Discover more from Conquest of the Useless
The Rocket Banana Monarchy: Of course the press doesn't want to discuss Britain's corruption — its proprietors benefit handsomely from it...
... and its columnists are required to peddle the myth of British exceptionalism.
Previously: The hot dog suited hordes: MPs and media alike are pretending they didn’t smash up the place
“Sleaze” is a very British word for corruption; it’s a Carry On construction which turns grift, self-interest, and hypocrisy into the stuff of passing tabloid outrage. When Boris Johnson insisted at his COP-26 press conference yesterday that he believes “the UK is not remotely a corrupt country,” the inclination of most of the British press is to accept that as a fact because to say otherwise would cause them and their proprietors headaches.
A common media argument is to point to Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI) and note that the UK is ranked as the 11th ‘cleanest nation’, sandwiched between Canada and Australia. But despite its extremely authoritative sounding name and the fact that its rankings are so frequently quoted, Transparency International is effectively just another thinktank.
Founded by former World Bank employees, the organisation’s rankings don’t consider the effect of corruption in economic terms but instead focus on the perception of corruption in each country, relying on surveys conducted by private organisations including The Economist’s Intelligence Unit, the US government-backed conservative think-tank Freedom House, and the back-scratching, elite skiing holiday enablers of the World Economic Forum.
As Le Monde noted in a 2019 article, “the collapse of Lehman Brothers (2008) or the manipulation of the money market reference rate (Libor) by major British banks revealed in 2011 did not affect the ratings of the United States or United Kingdom.” Writing for Foreign Policy back in 2013, Alex Cobham argued that the CPI “embeds a powerful and misleading elite bias in popular perceptions of corruption”. And where better to head for “powerful and misleading elite bias” than the British press?
In today’s Times, columnist and renowned knock-off leather jacket purchaser, David Aaronovitch, a man whose wallet has not gone uninspected for a single day since the Iraq War, filed a piece headlined Britain is only clean if it clings to the rules. He begins:
Something that had previously just been bent was broken last week and the prime minister broke it. I don’t claim the Sibyl’s gift for prophecy but I never would have predicted such brazenness.
It would have been one thing for Conservative backbenchers to vote for Andrea Leadsom’s attempt to have the standards committee’s verdict on Owen Paterson overturned. For the prime minister, on what appears to have been a whim, personally to decide last Wednesday to whip his Commons majority in favour of setting aside Paterson’s suspension for breaking very clear parliamentary rules was an act belonging to a different dimension.
There is more than a hint of Captain Renault-ism there; just like Claude Rains’ character in Casablanca, Aaronovitch is shocked! shocked! to find corruption going on even as he indirectly benefits from it. His boss’ boss Rupert Murdoch and other News UK executives met with ministers, including the Prime Minister, more than 40 times in the first 14 months of the Johnson administration.
It’s self-interested and self-deceiving for members of the British press to pull ever more askanced faces about lobbying by politicians even as the relationship between proprietors like Murdoch, Rothermere, Lebedev, and the remaining Barclay brother remains queasily close.
If those very same newspapers were writing about political goings-on in Nigeria or Russia, where a newspaper owner sympathetic to the ruling party — the son of a former foreign intelligence agent no less — was raised to a legislature, they wouldn’t have to look too far in their dictionaries for a description. But when the man formerly known as Evgeny Lebedev was made Baron Lebedev, of Hampton in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames and of Siberia in the Russian Federation the “corruption” word was very thin on the ground.
Today’s dead cat story thrown to the media by the Defence Secretary, Ben Wallace, about three MPs (two SNP and one Labour) allegedly getting drunk on a flight to Gibraltar to visit “our boys”, brought back memories of Boris Johnson, then Foreign Secretary, pictured looking like Bagpuss after a bender at San Francesco d’Assisi airport on Sunday 29 April 2018.
Johnson was on his way back from Lebedev’s property in Perugia. As John Sweeney wrote for Byline Times:
[He] attended several parties at the Lebedevs’ Palazzo Terranova near Perugia in Italy – parties described in the report as notorious for their “x-rated content”. On two separate occasions Johnson, as Foreign Secretary, left his Metropolitan Police protection officers behind in Britain – and that breach of protocol raises security concerns. What is concerning is that the “anything goes” atmosphere of the parties might create an environment where others could capture sex kompromat on the then Foreign Secretary.
But on becoming Prime Minister, Johnson refused to answer questions about the trips, despite a passenger who was on his flight home telling The Guardian that the politician had been “on his own, seemingly without any luggage and very much the worse for wear”.
Lebedev was made a life peer in July 2020. Concerns about his suitability as a member of the House of Lords were pushed aside after an intevention by the Cabinet Office. No photos from Boris Johnson’s Perugia party time have appeared yet. Another word worth looking up is “kompromat”.
On the subject of lords, let’s return to Aaronovitch’s column. After discussing the Paterson affair and the current Cox controversy — currently producing a veritable bukkake1 of revelations — he writes:
I have no problem per se with “second jobs”. There are plenty of second jobs, from GP to, say, columnist, which seem not just to be compatible with being an elected official but possibly even beneficial. But in the case of Cox, his second job is actually that of being an MP. How could it be otherwise, given that he earns over ten times as much employed as a lawyer?
What interesting examples of second jobs that might be permissable for politicians he chooses… GPs and columnists. We should call the latter “the Fink exception” since Lord Daniel Finkelstein, Aaronovitch’s double-act partner for one of Times Radio’s newspaper reviews, is also a Tory member of the House of Lords. But then again, Lord Hague, another former Foreign Secretary, also has a Times column to go alongside his membership of the second chamber.
