not Take Place: Why The Daily Telegraph is a bad comic and that Laura Kuenssberg rap battle rumour was believable
The closeness and secrecy of hacks' relationships with politicians mean even sensational stories can seem feasible.
Laura Kuenssberg is not a battle rapper. It should be self-evident that the BBC’s Political Editor does not spend her free time in multi-story car parks delivering fire-in-the-booth style lyrical beatdowns of Robert Peston and multi-syllabic rhymes about pitiful backbenchers.
But when a baby Telegraph hack, just emerged from the Alien-style egg sack— Dominic Penna — tweeted that Kuenssberg had engaged in a rap battle/dance-off with Michael ‘Wankie Knuckles’ Gove, it felt believable.
As a symbol of the almost symbiotic closeness between the Westminster press pack and the politicians they cover, this tweet (now dusted) from Penna…
Laura Kuenssberg and Michael Gove had a dance-off rap battle as one Tory MP sang Ice Ice Baby at karaoke last night.
Kuenssberg’s BBC colleague Lewis Goodall then gave Dancing Queen his best shot – after quipping: “Have we got any Tory scum in the audience?
… felt real. And, in parts, it was. Kuenssberg was at the karaoke party held by iNHouse Communications (the firm of ex-Downing Street Director of Communications Katie Perrior and ex-broadcast journalist turned Tory press officer Jo Tanner) but just doesn’t seem to have traded lines with Gove.
Similarly, Lewis Goodall did perform Dancing Queen — in an odd crooning style — but the video clip begins in media res so Penna’s now erased claim that the Newsnight reporter introduced himself with the “Tory scum” quip can only be confirmed by people who were in the room. And they’re mostly not talking.
Penna’s tweet was deleted after about 17 hours, with the rest of his thread, which included Michael Gove being forbidden to do karaoke by his SpAds and telling the journalist he wanted to sing Sunshine on Leith by the Proclaimers, remaining. The Daily Telegraph’s only response to the Kuenssberg rap battle claim — which was vehemently denied by the BBC and dealt with in fire fighting-style by the BBC News Press Team Twitter account — was a screenshot from its email newsletter, tweeted by Penna, which reads:
Party conferences pass in a blur. Contrary to my report from INHouse karaoke, Laura Kuenssberg did not have a dance-off and rap battle with Cabinet minister Michael Gove.
The BBC Political Editor was there, and chatting to people on the edge of the dance floor, with hundreds of other people. But no shapes were thrown with disco-loving Govey.
That’s not an explanation of why he tweeted the story or an apology. It’s barely a clarification. And given the feverish activity of the BBC News Press Team and the defensive posture adopted by other political hacks (the Daily Mirror’s Mikey Smith tweeted: “Reporters shouldn’t drink with or attend parties also attended by politicians’ discourse is the dumbest, most performative discourse. Grow up.”) the sense of wagons being circled was palpable.
The impression — yet to be (and unlikely to be) dispelled — that Penna was told to delete his tweet because, as I wrote for Byline Times yesterday, it breached the tacit omertà between hacks remains. The argument has been reduced to footling around details. The idea that Kuenssberg was exchanging Vanilla Ice lines with Gove made the rumour pop but the fact is she and many other political reporters were at the party and that karaoke with the people you cover is all too cosy.
In my Byline piece, I wrote, in response to Smith’s tweet:
Smith’s suggestion that doing karaoke, dancing, and larking about with the very people journalists report on is the same as simply attending the same events with them or speaking to them as sources is deliberately dense.
If it’s grown-up to drink with top politicians you cover, especially when you are employed by the BBC – an organisation perennially attacked by both sides for the nature of its impartiality – then I hope to maintain my state of arrested development forever.
The rush by political hacks whose style of reporting is dependent on access to defend the karaoke party has produced a kind of Streisand Effect1 variant. The rap battle detail may be untrue but the sense of no barrier existing between the reporters who purport to tell us the truth about politicians and the politicians they analyse is not.
