The Prick Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy: Columnists say, “Don’t panic!” and “Ignore the corruption…”
I read Simon Heffer and Matthew Syed so you don’t have to…
Early in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams writes of the titular guidebook that:
… despite its many glaring (and occasionally fatal) inaccuracies, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy itself has outsold the Encyclopedia Galactica because it is slightly cheaper, and because it has the words DON’T PANIC in large, friendly letters on the cover.
If the fictional guide had covered Earth newspapers1, it would probably note that they usually fail to heed the “don’t panic” advice and that this is a particularly pronounced problem in this most curséd of galactic backwaters’ most curséd little corner: Britain. British newspapers are world leaders in instilling fear — rational and otherwise — into their readers.
In today’s Sunday Telegraph, a paper designed to make its readers drop their marmalade in horror at the decline of civilisation and the advance of the woke hordes, Simon Heffer (imagine Beaker from The Muppets raised by Mrs Doubtfire if she was actually a Brown Shirt in hiding) offers up his latest slice of ahistorical bluster.
Having last appeared in this newsletter proving how unworried he is about being called “a gammon” by penning 800 words for a national newspaper about how desperately unworried he is, Heffer returns to tell us that it is un-British to panic. He writes, in his self-appointed role as keeper of Britishness, that:
An alarming number of Britons seem to have acquired a proclivity to act in a way we used to believe was alien to our character and our culture: to engage in mass panic. Despite, or perhaps because of, our prime minister saying there was no need to panic-buy fuel for our cars, millions at once did so. One even panicked to the extent of lining a bucket with a plastic bag to fill it with petrol (do not, as they say on Blue Peter, try this at home), there having been panic-buying of jerry cans.
Firstly, it is not irrational to disbelieve “our” Prime Minister. Boris Johnson is a liar, and a liar who lies with such ease that were lying an Olympic sport, he would be odds on to bring back the gold for Britain in the 10,000m2 bullshit.
But, more importantly, we are once again in the imagined 1950s wonderland of Heffer’s sweaty imagination, a place where lips are endlessly stiff, no one lost their shit in the Blitz, and there was definitely no such thing as black marketeering during the war. Walker in Dad’s Army is, after all, a fictional character.
The huffling Hefferlump goes on to repeat one of the great pandemic myths…
Eighteen months ago, early in the pandemic, when told there was enough lavatory paper, dried pasta and flour for everyone, people descended on supermarkets and stripped their aisles of lavatory paper, dried pasta and flour.
… which is so beloved of tweed pantalooned poltroons like him. In fact, people not unreasonably stocked up on items with an awareness that they might be confined to their homes, operating on the sensible hypothesis that shortages could occur, and aware that the habit of picking up items on the way from work might be constrained for a while.
Heffer continues with a paragraph that sums up the odd disorder that finds men and women in their fifties and sixties imagining that they fought in the Second World War or even lived through it at all. He writes:
We are the people that came through the Somme, the Slump, the Blitz, Suez and the legion horrors of the 1970s (including petrol shortages). What has changed? Our national character has suddenly degenerated. The pandemic, and politicians, may be to blame.
Our “national character” is a myth that Heffer and his paper have to buy and sell while constantly claiming it has been destroyed.
Go back to editions of The Daily Telegraph or The Daily Mail from the sainted fifties that Heffer always flies back to and you’ll discover the Heffer analogues of the time expended a great deal of print on how England was going to the dogs. It’s always going to the dogs but they can never be done eating or the Telegraph will have nothing to panic its readers about.
Heffer’s deliberately half-remembered history of the Second World War, for example, finds no room for the Bethnal Green Tube tragedy of 3 March 1943 when a panic at the station entrance resulted in a crush that killed 173 people. One reason it doesn’t is that news of the event was covered up at the time, with fuller details not released until January 1945 and the results of the official investigation not published until 1946.
