The white suit delusion: A childish need for heroes has left most of the British media telling political fairytales...
A neat narrative usually trumps the messy reality; just don't ask where all those stains come from...
Previously: The hot dog suited hordes: MPs and media alike are pretending they didn’t smash up the place
The Owen Paterson story has moved onto the buck-passing stage, with blame being shovelled towards Mark Spencer, the Chief Whip, Lord Snooty cosplayer Jacob Rees-Mogg, and what today’s Times calls “Downing Street ‘yes men’”.
It’s a transparent briefing operation on behalf of Boris Johnson whose decision to back the ex-minister and attack the standards commissioner — who has been a persistent thorn in his well-upholstered side — was heavily influenced by a claret-powered chat at the Garrick Club with dessicated bald eagle, ex-Telegraph editor and keeper of the Thatcher grimoires, Charles Moore.
With a by-election now due in Paterson’s seat, the remnants of the FBPE fantasy politics league and their boosters in the British political press are tossing around the notion of an “anti-sleaze candidate”. Minds addled by Britpop nostalgia, the recent Blair/Brown documentary, and dim memories of Martin Bell in his white suit, they crave another bit of meaningless symbolism which — if it even worked — would simply deliver another MP to vote with the Tories.
In the minds of people who think the point in British history when it “all went wrong” can be pinpointed to sometime briefly after the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony, Martin Bell’s stint as an MP1 is uncomplicatedly nostalgic. The story goes: He stood against and defeated Neil ‘brown envelopes” Hamilton, and helped consign the dirty Major era2 to the history books.
Only that’s the white suit delusion. Bell beat Hamilton, but the former Tory MP went on to make a nice living as a reality TV curiosity before sliming back into politics as a figure in UKIP (he’s now the party’s leader having replaced the previous one who lasted less than four months). And Bell’s own record as an elected representative was not a glorious one.
Bell, who spoke infrequently in Parliament and mostly confined himself to issues of foreign policy when he did, usually voted in line with the Labour government. But when it came to the repeal of the virulently homophobic Section 28, he went through the lobbies with the Conservatives, attempting to prevent its abolition. He also voted against the fox hunting ban.
Outside of his parlimentary activities, Bell backed a campaign for the release of Mark Wright and James Fisher who, in September 1992, while serving in the Scots Guards, murdered 18-year-old Peter McBride by shooting him in the back as he was running away after being searched by the soldiers and found to be carrying no weapons. As he lay dying, they shot him again.
Wright and Fisher were convicted of murder in 1995 and sentenced to life. The trial judge, Lord Justice Kelly, said both defendants had been “untruthful and evasive” in their evidence and that Fisher, in particular, had been “untruthful and evasive”. Appeals High Court and House of Lords appeals against their convictions failed, so the case moved to a more powerful tribunal: The Daily Mail.
The paper’s campaign was backed by BBC presenter Ludovic Kennedy, former Tory minister and Nosferatu stand-in Norman Tebbit, the former Labour MP and Northern Ireland Secretary Merlyn Rees, and Bell, who was at the forefront of the efforts to get the men released. He argued in parliament that the men had “served long enough” (just under six years at the time).
In September 1998, Wright and Fisher were released from prison on life licence. Two months later, it was announced that the two men would be allowed to remain in the military, because — according to a Ministry of Defence statement — the Army Board considered that they had shown “contrition for their actions, which they admitted was an error of judgement which they very much regret”.
Bell responded to the news by saying:
I'm delighted. Although I acknowledge it was a difficult decision, I always thought it was inconceivable that the army board should stand by these two during the years of their detention and then abandon them when they were free men. I know they both wanted to stay as soldiers and I am very pleased for them.
On March 3 2000, the UN War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague found the former Bosnian Croat commander Tihomir Blaskic guilty of war crimes, particularly the Lašva Valley ethnic cleansing which included the Ahmići massacre of 120 civilians, ranging from a three-month-old baby to an 81-year-old woman.
