Through the Looking Arse: Government not nasty enough for Tominey, Oakeshott offers coal for Christmas and Starmer’s speechwriter marks his own homework
Rejoice! It’s just 77 days until Boris Johnson ‘saves’ Christmas and Keir Starmer mutters something about family (and work! Don’t forget about work!)
In Star Trek’s many iterations, one of the signs that you’ve stumbled into the dystopian mirror universe is that a character who doesn’t usually have villainous facial hair has suddenly ditched the razor and ramped up the evil laughter. In our timeline — the most curséd of all possible worlds — you need only crack open a newspaper to move into the mirror dimension.
The majority of British newspaper columnists present the world as they pretend it is or as they wish it would be. In the gaslit territory of their imaginations, food shortages at Christmas will be proof that Brexit has worked and that people simply need to toughen up, parties at Tory Party Conference are the height of wild bacchanalian indulgence, it’s totally cool for Starmer’s speechwriter to grade his own work, and a Conservative government for whom cruelty and contempt are operating principles is, in fact, insufficiently nasty.
Join me in today’s episode of this newsletter/glacially slow news-induced breakdown as I pick at the latest bulletins from the mirror universe; a trip through the looking arse into the shit that Britain’s columnists actually believe.
We begin with The Daily Telegraph — the British newspaper equivalent of the Romulan Empire1 — where Camilla Tominey, on one of her brief breaks from obsessing about Meghan and Harry, submits a weekly column headlined Can the Tories afford not to be nasty? This is, remember, in the week when the allegedly non-nasty government cut the benefits of hundreds of thousands of people just as energy bills are about to soar.
Tominey opens the piece by putting the blame for the traffic cone-assisted assault on Iain Duncan Smith at Angela Rayner’s door, squeezing the last drops of bitter juice out of ‘scumgate’:
With the benefit of hindsight, Angela Rayner probably wouldn’t have described Tories as “scum”. Not just because it reaffirmed the deputy Labour leader’s cloddish credentials, nor even that Sir Iain Duncan Smith was afterwards attacked with a traffic cone by some of her knuckleheaded supporters.
No, what must really grate for Ms Rayner is that what was originally intended as a slur to galvanise the support of foaming-at-the-mouth Labour activists has actually done the opposite and brought the Conservatives together.
It’s interesting that Tominey, who has written extensively about the tyranny of “trolls” and is here criticising Rayner for cruel and dehumanising language, opts to dismiss the Labour Deputy as “cloddish”, decides without evidence that those who attacked Duncan Smith were her “knucklehead supporters” (the list of people who despise Duncan Smith is extensive) and rants about “foaming-at-the-mouth Labout activists”. It’s the stuff of Alanis Morrissette covers.
Tominey cheers the MPs and activists who ran around the conference with “Tory Scum” badges and draws a connection to the Vermin Club of Conservative Party supporters that formed after the 1948 speech in which Aneurin Bevan called Tories “lower than vermin”.
The Vermin Club also had badges — a chrome number featuring a rat and the word VERMIN — and a pyramid scheme-style recruiting method (those who brought in 10 new party members became “vile vermin” while bringing in 25 entitled them to be “very vile vermin”). Margaret Thatcher, an early member, became a Chief Rat, which was admittedly good practice for her future career.
Tominey argues that Dehenna Davison, the Tory MP for Bishop Auckland who was prominent in distributing the badges, does not fit the “Tory scum” definition well because her father was a stonemason and she grew up on a council estate in Sheffield. I thought the Conservative Party was meant to be aspirational; isn’t an MP who worked as a parliamentary aide to Jacob Rees-Mogg, co-hosts a GB News show with Nigel Farage, and was pictured partying with alleged far-right activists — she later said she “in no way condoned” their views — able to achieve “Tory scum” status?
More seriously, Tominey makes grimly exploitative use of the death from cancer this week of James Brokenshire, the serving Conservative MP and former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and for Communities and Local Government, who passed away aged 53. She writes:
While it may have been an appropriate obloquy to lob at the likes of Alan B’Stard or Harry Enfield’s Tory Boy, as the daughter of a stonemason who grew up on a Sheffield council estate, MPs like Ms Davison don’t wear it quite as well. And neither did James Brokenshire, the former secretary of state for Northern Ireland and for communities and local government who died of lung cancer on Thursday, aged 53.
Described by all who met him as a thoroughly decent, unfailingly polite and hugely dedicated man in politics for all the right reasons, the mild-mannered father-of-three could not be further from the “scum” brush with which Rayner has tried to tar all Tories. Again displaying her trademark brass, even she was forced to admit that “he cared deeply about his work and public service” in a rare straying from the shallow end of her cerebral cortex.
Ignoring the fact that Alan B’Stard and Tory Boy were fictional characters while, for instance, Jeffrey Archer and Jonathan Aitken are not, it is beyond cheap for Tominey to use Brokenshire’s death as a means to attack Rayner.
