The government of trolls: The Sunday Times celebrates the ‘secret’ king of culture war bullshit…
… and it’s clear he’s just ripping off Steve Bannon’s playbook. Just like the press.
Previously: At the chart of all the corruption: The Conservative Party/Spiked coalition explained (October 2020)
Since Dominic Cummings left government to spend more time with his blog, the Westminster political hacks have been aching for another eminence grise who can be praised/blamed for the administration’s strategies.
After all, it’s quite clear that Boris Johnson’s personal policy platform doesn’t stretch much further than achieving his twin boyhood dreams of a) becoming ‘world king’ and b) making it into the Guinness Book of Records for most affairs conducted by one bumptious politico. And if he can have someone else to blame for fuck ups, well, all the better…
That’s where Douglas ‘Dougie’ Smith comes in. While Smith — the husband of the Prime Minister’s Policy Director (and Spiked/Revolutionary Communist Party alumna) Munira Mirza — has been in the heart of the Tory machine since the first days of the coalition (he was Cameron’s chief speechwriter) and was rattling about for many years before that, he’s now making it into more and more profiles as the culture war he’s stoked dominates headlines.
In today’s edition of The Sunday Times, Tim Shipman writes a behind-the-scenes look at the Tories’ “war on woke” that places Smith at the heart of the action, despite the advisor and sometime sex party planner’s weaselly avoidance of public scrutiny and transparency. All we’re meant to know is that he loves the smell of culture war in the morning… smells like bullshit.
Shipman writes that ministers’ interventions into stories, ranging from the Magdalen College MCR portrait ‘row’ to racist tweets by cricketers and the question of the England men’s football team taking the knee, are the work of…
… the most powerful man in Britain you’ve never heard of.1
Commenting on Dowden and Williamson, one government aide said: “They’re not blowing a dog whistle, it’s a Dougie whistle. We’re all culture warriors now.”
Shipman’s pen portrait of Smith is typically high on drama but low on analysis and anything resembling actual journalism. He says:
Dougie is Douglas Smith, a Tory fixer for three decades who is married to Munira Mirza, Johnson’s Downing Street policy director. Together they are the power couple behind the war on woke.
A former cabinet minister who knows Smith well said: “He is pathologically opposed to publicity.” His proximity to power is perhaps surprising when you learn he was previously best known for running high-end swingers’ sex parties in the 1990s.
It’s surprising that someone who ran sex parties in the 90s is close to people in power? Oh, Shipman, you sweet summer child… or rather oh, Shipman, you’re fooling no one, least of all your wife, with that studied ignorance.
That line — “the power couple behind the war on woke” — is the one Shipman will have used in pitching his piece to the editor. Just as we were led to believe by Westminster hacks, including Shipman in so many breathless features, that all power in Downing Street ran through the junction box of Dominic Cummings, now it’s Smith who is talked up:
Largely unseen, and almost wholly unchecked, he is a key influence on issues such as race, trans rights and attacks on historic statues. He controls access to the Conservative candidates’ list, appointments to public bodies and even the House of Lords to reshape Britain in an image those red-wall voters will find more congenial.
Ambitious ministers like Dowden, who got to know Smith when they worked for David Cameron… have gone along for the ride. “He’s identified that one of the ways to get on in this government is to follow Dougie’s agenda on this stuff,” a senior Tory observed.
While Shipman wants to kid on to readers that he’s revealing Smith’s role to them, the advisor has been written about frequently since Johnson entered Number 10. In March 2020, for example, The Daily Mirror published a piece with the headline Boris Johnson hands Number 10 job to 'fixer' who ran exclusive sex parties, which opened with panting tabloid sentiments:
Boris Johnson has brought a man who ran London's most exclusive sex parties into the heart of his Number 10 operation, the Mirror can reveal.
It’s reignited a row over the hiring processes and vetting of staff working for the Prime Minister.
That piece discussed Smith’s dual history as a Conservative Party operator and sex party impresario. But like Shipman’s feature, it didn’t actually dig very far into the fixer’s history, sticking with surface-level details.
The Daily Mail, usually home to more assiduous dirt diggers, followed up the Daily Mirror story. Beneath the headline Former sex party boss lands job in Downing Street as Government strategist and researcher 'reporting to Dominic Cummings', it wrote:
Mr Smith, who is married to head of Downing Street's policy unit Munira Mirza, organised swingers parties and orgies for five years and asked couples to submit photos and pay a fee of £50 to attend his illicit events.
He also worked as a coordinator for the think-tank Conservatives for Change.
In 2003 he insisted his different work ventures did not 'overlap'.
Curiously, though the British press would never shut up about it if a sex party planner was working in Keir Starmer’s office — unlikely to happen as the Leader of the Opposition reproduces asexually through the release of clouds of spores — neither the moralistic Mail nor the nominally left-wing Mirror made much of the story and it disappeared quickly.