In February 1999, Martin Bell appeared as a witness for the defence, essentially answering only one question from General Blaskic’s counsel: “What did the accused say during the press conference held on 27 April 1993, 11 days after the massacre in Ahmici?” Bell replied, referring to a black notebook retrieved from the pocket of his white suit, that:
Blaskic said he was horried and that he [was] going to do something about it. He said, "Whoever did that...it was organised, systematic and planned. The culprits must be identified and brought to justice.” He was appalled.
The Observer’s Ed Vulliamy also testified in the Blaskic case but he did so for the prosecution. In his review of Bell’s third memoir, Through Gates of Fire, Vulliamy wrote:
… Bell testified not for the prosecutors seeking to bring war criminals to justice, but for the defence of a Croatian general, Tihomir Blaskic, convicted of crimes against humanity. Bell has said the offences were the work of forces beyond Blaskic's control. But maybe it is something to do with professional soldiers; Bell was one, and reporters who spend too much time with them are often seduced by their apparent chivalry.
I believe a lot of people have been seduced by Bell’s “apparent chivalry” and by the neat and easy symbolism of that white suit. The same simplistic approach ran through the behaviour of the FBPE faction during the Brexit debates, forever searching for the “good Tory” who would ‘save’ them. And it continues.
Take this tweet from the writer Emma Kennedy — who previously called for a letter writing campaign to get the Queen to stop Brexit — suggesting potential “anti-sleaze” candidates to stand in the by-election triggered by Paterson:
If I was Rory Stewart or Anna Soubry or Dominic Grieve or David Gauke, I’d give serious consideration to running as an Anti Sleaze candidate in North Shropshire because with the Tories on a 26k majority there, they’re the people with the best chance of nicking it. Discuss.
Every single person named there is a former Tory MP. Rory Stewart was a character witness for Paterson and previously failed to declare his chairmanship of a shadowy transatlantic talking shop for spooks, politicians and business people. Anna Soubry, such proven electoral dynamite with the CUK party, weighed in behind Matthew Parris to support his call for GRT people to be stripped of ethnic minority status. Dominic Grieve abstained on the same-sex marriage vote and ‘accidentally’ implied people from a Pakistani background were more likely to be corrupt and commit electoral fraud on at least two occasions. And David Gauke — leader of ‘Gaukeward Squad’3 — was a noted beneficiary of second home flipping4 during the Expenses Scandal.
Even if Soubry, Stewart, Grieve, and Gauke wouldn’t be electoral poison in a majority Leave voting area, there’s a Labour candidate — Graham Currie — who has come second in the last three elections. Curious that so many ‘moderates’ should come to the conclusion that the only centrist solution is to parachute in a Tory who just happens to have been on their side during the Brexit battles.
Suffering with severe cases of “white suit delusion”, people like Kennedy have convinced themselves that they have discovered “the good Tories”. And in common with the many political journalists who are beguiled by tone, they are delighted with politicians that appear ‘civil’ and might feasibly be cast as MPs in a mid-week ITV drama.
Where the FBPE fantasy politics game gets really unhinged is when names like Jackie Weaver — the clerk from the viral Handforth Parish Council video — or Channel 5 debate show mainstay Femi Oluwole are thrown into the mix along with career tobacco company lobbyist and occasional cabinet minister Ken Clarke. This is so far from reality that you may as well suggest Bob the Builder, Mr Blobby5, and Bruce Wayne as viable candidates.
We are living in a society where too many people seem to have internalised the West Wing not as fanciful drama but the template for political change. It’s this extreme Sorkinism that has led them to believe that a James O’Brien monologue really ‘pwning’ the Tories has an effect beyond a flurry of retweets or that the sheer power of so many middle-aged men delighting over Marina Hyde’s latest ‘bit’ on how bad Boris Johnson is will cause him to spontaneously combust.
“Listeners are branding this James O’Brien’s finest monologue yet6,” tweeted LBC, the radio station where he follows the spittle-flecked right-wing fulminating of Nick ‘Austin Allegro’ Ferrari every week day. It’s the white suit delusion at work when O’Brien’s carnival barker act is heralded; this is a man who started out on the Express and presented a Jeremy Kyle-style suited and booted political shout-em-up on ITV before he was rebranded as a scruffy centre-left truthteller by LBC.
