The view from a no horse town...
A British media that revelled in smears can't pretend to shocked by Johnson's Starmer/Savile jibe.
Boris Johnson’s line — spat out in parliament during the debate after the publication of Sue Gray’s partygate ‘update’ — that Keir Starmer “spent most of his time [as Director of Public Prosecutions] prosecuting journalists and failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile, as far as I can make out,” has provoked a great deal of pearl-clutching.
James Forsyth, husband of Allegra Stratton — the only person to resign over the partygate stories — best friend of Rishi Sunak, and political editor of notoriously innuendo-free Tory fanzine The Spectator, tweeted:
It would be good for our politics, and for Boris Johnson’s relations with Tory MPs if he withdrew the Savile line today. It isn’t the tone that we should want for our national debate.
He’s a man shouting that the stable door should be bolted while staring at the absence of a horse. Forsyth was, for instance, quite happy to wallow in the baseless innuendo about Jeremy Corbyn being a Communist spy.
Johnson’s attack on Starmer — desperate, deflective, crass and cheap — is decried as a smear by people who were only too happy to amplify claims about opposition MPs with far less relationship to reality during the Corbyn years.
The Savile line is less a smear and more a bad-faith interpretation of the facts, a political attack taking advantage of Starmer’s own frequently-expressed view that leaders should take responsibility for the organisations they lead.
Following Alison Levitt QC’s 2013 report into the Crown Prosecution Service’s handling of the Savile case, which he commissioned, Starmer apologised on behalf of the organisation. He was not the reviewing lawyer but he took responsibility for what he called the CPS’ “shortcomings”.
Starmer told Johnson during PMQs in December that “if there is an apology to be made, that apology should come from the top”. His actions as DPP fit with that: An apology needed to be made and it came from the top — him. It’s no surprise that Johnson is using that to make insinuations. What’s ludicrous is political journalists pretending that now a line has been crossed.
In The Times’ Red Box email on Wednesday, Patrick Macguire wrote:
Sir Keir Starmer's team were irate when the prime minister attacked him for having "prosecuted journalists and failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile" as director of public prosecutions — a conspiracy theory that gets a great deal of traction on Facebook and regularly crops up in focus groups but had yet to get an airing in the political mainstream, let alone by the prime minister, until yesterday.
Setting aside the substance for the moment — Starmer was indeed running the CPS when it took the decision not to charge Savile for child sex abuse in 2009, for which he later apologised, but did not personally take the decision himself — it was a gambit of dubious taste that, according to the FT, the PM was expressly warned by aides not to embark upon.
The key lines there are “setting aside the substance for a moment” and “it was a gambit of dubious taste”. Where was this concern about substance and “gambits of dubious taste” when The Times was assuring us that Jeremy Corbyn “[rode] a Chairman Mao-style bicycle”?
The frequently quoted fact checks by Full-Fact and Reuters1 on Starmer and the Savile case were both published before Johnson made his counter-attack. They’re rebuttals of suggestions that Starmer personally made the decision or was somehow involved in ‘protecting’ Savile. Johnson’s choice of the word “failed” avoided that trap. The CPS under Starmer did fail to prosecute Savile.
It’s indisputable that Johnson’s invocation of the Savile case as he attempted to defend himself in the Commons was desperate and despicable. Several of Savile’s victims have said as much. But the notion that this is the point at which British public debate toppled into the cesspit is a joke.
Contrast the willingness of political journalists to cry foul at Johnson’s tactics now with the silence that greeted one of their own putting a literal conspiracy theory on the front page of a national newspaper.
On December 7 2019, The Sun’s front page featured a story bylined to its then-Political Editor, Tom ‘Olivia’ Newton-Dunn, headlined Hijacked Labour [archived link]. By the end of the day, it had been erased from the paper’s website; its author and his bosses declined to comment on how it came to be or why it had been memory-holed.
Where Johnson’s jibe has at least some grounding in reality, The Sun story was entirely drawn from conspiracy theories, despite Newton Dunn’s claim that “an extraordinary network of hard-left extremists [had been] pieced together by former British intelligence officers.”
The ‘Hijacked Labour’ site, which The Sun seized upon and promoted in its story, was a smaller version of a previous, more sprawling conspiratorial disinfographic called ‘The Traitor’s Chart’. Its sources included the neo-Nazi group Aryan Unity and the antisemitic website The Millennium Report (sample article title: “Why are the Jews so reviled worldwide?”)
Hijacked Labour ludicrously dragged the actor Matt Berry into the mix as well as a trio of dead French philosophers Foucault, Lyotard and Derrida, but the branding of a wide selection of journalists and politicians as “traitors” and part of a sinister conspiracy was clearly dangerous. Asked to give his name in court, Jo Cox’s murderer said: “Death to traitors, freedom for Britain.”