As is depressingly common in Shipman’s articles and books, today’s piece is full of anonymous quotes, tailored to push one line or another from within the government, which is less a unified force and more a bag of fighting cats that still despise every creature outside of the sack even more. Shipman writes:
Perhaps naturally, Boris Johnson intervened when the statue of his great hero Winston Churchill was boarded up in Parliament Square to stop it being defaced, a move he branded “absurd and shameful”. Removing statues of controversial figures was “to lie about our history”, he said, arguing that the protests that followed the death of George Floyd in the US had been “hijacked by extremists”.
If this looked like an impromptu response to live news, it was not. Smith was instrumental in urging Johnson to weigh in and he has continued to do so. To govern is to choose and Smith’s approach, according to one who knows him well, is that there is an opportunity to realign British politics. “Westminster likes to bracket people as left and right,” they said, “but the real gap in the political market that Boris identified and has successfully filled is people who lean left on spending and public services but are culturally conservative. A lot of the voters who have turned to us care about their country and their Queen and don’t like being told everyone is racist. They want tolerance but they don’t like the way the trendy left overreacts to these issues.”
Shipman doesn’t analyse these claims. He gobbles them down like a hungry bird and regurgitates them for his readers. It’s again an opportunity for Boris Johnson to shift responsibility for his actions to an advisor — one who can be jettisoned at a later date if the political circumstances require it.
So we’re told that it was Smith who manoeuvred Sir Robbie Gibb onto the list to join the BBC board and Smith who has been pushing for Paul Dacre to be given the job of Ofcom Chair. The decision to elevate Claire ‘Lady Semtex’ Fox to the House of Lords is also rightly traced back to Smith and Mirza, but it’s framed as though Johnson has no say in these choices.
Having framed Smith as dreadfully mysterious in his opening, Shipman has to maintain that impression…
Smith, who friends say is 57 or 58, is a graduate of St Andrews university and was a player in the notorious Federation of Conservative Students, which even Norman Tebbit thought was too right wing. He had a spell working for Sir James Goldsmith, who set up the Referendum Party to campaign for a public vote on leaving the EU. Then, in 2002, after an ideological journey, Smith helped set up C-Change, a campaign group devoted to Tory modernisation
In the same building was the modernising think tank Policy Exchange, where Mirza, now 43, was working. The couple met and fell for each other. Theirs is reputed to remain one of the strongest marriages in politics.
It was while Smith was at C-Change that The Sunday Times ran a headline proclaiming “Top Tory aide is king of the urban swingers”, revealing his role in hosting opulent orgies in London mansions for couples and single women, in some cases personally selected by Smith.
Shipman is playing cute when he writes “Smith, who friends say is 57 or 58…” It’s playing up to the idea of Dougie Smith as a shadowy figure with his hands on the levers of power rather than a long-term Tory advisor about whom there is plenty of information if you dig deep enough. The Sunday Times article from 2003 which Shipman references opens:
By day Dougie Smith, 41, is the respectable co-ordinator of Conservatives for Change (Cchange), the influential Tory think tank whose board members include Theresa May, the Conservative party chairman.
What’s interesting about Shipman’s client journalist write-up of the so-called mastermind of the ‘war on woke’ are the ommissions.
There’s no space for the incident in 2019 when Nigel Farage accused Smith (along with Sir Eddie Lister) of offering him and other Brexit Party figures ‘inducements’ including peerages to step down.
Oh and then there’s the fact that the hard-right Federation of Conservative Students where Smith started his politicking — members of which notoriously produced ‘Hang Nelson Mandela’ stickers and poster — was also the kkkindergarden for Paul Staines aka Guido Fawkes. Smith and Staines — the worst estate agents in the worst town you can imagine — also both served time with the head-banging right-wing Committee for a Free Britain pressure group.
Nor does Shipman go back to 2001 when Smith wrote an article for The Daily Telegraph which had stinging words for MPs who are now senior figures in the government he serves. In an op-ed headlined Soulless, selfish and smug - today's Tory candidates, Smith — then aligned with the Portillo “king across the water” faction of the party — wrote:
The few young people on display seem unable to decide if their role model is Rik Mayall's Alan B'stard or Harry Enfield's Tory Boy. Alternatively hectoring and smarmy, this is not a party that looks like Britain. It is a party that looks deeply odd.
Even if there is a dawning realisation that something must be done, is there any real appetite for the cull required? It may be possible to sideline Jacob Rees-Mogg, who thought it would be clever to announce to the Scottish mining seat he aspired to represent that he was being assisted in his campaign by his nanny.
But there is a more serious reason to look to that comment piece beyond the fun to be had with digging up Smith’s distaste for the man who is now Leader of the House of Commons. Shipman is framing Smith as the ideological engine for the Conservative Party’s culture war antics and the seeds of that effort can be found in that Telegraph piece, where he writes:
A core of "A-list" candidates needs to be recruited. It should be biased towards the sections of the population where the party is weakest - women, ethnic minorities, young people and, yes, gays.
That doesn't mean that the party should accept anyone who fits into these categories. There is no point in getting a Muslim who is an anti-Semite or a gay man whose campness is ludicrous even to other gays….