In The Guardian, Jonathan Freeland mimicked O’Brien’s “they’re really done it this time” schtick, with a piece headlined The Paterson fiasco confirms the threat Boris Johnson poses to British democracy as if the many, many other occasions hadn’t already made that clear and been quickly forgotten. His opening paragraph…
How many more times does it need to happen? How much more proof do we need that the country is run by a man with contempt for the rule of law, who believes that he and his friends are beyond its reach?
… prompts the shrugging reply: “Loads, probably.”
Meanwhile, responding to Keir Starmer’s empty foot-stamping in The Guardian, i paper columnist Ian Dunt offers the purest example of favouring tone over substance in ages, writing:
Labour’s proposals on corruption seem to me either vague or pointless. But this copy is really punchy. Genuinely well written and impactful article by LOTO’s office.
Perhaps Starmer should get a job writing the perky copy on the back of Innocent smoothies though, with his cop-addled mind, he’d most likely agitate for them to be renamed Innocent Until Proven Guilty.
Finally, in The Spectator, Robert Peston’s diary offers an insight into what years of pumping pure narrative straight into the vein does to a person’s mind. His reflections on COP26 begin with a weird section on world leader hugs…
Trudeau is predictably generous with his flirtatious smile. And Modi is the most huggy, which I hadn’t anticipated. He hugs everyone. Except me. I was particularly struck by his warm embrace of Luxembourg’s PM, Bettel. It felt like a symbol of this whole sprawling, dizzying affair: a country teeming with aspirational people putting the squeeze on a tiny country overflowing with surplus capital.
… before seguing into a defence of authoritarianism as a means of getting better quality hors d'oeuvres:
COP is a world away from the immediately preceding G20 summit in Rome, which was held in Mussolini’s modernist EUR district, and where the 20 assorted duci were separated from us hoi polloi with fascist rigour. I tell you one thing though about the G20 autarky: food was free, plentiful and yummy (the vitello tonnato was particularly good), whereas COP26’s is not even up to Pret standards, and the sausage rolls run out fast. When it comes to summits, perhaps benign dictatorship has its good points.
Of course, he also finds an opportunity to plug his first novel, a political thriller whose protagonist should really be called Pobert Reston and which I covered in typically fair and even-handed style earlier this year. Regardless of whether it’s Peston or his alter-ego Gil Peck speaking, the result is the same: A soap opera world view in which politicians are characters just like him.
In Iain Banks final novel, The Quarry, one character tells another7:
I’m not arguing there are no decent people in the Tory Party, but they’re like bits of sweetcorn in a turd; technically they’ve kept their integrity, but they’re still embedded in shit.
The white suit delusion sufferers are engaged in a perpetual sweetcorn hunt, pinching their noses and pretending they haven’t noticed the smell.
It’s easier to look back through the mists of time to the long since simplified late-nineties and pretend that Martin Bell, in his lovely white suit, was a shining star of civility than to remember him — and he’s still with us at 83 — as a difficult and complicated person who backed some horrifying things.
There isn’t a dry cleaner in the land who could get the stains out of that outfit.
Bell’s political advisor was his nephew, Oliver Kamm, a now fairly infamous Times columnist. Bell’s father was Adrian Bell, the creator of The Times crossword.
And Major’s appearance on Today this morning as led to an outpouring of centrist love for him as if extensive records on his administration are not available.
How do political journalists avoid cringing themselves inside out?
To the tune of £27,000. Which admittedly makes him small fry compared to Paterson’s £500,000 lobbying jamboree.
Blobby, of course, thrown in there to appeal to their 90s nostalia addiction.
It managed to make the issue about Jeremy Corbyn because… well… his listeners like it when he gets angry about Jeremy Corbyn.
The quote is often shared on social media attributed to Banks but he actually put it in the mouth of one of his fictional creations.