The rap battle rumour reveals once again that The Daily Telegraph is a fanzine squatting in the hollowed-out corpse of a 166-year-old newspaper brand, but it also shows us how hacks are simultaneously comfortable and ashamed about how they make the sausage and galivant with the pigs.
Of course, political reporters need to talk to politicians but they don’t have to socialise with them or treat them as friends. Unless, of course, they always have their eye on future jobs within government or the sprawling tentacled mass of think-tanks that produce most policy and provide a job creation scheme for some of the most odious people in Britain (if not the world).
In the Byline piece, I raised the example of James Slack, the author of the 2016 Daily Mail’s “Enemies of the People” splash, which accused three high court judges of conspiring to block Brexit and described one of them (Sir Terence Etherton) as an “openly-gay ex-Olympic fencer”, a dog whistle so shrill that a number of dogs in Kent are still barking 5 years later.
Slack went from The Daily Mail — where he had replaced James ‘Chappers’ Chapman as Political Editor after he left to spin for George Osborne at the Treasury in 2015 — to become the Prime Minister’s official spokesperson in February 2017. He remained in post when Theresa May was succeeded by Boris Johnson in 2019 and in December 2020, when Lee Cain slunk out of government, Slack was announced as his successor as Downing Street Director of Communications.
The promotion was short-lived. In March 2021, Slack returned to journalism as Deputy Editor of The Sun. Slack’s decision was a rather convenient redeployment for the fortunes of Boris Johnson, who continues to receive sloppy blowjob-style coverage from the paper where his wife’s ex-boyfriend Harry Cole is also Political Editor and writes cuckishly enthusiastic reports.
The revolving door between the political press and government spins at 45 rpm. I have written time and time again — including yesterday — about the personal relationships between politicians and the press that covers them. And I’ll keep doing it until the heat death of the universe (or more likely I have a breakdown of such starling force that I moved to a cave to subsist on locusts, wild honey and picnickers discarded barbecue food).
The example I usually reach for is that of James Forsyth (Spectator political editor and Times columnist), his wife Allegra Stratton (ex-BBC and ITV turned government flack) and his best friend/best man Rishi Sunak (the Chancellor). That’s because the lack of disclosure from Forsyth is blatant and shoved in our faces on a weekly basis by his stenographer stylings in The Times, writing about Boris Johnson while pretending he’s some dispassionate outsider rather than a regular around the same dining tables as the PM.
But I could equally harp on about the ease with which the Prime Minister’s dad Stanley and sister Rachel gain commissions and TV appearances or how Amelia Gentleman, who has written powerful pieces on issues including the Windrush Scandal, is married to Johnson’s Village of the Damned-looking brother Jo.
These family relationships wouldn’t go unmentioned in the disclosure-heavy world of journalism in the United States. If Forsyth was a US political journalist married to a spinner for the President, he’d be required to state that at the top of every column. But as I wrote yesterday:
British political reporting is not the Pompidou Centre; the shit2 that flows through its pipes is concealed from viewers and readers. And the memory-holing of details such as whether or not Laura Kuenssberg chummily traded lines from Ice Ice Baby with Michael Gove only serves to make the whole process more oblique.
The secrecy at work in the British political press doesn’t just benefit politicians. When former Labour MP, Eric Joyce, who was arrested five times during his last five years in Parliament (mostly for assault), was found guilty of possessing, accessing and ‘creating’ (after it was synched from his computer to his phone) an image of child sexual abuse.
His partner at the time of his conviction — it remains unclear whether they were still together3 — was India Knight, The Sunday Times columnist. The fact along with the use of that relationship in sentencing mitigation (Joyce’s lawyer referred to “a partner that he loves [and who] loves him” and their “life together”) was referenced in a number of news reports.
In The Times and Sunday Times, however, coverage of Joyce’s conviction was sparse — odd given their general attitude to criminal cases involving MPs, especially Labour MPs — and Knight’s name was not mentioned. India Knight’s step-father Andrew Knight is a former editor of The Economist, a former nominated successor for Rupert Murdoch and News Corp board member, and is now chairman of Times Newspaper Holdings.