The greatly missed journalist Dawn Foster challenged Newton Dunn on the article in July 2020, after he tweeted to complain that “Twitter [should take] responsibility for its content, like broadcast, print and digital media must.”
Dawn Foster: Is that why your article republishing the antisemitic and racist ‘Hijacked Labour’ interactive was taken down?
Tom Newton Dunn: You really don’t know what you’re talking about Dawn. Thought you knew better than to repeat untrue slurs.
The internet’s memory is much longer than that of a former Sun hack who needs to forget. Indeed, a Wikipedia user called tnewtondunn worked hard to have the “falsehoods” about the ‘Hijacked Labour’ story removed from Newton Dunn’s entry. The section titled ‘Far-Right Conspiracy Theory’ remains and features an extensive set of references, including Dawn Foster’s article for Jacobin.
In that piece, she wrote:
Though the map was reported as a breaking news story, it had in fact been seen before: it was widely shared online earlier in the summer under the original name of “the traitors’ chart,” and its “fact files” included a link to what essentially amounted to a hit list for anti-leftists that was filled with antisemitism, racism, and xenophobia
Newton Dunn’s response to being challenged over the disappeared article again shows how flexible the word “slur” can be in the hands of the British press.
To ask a hack who went from The Sun to become Chief Political Commentator for Times Radio and will now front a nightly show on Rupert Murdoch’s TalkTV about a front-page story he wrote is “a slur”. Claiming someone’s long-dead father “hated Britain” as The Daily Mail did to Ed Miliband is just journalism.
Giles Udy, a Telegraph contributor, was even willing to defend the use of neo-Nazi and antisemitic sources in the ‘Hijacked Labour’ graphic and The Sun’s promotion of them. He tweeted at the time:
‘Hitler noted the sun was shining’ doesn’t become untrue just because he reported it. The Left will want to smear this by association. I’d say look into it properly first before accepting the denials of those who have a vested interest in discrediting it.
Of course, Udy was also the author of a Telegraph piece headlined It's not all that farfetched to compare Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party to Stalin. Still, that almost seems mildly hinged when compared to Simon Heffer’s assertion on LBC that Jeremy Corbyn was “a man who wants to reopen Auschwitz.”
David Aaronovitch, who called Johnson’s reply to Starmer in parliament “a low, low point. Snake belly low”, previously nudge, nudge, wink, winked that Corbyn had a connection to an IRA bombing:
For a completely different reason, I’ve been going back over the 1993 Warrington bombing. There’s a big possibility that it was carried out by far-left people associated with a group called Red Action. I offer no prizes which Labour figure was close to Red Action.
Alongside innuendo of the scale of that ‘pondering’ and the Czech spy claims, the Corbyn era featured stories like claiming he “danced a jig” on the way to the Cenotaph, “stole sandwiches from veterans”2 and should apologise for the actions of his great-great-grandfather, a monstrous workhouse master.3
In the no horse town of British political journalism, where newspapers have plucked far-right talking points from Guido Fawkes for years, the notion that Johnson’s Savile attack on Starmer — previously pushed by Guido’s founder, drink driving enthusiast Paul Staines4 — represents the tipping point is beyond laughable.
The horse didn’t bolt. It was bolt-gunned by the British political hacks years ago. They can hardly complain about the mess now.
I’ll write something in the near future on the inherent politics of “fact-checking”.
Guido Fawkes made this one up. Costa said it had handed sandwiches to everyone at the event including Corbyn.
I could fill several newspapers with smears about other opposition politicians and public figures over the years.
But that was back in 2018 when hacks weren’t pretending to be bothered.
Masterly analysis from a media perspective. Novara came out swinging with similar comments on James I'Brien's and others' hypocrisy contrasted with Corbyn. Michael Walker all by himself on three topics was on fire. But only Mic takes apart the history morphology and culture of these media parasites.These slightly more sober and tightly argued CotUs of the last 3 weeks attest as (let's reach for hyperbole) Keats once said of his Odes 'I have taken some pains over them, and they read the more richly for it.'
Regardless of some people's double-standards re Corbyn, this post is disappointingly weak on the fact that the 'Jimmy Savile' smear was a conscious dead cat tactic by Johnson, using an untrue far-right theme. It is frankly shameful that not only the Spectator, but sections of the supposed "left" (the worst offender being the Skwawkxox, but also Menosa of the Canary and Barnet Momentum, in a tweet) have been suggesting that (a) there may be some truth in the smear and (b) Starmer deserves it anyway. You need to be much clearer about this, and not give an inch to these Red-Brown hysterics.