The rubber guillotine
The papers may seem to be "killing the king" but it's all so much theatre.
Politics is a constant repetition, in cycles of varying length, of one of the oldest myths in human culture, of how we make kings for our societies, and how after a while we kill them to achieve a kind of rebirth.
Some of the kings are innocent; indeed, some of them take away the sins of the world. Some of them are less innocent, like Mr Aitken. It doesn’t really matter. They must die.
Boris Johnson wrote those words in a 1997 Telegraph column about “the basic drama of politics” and the resignation of Jonathan Aitken.
After serving a prison sentence for perjury, Aitken went on to become an Anglican priest and is now a prison chaplain. I think Boris Johnson’s road to retribution will neither be as hard nor as pious.
Though even the headlines in The Daily Telegraph, his once and future home, are bruising…
The 'greased piglet' wriggles free again, but this PM's mutinous party still smells blood
The Prime Minister is left badly wounded
History is little comfort for Boris, despite his vote win
… this is all part of the paper’s long shift from ludicrous superlatives to painting Johnson as a “tragic figure” (as Sherelle Jacobs writes today). The aim is to separate the man from the party and pretend that the Telegraph has just become aware of his failings, rather than previously marketing them as exceptional advantages.
The Daily Mail is more slippery. Its front page reheats that claggy old Cameron line about a “coalition of chaos” to warn its readers that Starmer is lurking under their beds with SNP bogeymen by his side. Inside it parrots Number 10 briefings that “serial rebels… could be kicked out of the party” and gives space to a story about the “cabinet getting battle-ready” (no doubt Dominic Raab is already karate-chopping a stack of old phone books).
But the zombie-like Stephen Glover’s column (“There is a way Boris can bounce back: Cut taxes and give us a real Brexit dividend”) and the supportive leader (“If it goes on, this circular Tory firing squad can have only one result: Starmer and his wrecking crew in No. 10”) have the undertone of a mafia shakedown. “Nice premiership you’ve got there, shame if anything were to happen to it.”
The paper’s double-page takedown of Aldi knock-off brand David Cameron, Jeremy Hunt (“a pound shop Machiavelli”) serves two purposes: It demonstrates the value of keeping the Mail onside to Johnson while giving an insufficiently right-wing candidate a kicking. The accompanying analysis by Glen Owen, the Mail On Sunday’s Political Editor, gins up a year-long plot against Johnson that bears no relationship to reality.
Paranoia is a key tool in The Daily Mail’s editorial arsenal. In its retelling, the story of the vote of no confidence is one of dark forces surrounding the Prime Minister rather than a slow puncture caused by his own actions and abject disregard for forming alliances and fostering loyalty. Political reporters are much more comfortable creating narratives built on psychodrama than detailing the destructive effects of mediocrity.
In the leader column — the Mail’s ‘voice’ — we are told that “the animus towards Mr Johnson is out of all proportion” immediately after the paper returns to Beergate snarling that:
Beergate hypocrite Sir Keir Starmer has been dissembling like mad for weeks… with barely a breath of criticism from the Boris-haters.
The same article claims that “the mainstream broadcast media — BBC, Sky, Channel 4, ITN — have also been vicious and unrelenting. Even Jeremy Corbyn was given a fairer shake.” The Mail is, of course, an expert in being “vicious and unrelenting”, but that line is less believable than the old playground rumour about the popstar, the stomach pump and enough semen to stock a sperm bank.
The Sun’s front page combines a typically crass headline (Night of the blond knives) with a subhead that claims the Prime Minister was “stabbed in the back”. The coverage in its news pages is a relatively straight recounting of the events leading up to the vote of confidence and the aftermath.
The real spin resides in its leader column. Beneath the headline Act of self-harm by Tory rebels, it parrots exactly the words used by Johnson's allies yesterday (“he got the big calls right”) and lurches back to Brexit rhetoric to defend the Prime Minister:
What breathtaking disloyalty to a man whose charisma, and ruthlessness towards the toxic Remainer-stuffed Parliament of 2019, won a huge majority and handed scores of them their seats.
But, as with the Mail, there’s a mafioso undertone here, albeit with an Aussie twang. The Sun’s continuing support — Rupert Murdoch’s continuing support — comes with the demand that he “enact the sort of Conservative policies which got him elected”:
Primarily that means cutting the monstrous tax burden which is hammering families already engulfed by the cost-of-living crisis. It means using the Brexit independence that HE helped win to cut regulations smothering businesses.
It means facing down the critics of the Rwanda deportation scheme for illegal migrants and making it work.
These aren’t demands on behalf of The Sun’s readers — a dwindling band in any case — but those of its editors and their Palpatine-with-a-ex-model-wife proprietor. Were Kier Starmer to suddenly appeal to Murdoch, columnists like Trevor Kavanagh would quickly decide he is not, in fact, “a dullard written off by his own MPs as a born loser.”
It’s not that Starmer hasn’t and won’t repeatedly debase himself to the Mail, Sun and Telegraph, in turn, it’s just that they don’t believe he’ll get adequately in the dirt for them. He is receiving the same villain makeover given to Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn before him because it worked then and the papers think it’ll work now.
The Sun and The Mail will turn on Boris Johnson for good when they decide that the public distaste for him is truly unredeemable. And when they do, they’ll pretend that they are shaping the public mood rather than simply chasing it. Conversely, once he is out of No. 10, Johnson will be The Daily Telegraph’s golden boy again. He won’t need to take holy orders when there’s a column waiting for him.
There’s a telling passage in Telegraph Associate Editor (Politics) Christopher 'Chopper' Hope’s newsletter today. After getting tumescent about a typically tedious Twitter thread by bothersome book-eating bullshit spouter Professor Matthew Goodwin, Hope writes:
Goodwin’s blast of common sense is the kind of thing Johnson would be calling for if he still worked for The Telegraph rather than running the country from 10 Downing Street.
The Telegraph is just bored with ‘Boris’ being in government now. It wants him back where he belongs: Blustering under a Telegraph byline.
Boris Johnson’s career isn’t over. It’s just that his sabbatical as a politician might be coming to an end. Like Theresa May being feted for her ballgown, the media class will quickly find a way to rehabilitate him when all is said and done.
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