And even over at Private Eye, still treated as the most fearless scourge of press and politicians alike, a certain silence still abides. Among those who write and edit longstanding features like Street of Shame are people who also have key roles at major newspapers. When allegations are made against individuals within the Private Eye orbit — as they have been in the past and very recently — they do not make it to the magazine’s pages.
We are told by political hacks that cosiness is a necessary element of their work, that they must dance, drink and karaoke with contacts or their access will evaporate. It’s self-justifying, self-satisfied and self-evidently wank. Journalists can maintain links with sources and meet with them without allowing those connections to become friendships.
Jeremy Paxman, who before he settled into a semi-retirement as a blustering and transparently Tory podcaster, was not even inclined to party with colleagues let alone politicians, famously quoted the words of The Times foreign correspondent of the 1940s and ‘50s Louis Heren when describing his attitude to interviewing: “Why is this lying bastard lying to me?”
While you could argue that inquisitorial interviewing can go too far — I won’t, I’d be happy to see most Cabinet Ministers made to do Today interviews in thumbscrews — the “why is this lying bastard lying to me?” approach is infinitely preferable to chummy bonhomie. Of course, politicians are human (I suppose) but it doesn’t pay for journalists to spend too much time thinking about that; they only take advantage.
I turned on the latest episode of Newscast, BBC News’ egregiously chummy gang show podcast while writing this edition to see if Laura Kuenssberg addressed or even alluded to the karaoke and Penna’s fan fiction output. Of course, she didn’t but the interaction between her, co-hosts Adam Fleming (Chief Political Correspondent) and Chris Mason (Political Correspondent and Any Questions? host), and their guest recently ex-Secretary of State for Housing and Local Government, Robert Jenrick was instructive.
There was no mention of the many scandals and accusations of corruption that dogged the Tory during his time as a minister, besides Fleming joking about all the houses Jenrick owns (ahaha, how hilarious that he has a £5 million property portfolio). Fleming introduced Jenrick by saying:
We are joined by former Housing and Local Government Secretary, Robert Jenrick, who is now sadly no longer in the job but it does mean he’s now free to come on weirdly timed TV programmes and podcasts.
Why “sadly”? And why was Fleming’s line greeted by a peal of chuckles from the three presenters? Because Jenrick is a past, current, and future source. And because now he’s out of Cabinet — already talking of when he’ll return — those scandals are old news that three political correspondents don’t really care to look at anymore.
In 1991, Jean Baudrillard published a trio of essays4 (“The Gulf War will not take place”, “The Gulf War is not really taking place” and “The Gulf War did not take place”) in Libération. His argument was not literally that the military conflict did not occur but that it was something else masquerading as a war because what people saw of the ‘Gulf War’ was so tied to the propaganda imagery that it was impossible to understand what really happened.
The reason the Kuenssberg rap-battle rumour felt real — apart from the fact that it was merely an exaggeration of events that did occur — is because people are increasingly aware of the gulf between what actually happens in our political culture and the way it is presented and reported by a political press that can, in the click of a job offer, move from observing government to being within it.
While readers and viewers are not always aware of what the silence is about, many of them can tell there is a silence nonetheless. The cosiness between the media and politicians hangs in the air like smoke in a pre-smoking ban pub; it’s invisible to the eye but the next morning you can’t help but detect the stink.
Per Wikipedia: “The Streisand effect is a phenomenon that occurs when an attempt to hide, remove, or censor information has the unintended consequence of increasing awareness of that information, often via the Internet. It is named after American entertainer Barbra Streisand, whose attempt to suppress the California Coastal Records Project photograph of her residence in Malibu, California, taken to document California coastal erosion, inadvertently drew greater attention to it in 2003.”
Byline understandably changed this line to “the pollutants that flow through…” but I’ve changed it back.
Though a section of a 2020 interview with Knight’s former partner (and the father of one of her children) Andrew O’Hagan says this:
“India Knight’s subsequent partner, former Labour MP Eric Joyce, was recently convicted of making a pornographic image of a very young child; O’Hagan has no wish to comment on that case in print, though he mentions that his and Knight’s daughter, Nell, 16, is living here with him and Milligan.”