Aaronovitch concludes with strong words…
Let’s make tougher rules. Once made, let’s enforce them officiously. Let’s make it as hard as possible for our leaders to be unaware of them and let’s punish or restrict those public officials who put their personal gain above their duty to the country. On this, let puritanical values govern.
… but the trouble is that I believe them even less than he should have that bloke who tried to flog him a coat made of glorious sweat-inducing pleather. He works for Rupert Murdoch, arguably the most corrupting influence on British politics in the last century, and does so happily. 72 hours after he became Prime Minister, Boris Johnson had a private meeting with Murdoch.
Someone who really cared passionately about “influence peddling” could not write about it with a straight face in a title owned by Murdoch. But then Times columnists always kid themselves that the history of that masthead elevates them above The Sun and The News of the World whose toxic influence abides like Chernobyl fallout.
Today, Times Radio where Aaronovitch and Finkelstein appear billed as Finkelvitch — the “cerberus of news”… yes, really — offered an instructive example of how the quiet corruption of British media works. India Knight making her own weekly paper review appearance on Matt Chorley’s show was asked by the host about the story of the allegedly inebriated MPs on the Gibraltar flight and legislators getting drunk and disorderly generally.
Neither Chorley or Knight mentioned of her (former?2) long-term partner Eric Joyce, whose Wikipedia page includes an entire section on “Assaults in the Houses of Parliament” which occured while he was drunk. Then again, The Times was assidous in neglecting to mention Knight’s relationship with Joyce — and its use in mitigation — when it reported on the ex-MP’s conviction for possession of an image of child sexual abuse, so it’s hardly surprising that Chorley skirted the ‘awkwardness’.
At The Spectator — which provided Johnson with his own second job as editor during his first term as an MP — the current editor Fraser Nelson has written a cover story headlined Court of Chaos: Boris’s style of government isn’t working for him — or his country (note how they firmly stick to the mononym that makes it sound like a criticism of a wayward mate rather than the PM).
Even as Nelson delivers his (opportunistic) critique of Johnson, it comes framed in fond and fiction-flecked form. He writes:
The King Boris model did work for a while, when it was vital to get Brexit done, and it segued naturally into the era of Covid and lockdowns. But Johnson is simply not cut out to be a great dictator. He has too little real interest in politics. He entertains too many contradictory ideas.
Imagine writing that the Prime Minister (the Prime Minister?!) has “too little real interest in politics” as though that’s something that can be shrugged away. But then Nelson also asserts that the early period of the Johnson administration “worked”, as though the contempt for the rule of law shown in that “get Brexit done” strategy did not cause further damage domestically and internationally.
Nelson, himself ultimately an employee of the remaining Barclay brother and hugely comfortable in both TV and radio green rooms and the chummy world of Spectator garden parties, is an establishment creature. Like The Daily Mail giving Johnson a thwack on the nose with its critical front pages, Nelson’s piece is an attempt at correction from the friendly right-wing press, a message to the Prime Minister from his bosses to get in line. It is, in its own way, a reflection of Britain’s ambient, background corruption.
The sort of corruption and crony-enabling that allows James Forsyth, The Spectator’s political editor, best friend (and best man) to the Chancellor, and husband of one of the Prime Minister’s senior spokespeople to be treated as a reliable narrator. His latest Spectator piece — Can Boris weather this new storm? — serves the same purpose as his Friday column in The Times often does: Providing a space for ‘notions’ from within government to be aired and the response to them to be assessed.
Just as Nelson and Forsyth find ways to be sympathetic to Johnson, Evening Standard columnist, Times Radio ‘chief political commentator’ (a role invented to make his sideways push from The Sun look less like a demotion) and purveyor of a neo-Nazi conspiracy theory on the tabloid’s front page Tom Newton-Dunn indulged in fan fiction in his latest piece.
Writing in his usual style — spiv chimpanze throwing cliché-printed magnets at a fridge door — Newton-Dunn describes the Prime Minister as…
not a normal politician. He doesn’t behave like one, and he isn’t expected to. His primary currency is emotion, not fact. He shoots from the hip, goes on his gut and delights in ripping up rules. A lot of voters like him for that, especially in the Red Wall. They see him as an anti-politician. An outsider, like them, fighting the elite.
If Boris Johnson is “not expected” to behave, it is in large part because British political journalists have indulged him in that. And writing, in all seriousness, that the Eton and Oxford-educated, schoolboy Latin spewing, former Mayor of London, ex-Telegraph columnist Tory Prime Minister is “an outsider” who “fights the elite” is only excusable if you’re suffering from a head injury.
Newton-Dunn’s multi-car pile-up of mixed metaphors continues:
Throughout his London mayoralty and most of his premiership, Johnson has had the self knowledge to keep a few greybeards close.
Shrewd and experienced political operators who can spot fast-moving banana skins in real time, speak truth to power and, crucially, get listened to while he’s busy emoting.
Beyond the vision of the Prime Minister needing advisors to help him avoid rocket-propelled banana skins, Newton-Dunn’s ‘analysis’ shows again how the British press has enabled and excused Boris Johnson.
It’s not that Johnson is comfortable with corruption and has been an inveterate liar with a willingness to aide and abet other moral bankrupts throughout his career but that he simply hasn’t got the right advisors to explain right from wrong to him, a 57-year-old man.
The majority of the British press — especially its columnist class — cannot talk about corruption with honesty because they also benefit from it. When the UK’s corruption is measured by ‘perception’, its media has a big role in minimising its reality. British exceptionalism is so baked into the mindset of most media figures that the idea that this island is a place where the world’s most corrupt can stash their cash and be enabled by our homegrown kleptocrats is unthinkable.
As ever, do not Google that.
The current status of their relationship remains unclear though they do still follow each other on Twitter, for what that’s worth (i.e. very little)