… Just before the election I went with some friends to Winchester. Not to campaign for the Tories in a marginal seat now held by the Lib Dems, but to attend Homelands, a dance music festival attracting 40,000 people. These were not crazed hippies or anarchists but well-adjusted youngsters, most of them holding down ordinary jobs. I looked around me at a sea of excited faces.
I don't know whether it was the hallucinatory quality of the trance music, but I found myself musing how many of these people would vote Conservative. Virtually none. They sense - rightly - that the Tory party can't understand and doesn't approve of them. Yet I'm sure plenty of the ravers share core Conservative values, including a desire for low taxes, a belief in personal freedom and a preference for keeping the pound. Only when people like them regard the idea of voting Tory as a serious option, rather than a bad joke, will Britain have another Conservative government.
“Women, ethnic minorities, young people, and, yes, gays…” Smith was writing in 2001, not 1971. Yet you can see in those lines from 20 years ago the strategy that Shipman says dear ol’ Dougie is driving now:
Smith’s world view is why Priti Patel, the child of immigrants taking a tough line on asylum seekers, is home secretary. Another key appointment at the next reshuffle will be a widely anticipated replacement for Gavin Williamson as education secretary. Smith is pressing the case of Kemi Badenoch, the junior equalities minister who grew up in Nigeria but who he has identified as a culture warrior. “She fights his war on woke,” said a No 10 source.
His ‘insight’ from 2001 that the Tory party needed candidates who looked ‘right’ and believed Right has come to pass.
The most disingenuous thing about Shipman’s mini-profile of Dougie Smith is that he writes, in common with many of his colleagues, as if his paper and its daily counterpart do not “weaponise woke” in exactly the same way as the government and, in fact, act as outsiders for that government.
The Times and Sunday Times have spent the past ten years waging an ever more vituperative war against trans people, frequently play host to shocking anti-GRT rhetoric (see Matthew Parris’ recent column), and endlessly obsess over statues, the Proms, student politics, and the inner workings of the National Trust. The culture war is policy gold for the government and easy copy for the hacks. The latter simply pretend they play no role in the process.
But look at just today’s Sunday Times comment pages and you’ll find that five out of the five bylined op-ed columns cover ‘culture war’ topics. Matthew Syed condemns taking the knee and returns to the topic of cricketers’ tweets, Dominic Lawson writes about ‘resistance’ to the ‘woke’, Camilla Long picks at the scab of the Brewdog story in a cheap column that suggests young people simply refuse to work at ‘bad’ companies and manages to include a swipe at Prince Harry, Rod Liddle is just Rod Liddle, and Clarkson files some guff about offence that I’m sure he’s published ten to fifteen times already.
The ‘war on woke’ is all over the British press. In the Mail on Sunday, Sarah Vine accuses Boris Johnson of “going all frothy and woke” because he mumbled some buzzwords at the G7 — what possible motivation could she have for writing that? And has she snuck into No.10 to measure for curtains recently? — and Piers Morgan — a man whose biggest joke remains himself — dusts off the hackneyed “I identify as…” gibe for a pathetic instalment of his diary headlined If it appeases the woke brigade, I'm prepared to identify as a woman.2
Unsurprisingly, the Sunday Telegraph also has a selection of ‘war on woke’ stories featured prominently on its homepage, including an op-ed from Nigel Biggar and Doug Stokes with the not-even-remotely hysterical headline The woke onslaught is a war on the West itself.
There’s also an interview with Andrew Neil3 in which he claims “cancel culture has moved into the corporate world — Davos Man is now woke” while promoting GB News, which gets another little plug with an entirely speculative aka bullshit story claiming the BBC wants to shut GB News out of pooled footage of major events, and a news piece that screeches ‘Concerning precedent’ Universities regulator says academics should 'leave their personal political views at home'4
While Shipman’s piece aimed to present Dougie Smith as the ‘secretive’ puppet master behind the government’s culture war campaign, there’s nothing secret about it. What the Tories are up to is as obvious as the compliance and complicity of most British newspapers in those efforts.
If they’re not actively engaged in stoking the culture war, papers are happy to report on it and stroke their chins rather than offering any real analysis of what’s actually happening. The government and its media outriders are borrowing heavily from the Steve Bannon playbook, just with more refined accents and much more expensive clothes.
Side note: I hate this smug construction that features frequently in British political journalism. How the fuck do you know who I have and haven’t heard of? It’s patronising to readers and used purely to make hacks feel even more puffed up about themselves than usual.
You may recall that Moron used the same gag to equally chuck-free effect back in 2019 when he told viewers of Good Morning Britain that he was now going to “identify as a penguin”.
Andrew Neil is, of course, also Chairman of Press Holdings, the parent company of Telegraph Media Group, which owns the Sunday Telegraph. Harry de Quetteville’s interview doesn’t mention that.
How exactly academics are meant to do that without access to a Wurzel Gummage-style selection of alternative heads is not clear.