Churchill, who had received a report on the disaster on 6 April 1943 — which concluded that public panic during an air raid was the cause — ordered that the details should be suppressed because they contradicted official statements that there was no panic and could be an invitation to the Germans to conduct similar raids. He went against the advice from Labour figures in the wartime coalition, notably his deputy, Clement Atlee (who was the MP for Limehouse) and the Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, who had wanted to speak about the event to stop rumours that the panic had been “due to Jews and/or Fascists”.
There’s no place in Heffer’s view of history for inconvenient details like that, nor for the reality of soldiers returning from the Somme — like my paternal great-grandfather who was gassed — physically and mentally changed forever. Do we take the word of Heffer, who has fought a thousand battles in his imagination, or Wilfred Owen’s words from Dulce et Decorum est:
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
Jumping forward to the 1970s, the period with which columnists are particularly keen on making clumsy comparisons at the moment, Heffer thunders:
I remember queues at petrol stations after the oil price shock in 1973; then the crash in the stock market, inflation at 26.9 per cent, the trades unions running the country, Denis Healey running to the IMF to beg it to bail us out. We weren’t happy, but we kept our heads. We didn’t metaphorically fill buckets with petrol, or cupboards with bog rolls. We just bided our time and elected Mrs Thatcher. We were still the sort of people depicted in that famous photograph, admittedly staged, of a cheery milkman walking through rubble with his crate of bottles during the Blitz. Then, Britain could take it.
Even as he admits in the same sentence that the image was staged, Heffer cannot let go of the propaganda fiction; he needs the cheery milkman to be real and will argue for a kind of emotional truth even as he knows it was a lie. And, as is often the case with columnists, he treats his own anecdotes as unassailable.
While Heffer claims people “kept [their] heads” during 1970s shortages, it’s not hard to find stories from others that say different. When Dennis Kilcommons, a columnist from the Huddersfield Examiner, asked in 2012 for memories of a “British sugar shortage” that a reader had half-remembered, he was deluged:
Beverly Collins says that because of the three day week, deliveries to supermarkets were erratic and they rationed sugar to customers.
“I was thrilled to win a raffle, at the time, which consisted of a tea pot, box of tea bags and a precious bag of sugar. I lived in a staff house in Storthes Hall Lane and coal supplies were very irregular.”
… Keith Turner of Shelley says newspaper headlines said: Sugar shortage on the way – no need to panic.
“So everyone panicked and cleared the shelves. Shops that still had stocks were rationing it. I reduced my sugar intake considerably and could now manage quite well without it should there be another shortage.”
Bob Vant says it happened whilst he was a student in Aberystwyth.
“Difficult to forget it, since it showed how shallow the veneer of respectability is,” he says. “There was just the one supermarket in town and I'm not being sexist when I say that you had to be careful where you pushed your trolley, in case you got a cold stare from the Laura-Ashley-clad lecturers' wives and partners.
“Mind, that was small beer compared to how they went for each other for the limited amount of sugar.
“It was quite summat for a naive young whipper-snapper to behold. I watched the violent struggles with jaw dropped wide-open.
“And then there was the REAL bother … when toilet rolls were caught short. The language! I tell you, if you got caught up in the middle of a sugar or bog-roll turf-war, you were dog-meat.”
But for Heffer — whose collection of dog whistles is one of the most extensive in all of Britain — it’s important to suggest that some steel was lost from the national character since the 70s (perhaps after Thatcher nationalised British Steel?) so he has to ignore any evidence to the contrary. That’s why he regurgitates another myth and wraps it up in the Telegraph’s beloved Covid ‘skepticism’:
But the power of mass media and the absence of statesmanship shown in the generation of fear over Covid seem to have bred a change of character. It reminds one of the collective hysteria after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, when briefly it seemed millions lost faith in the monarchy. Remnants of that hysteria linger in our DNA: and the ease with which we now panic suggests we have lost our nerve.
You’ll also notice there an absolute classic of the columnist’s toolkit: Blaming “the media” — “the elite” is also mentioned in the lede — while being a long-standing member of both those amorphous groups.
