The property is condemned
The property is condemned
The media coverage of the Tory Party leadership contest is big on pantomime and low on scrutiny.
Previously: Addled minds under the blond sun
Left to your own devices
I know you're going to sink like a ship
Property, property, property is condemned
You tell a lie for long enough
And you believe it yourself
— ‘Property Is Condemned’, The Triffids (1986)
Witnessing the Conservative Party leadership contest is like watching a series of people who handed the arsonist matches argue about who’ll be the best custodian of the ashes. All the while they stink of petrol and the media pretends not to notice. Instead, it detects — as the i’s Chief Political Commentator Paul Waugh did during Rishi Sunak’s campaign launch — “… the undeniably strong smell of power in the muggy room.” What does power smell like? Bullshit? Bollocks? Old Spice?
Writing about the same event, Tim Stanley — a 40-year-old man with the demeanour of a precocious toddler in a sailor suit — delivered the most embarrassing Tory fan fiction since Toby Young’s 2019 Quilette profile of Boris Johnson (“You could imagine him in lederhosen, wandering through the Black Forest with an axe over his shoulder, looking for ogres to kill.”) Wiping the drool from his chin, Stanley wrote:
If Rishi wins this thing, of course, it’ll be a historical first - and I’m worried about the backlash. I’m not sure Britain is ready for a good-looking prime minister… Illuminated by Rishi’s camera bulbs, blond-haired Grant Shapps was a Botticelli Angel, and even Dominic Raab, introducing the candidate with an angry grin, had a touch of the Steven Seagals. As Rishi bounded onto the stage (he skips like a fawn), I was overcome by the significance of the moment, for Britain finally has its Barack Obama – a solid eight out of 10.
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.
The New Statesman’s Jeremy Cliffe took a similar line tweeting:
If I were an ideological Tory — which I very much am not — I’d probably be rooting for some sort of Tugendhat / Badenoch joint ticket. On the grounds that both seem to have some degree of substance in a way that rest of the field do not.
That’s Badenoch, the candidate that dedicated a significant part of her launch to berating ‘woke’ ice cream, and Tugendhat who believes that the solution to any and all of the UK’s problems is shouting military jargon and “getting the army in”. It’s like arguing that instead of having a cone with one scoop of total shit, you should opt for two scoops with marginally different flavours.
For The Guardian, Heather Stewart also buys into the notion that there is any kind of variety among the candidates. She writes of Penny Mordaunt:
With her bracing good humour, Mordaunt is promising to give her party back its self-confidence after the meltdown of recent months – a message that seems to resonate, particularly when wrapped in a comforting blanket of patriotism.
At her campaign launch on Wednesday, she took plenty of questions and parried them wryly – contrasting with the more senior Liz Truss’s woodenness at her own speech the next day.
That “wry parrying” including a joke in response to the question “What is a woman?” (“It was Margaret Thatcher who said that 'every Prime Minister needs a Willie'. A woman like me doesn't have one.”) that even the obsessively anti-trans Times writer Janice Turner called ‘transphobic’ in her notebook column today.
Besides Stewart’s surface-level analysis of Mourdant (“[She’ll] be able to rely on her brisk but reassuring persona…”), The Guardian also gave space to Henry Hill, Conservative Home’s Deputy Editor, to talk up her appeal to party members. But even then his assessment of her is less straight-forwardly positive than the view of the Guardian’s political editor:
Does Mordaunt fit this competent, unifying, election-winning image? She’s certainly trying, but I don’t really know. Nobody does. Even politicians who have worked alongside her for years claim to have no real idea what she thinks. Her campaign is less a crusade than a vibe in search of a destiny.
How lucky for Mordaunt that the majority of the British political press also works on an entirely vibes-based system. And that if you were to drone strike the Spectator garden party, you’d wipe out most of those who cosplay as centre-left as well as the majority on the right and far-right.
It was ludicrous but inevitable to hear Andrew Marr — another Spectator garden party attendee — on LBC hyperactively babbling about “the left and centre-left” candidates in the Tory Party leadership contest as if such a creature exists. He might as well have been trying to persuade listeners that he’d discovered a unicorn having stumbled across a Shetland pony with a Cornetto superglued to its forehead.
The candidates are like the Pando of Utah, which appears to be different trees above ground but is connected to the same vast root structure beneath it. They feed on the same mulch — dead Thatcherite ideas — and are part of the same networks. For instance, Sunak, Truss and Mordaunt have all delivered speeches to the Lord Finkelstein-chaired think tank Onward, while Tugendhat and Badenoch have sat on its board.
For all the sound and fury in the press — Dan Wootton feeding the Boris betrayal narrative by snarling at Sunak, Sarah Vine declaring she could not vote for Mordaunt as she is insufficiently transphobic — this is political pantomime. The aim is to make it seem like change has occurred and political hacks must take it very seriously lest the futility of their existence be revealed to them.
In the breathless profiles and the X-Factor-without-the-phone-vote theatrics of this weekend’s televised debates, proper scrutiny will continue to be AWOL, replaced by cracker dry fact-checking that will do nothing at all to deter lies and clumsy attempts at gotcha questions.
Whoever becomes the new Prime Minister in September will be allowed to present themselves as a fresh start with the professional amnesiacs of the British political press conveniently forgetting that Boris Johnson played the same trick in 2019. The property is condemned but the same old lies will be tarted up as new truths and the same people who once ‘believed in Boris’ will assure us it’s different this time.
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