Tominey knows full well she is twisting Rayner’s comments with all the care of a vindictive child with a Stretch Armstrong doll and that, had the Labour deputy not offered words of condolence, she would have criticised her for that too.
Imagine writing as Tominey does — mere months after Marcus Rashford had to shame the government into ensuring that children would be fed and when more cuts have just been pushed through — that “the milk-snatcher side of [Thatcher’s] legacy appears to have finally been expunged.” It requires more condensed gall than you’d find in an overstuffed lift at an Asterix convention2.
Tominey craves “a properly punchy response” — presumably of the kind sanctioned by Thatcher against protestors during the Miner’s Strike, and which occupy Priti Patel’s vivid daydreams — and concludes:
No one wants to see a return of the nasty party. But if the Tories lose their teeth, not least when it comes to competence in a crisis, then they are in danger of biting the dust.
Of course, Tominey wants an already cruel government to have more “teeth”; she knows there’s absolutely no chance that she will be the one getting bitten.
And on the topic of right-wing commentators who crave cruelty that will not even remotely affect them, let’s turn to that veritable Ebeneezer Stooge — Isabel Oakeshott — who used the first episode of her GB News show to argue that the true meaning of Christmas is explaining to your child that dinner is cancelled and their gift is a remaindered copy of Nigel Farage’s autobiography.3
Pretending that she’s planning to shun Christmas like Oliver Crowell in a blonde wig, rather than having a luxurious celebration with her partner, Reform Party leader, sentient ham and multi-millionaire commercial landlord Richard Tice, Oakeshott crowed:
I do think if your Christmas joy depends on getting a particular type of Turkey for lunch, or the latest must have toy for little Johnny, I would suggest you need to take a long hard look and think about what Christmas is all about.
This is the same Oakeshott who shares an alma mater with Prince Charles (the austere Scottish public school Gordenstoun) and has made a packet penning fiction dressed up as biographies with Tory billionaire Lord Ashcroft. Like wartime toffs lecturing the plebs on the importance of rationing while getting treats from the black market, Oakeshott and Tice won’t go short this Christmas, even as they pretend that Brexit is the greatest gift of all.
Still, at least Oakeshott’s Grinch with a Groucho Club membership act is consistent. Shortly after the Grenfell Tower fire, she said:
My position is that benefit claimants have no basic entitlement to live in the most desirable areas of London.
She’s yet to call for the Windsors, Britain’s most profligate claimants of state cash, to be turfed out of their residences in the most desirable areas of London.
Where Oakeshott leads — most famously with the funny but fabricated story of David Cameron placing his little (Boris) johnson into a dead pig’s mouth — swathes of the right-wing press follows so expect to see a rash of columns implying that a sparse Christmas will be good for “us” — “us” used here to mean “everyone besides the writer and their pals”.
Oakeshott is a veteran blonde bombsite of the British media but she’d be wise to watch her back. There’s a whole new generation of amoral hacks aiming for her spot on Andrew Marr’s sofa and the ‘Eva Braun with an email account’ role on Question Time. Among them is Emily Hewertson who popped up in the Mail — site of many of Oakeshott’s ‘triumphs’ — this week with a report from the Tory Party conference.
After a headline — Tequila shots, rampant snogging and the dancefloor jumping to Jerusalem! The Tory It Girl on her three days of debauchery at the ‘youthquake’ conference — that can trigger headaches more effectively than an imagined Russian energy weapon, Hewertson begins:
Can I tell you about the hottest party in town? It's where the bright and the beautiful mingle, the drinks flow and the creme-de-la-creme of the gilded youth – all razor cheekbones and even sharper minds – discuss the big topics of the day.
There's bacchanalian scenes even Pan would blush at. There's wild dancing paired with uninhibited conversation. There's so much champagne, the vineyards of France must be little more than bare branches and parched earth. And there was a real sense that this was the happening, hip place for the young to meet. Who wouldn't want a ticket to such a pleasure palace?
Yes, I am of course talking about the Tory conference (called by those in the know as Conservative Christmas).
Having seen pictures from the event of Tory Boys looking like extras in a version of Village of the Damned where the dead-eyed children are kids that Boris Johnson forgot he’d had, it seems apparent that Hewertson’s fantasies would have benefited from significant fact-checking by someone who resides in this reality. Isn’t it a great betrayal for Brexit-loving Tories to be supping Champagne when we’re assured that English sparkling wine is superior? Surely there’ll be no more of that once The Sun gets the war with France it so desperately craves.
After burbling about Wetherspoons, Jacob Rees-Mogg being “a style icon” (the style being “the Child Catcher but with considerably less warmth”) and “sweaty snogfests” among the chinless wonders of the young Conservative movement — a helpline for scarred readers will be provided at the end of this email — Hewertson lets us into the secrets of an event called with the ruling party’s typical lack of irony “Freedom Fizz”:
[It] was pure patriotism galore. For remoaners, it would have been their idea of hell on earth. Activists waving British flags and belting out classic British songs alongside Brexit heroes Graham Brady and Mark Francois. It was like the final night of Glastonbury – forget the club going wild when the beat drops, you should have seen the hands-in-the-air singalong to the song Jerusalem.