It’s also so rich that it could be served as a gravy to hear Heffer pontificating about the terrible nature of panic when he was the man who suggested, during an appearance on LBC in July 2019, that Jeremy Corbyn is “a man who wants to reopen Auschwitz”.
Heffer represents a very intense and particular case of columnist derangement but he’s far from some wild outlier.
In The Times today, Britain’s most overpromoted ping-pong player Matthew Syed — whose last appearance in this newsletter was in late September after he wrote a column headlined It damages society if we keep on calling our politicians cheats and liars — argues in the week that the serving police officer who murdered Sarah Everard was jailed that “any corruption or rule-breaking in Europe is piffling next to Xi and Putin’s contempt for civilisation.”
Syed is more committed to defending the status quo than a man who dresses exclusively in double denim and has requested Rocking All Over The World be played at his funeral (just as it was at his wedding). Under the headline As we in the West score points off each other, Russia and China smirk, he writes, in response to another Times column earlier this week about German schadenfreude over Brexit, that:
Any right-minded person on these shores will have been horrified by the Greensill affair, cronyism in the handing out of government contracts and more. No, the point is that just as western nations are as culpable as each other when it comes to putting self-interest above collective security, we are equally to blame for the steady erosion of the moral norms upon which western civilisation is constructed. That goes for the EU, too.
This is why when I see Tiede “grinning” at the UK’s travails I feel like weeping at the shallowness of his analysis. He is, in my view, right to blame Brexit for many of our present problems, but of infinitely greater historical significance is the decadence that is eating away at the values, self-confidence and solidarity of the West. We are being divided and ruled by powers that do not share our values and are hostile to our interests, aimlessly sniping at one another while Beijing and Moscow look on with glee.
Syed is writing about the “horrified” response of “any right-minded person” in a newspaper whose Saturday edition carried a ludicrously soft-soaping interview with the Prime Minister just yesterday. Just pages before Syed’s column, The Sunday Times has a news piece declaring Dishy Rishi is just the man to balance the racks, making a cheeky human interest story out of the Chancellor’s quotes about stacking the dishwasher and not questioning how often a man married to a billionaire’s daughter gets anywhere near dirty plates.
The word “decadence” has been popping up frequently in the op-ed columns of The Times, Telegraph and Daily Mail in recent months. Because while each of those papers backed the Conservative Party and has a government that serves the interests of their proprietors, it’s important for readers to still feel a sense of panic. The failings of the Right need to be blamed on a lack of ‘real’ Tories — the no true Scotsman fallacy comes in very handy — and secret conspiracies by the “wokeists infecting culture”.
On an international level, the right-wing press needs to have enemies without (Russia and China) to match the enemies within (the ‘lefties’ who pushed ‘political correctness’ now rebranded as the ‘woke’ selling ‘critical race theory’). It also speaks to the bloated Brexit ego to suggest that Beijing and Moscow are “[looking] on with glee” at Britain’s travails. The truth is Putin and Xi don’t think about Britain very much at all.
Syed and Heffer are not saying Don’t Panic in the calm voice of The Hitchhiker’s Guide… but in the contradictory shrieks of Dad’s Army’s Corporal Jones. They, like many other columnists, are addicted to the kind of national identity that only exists in the fiction of Dad’s Army and the more serious versions presented by the Sunday afternoon war movie marathons of their youth.
Like The Hitchhiker’s Guide… outselling the Encyclopedia Galactica “despite its many glaring inaccuracies”, columnists like Heffer and Syed are selling a simple version of a complicated reality, but — whatever they claim — panic is always an intrinsic part of the package.
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It didn’t, as Ford Prefect only dedicated one word to our cursed planet (“Harmless”), which was subsequently upgraded to the more precise “Mostly harmless”.
Sorry, that should be the 10936.13-yard bullshit given his professed desire to bring Imperial measurements back to the fore.