Ah yes, Jerusalem, with words by that famous Tory… uh… William Blake, with his distaste for organised religion, support for the French and American revolutions, life-long distaste for the abuse of class power, and participation in an attack on a prison and the release of prisoners during the Gordon Riots.
If William Blake was alive today, Priti Patel would be pushing through laws to ensure he was banged up for life.
Hewertson’s entire article is an example of the “protests too much” school of writing. With each successive awful line, she tries to give the impression that young Tories aren’t “stale or stuffy” while revealing herself as the sort of person who believes that doing shots and going to McDonald’s at 4.45 am is the height of debauched rebellion. She ends by saying:
Among the 'awards' given out to my group of partygoers were 'best Tory shot girl', 'best at herding drunk people' and 'best dressed'. Me? Hope it's not immodest to say I was named 'best general babe'.
I have recovered from reading the article by reclaiming the phrase “General Babe” for the title of my as-yet-unwritten Animal Farm spin-off about a talking Communist Pig giving aid to Che Guevara.
While most of this edition has focused on the fantasy worlds of the unhinged Tory commentators, the bastions of the Labour Right have also been at it this week and special mention should go to Philip Collins — the one who bangs bad metaphors rather than drums — who’s been doing the rounds reviewing Keir Starmer’s conference speech which… he wrote.
For The New Statesman, Collins wrote a piece headlined Keir Starmer has sidelined his party’s left. But does Labour really want to win? which begins:
Most party conference speeches last about an hour in the convention hall and then disappear. Keir Starmer’s address to the Labour Party conference on 29 September – in which I confess an interest and to which I lent a hand – lasted half an hour longer and might linger longer too in the public mind. I do not recall any speech to a party conference that made a strategic leap as large as that made by Starmer. It’s nowhere near a sufficient condition for a Labour recovery but it was undoubtedly necessary.
It’s the journalistic equivalent of someone who, having cooked a passable roast, spends the entirety of the meal exclaiming loudly, “This meal is delicious!”. Only in the case of Starmer’s speech, Collins overdid the allusions (“I think of these values as my heirloom. The word loom, from which that idea comes, is another word for tool.”) while undercooking anything resembling a policy.
This is Collins being allowed to mark his own work by The New Statesman which should be embarrassed but long since dispensed with that feeling in favour of a kind of impermeable smugness. The article continues:
Ten minutes before the end of the speech there was a long-delayed moment of catharsis. Smuggled into a section ostensibly designed to mock the Conservative Party’s lack of seriousness on levelling-up, the floor of the Labour Party conference applauded the achievements of Tony Blair’s government. It ought not to be noteworthy that a party congratulates itself on former glories. Yet, in the hall, it felt like a reckoning. It is somehow typical of the Labour Party that it had to have a reckoning not with its defeats, but with its victories. There was a palpable sense, for the first time in a decade, of a party preparing to compromise with the electorate.
The length of the speech is a testament to that. In rehearsal it had not been notably long. The conference speech is always the hardest in the calendar as there are so many people who need to be mentioned, and so many topics – too many – that would be odd to omit. Tough editing, however, had kept it to time. We knew, of course – or, at least, we hoped – that there would be applause. Yet a few of us sitting in a small hotel room, offering perfunctory applause at the right moments, as if someone had just played a nice cover drive on the village green, didn’t remotely prepare us for what unfolded.
Galvanised by the presence of hecklers and critics in the hall, the majority of the spectators began to clap linking lines and cheer routine observations…
The vibe here is reminiscent of a bloke assuring a sexual partner that him hammering away for an hour without making them cum was, in fact, very good.
Having praised himself thoroughly — a feat he repeated in audio form for an especially unbearable episode of Politico’s Westminster Insider podcast — Collins moves onto the BBC’s recent documentary Blair and Brown: The New Revolution — in which he appears having been one of Blair’s speechwriters — to argue that Starmer must increase the intensity of his Tony tribute act.
Collins — who comes third only to obsequious egg man Lord Adonis and the undead John Rentoul for Blair fanboyism — argues:
There will be a lot of sound and fury from the left but Starmer’s speech in Brighton made them irrelevant, at least until the next election.
It’s wish-fulfilment from a man slapping an A+ on his own obviously written, clumsily delivered script.
In the mirror universe where Oakeshott argues that misery is the Christmas we all should want anyway, Hewertson imagines the pork-faced princelings of the young Tories as punk, and Tominey craves more cruelty, Collins is lucky. He doesn’t need to worry about getting any presents. He’ll just give himself one and declare it brilliant.
Cruel, insular, obsessed with a bygone age and inclined to a visceral hatred of any and all outsiders.
Yes, I am still persisting with these analogies.
It exists. It’s called Flying Free and the blurb, stubbornly ignoring the metaphor forced upon Farage by the universe, talks of the 2010 accident when “the light aircraft [Farage] was flying in got caught up in a UKIP banner it was towing and crashed” with an entirely straight face.