Toxic avengers: The paper of “Enemies of the People” and “kill vampire Jezza” cannot offer lectures on civility...
The ‘kindness’ of Sarah Vine and Dan Hodges doesn’t stretch very far.
It took just 10 days after the murder of Jo Cox for The Mail on Sunday to publish a piece by Dan Hodges bearing the headline Labour MUST kill vampire Jezza1 and illustrated with a picture of an (un)dead Jeremy Corbyn in a coffin.
Today Hodges and his hypocritical employers at the Mail broke their own record; less than 48 hours after the horrific murder of Sir David Amess, the paper features a Hodges column headlined I don’t know why Sir David Amess was killed but the visceral hatred of Tories at the heart of Labour has to end right now and promoted with a picture of Labour’s Deputy Leader, Angela Rayner.
After sharing his last memory of Amess — they saw each other at a party during the Tory Party Conference earlier this month and the MP sent best wishes to Hodges’ mother, the former Labour MP Glenda Jackson2 — Hodges writes:
As news of the appalling attack was filtering through, a tweet from Angela Rayner expressing her own sympathies provoked anger from several Tory MPs and officials.
‘She was calling us scum a few days ago,’ one told me. ‘She doesn’t get to express sympathy today.’
In the immediate aftermath of a horrifying event such as this, it’s understandable that emotions run high. So it’s important not to reach for knee-jerk-reactions, or apportion unnecessary blame.
But when an elected Member of Parliament has just been stabbed to death in their constituency surgery – and a house of worship – it’s also important not to hide unpalatable truths.
… those seeking a direct parallel between the comments of Angela Rayner and the attack in Leigh-on-Sea should desist. Whatever motivated his killer, it will not prove to have been some ill-advised words at a Labour fringe meeting.
But if the brutal killing of a Conservative MP should not be used to draw inappropriate political parallels, it should at least give people pause.
And more specifically, it should give people on the Left pause.
This is almost the dictionary definition of “having it both ways”. Hodges brings up Rayner’s comments in the context of Amess’ killing — just as Times columnist Janice Turner did yesterday — but then immediately distances himself from the connection he has made.
Hodges anonymously quotes Tory MPs snarling at Rayner’s condolences — had she said nothing she would also have been castigated — so he can use those sentiments while claiming he was merely reflecting what he was told. Play-acting that he is not blaming Rayner or Labour — while nodding and winking so fast it’s like a kind of manic semaphore — he writes:
This morning, we have to begin to talk about and confront the scourge of Left-wing extremism. It is a very different creature to the extremism of the Right. It is less overtly violent. But it is equally toxic and represents an equal risk to our democracy and its parliamentary representatives. Because, crucially, it does not reside on the political margins.
While the headline and Hodges copy go through the motions of noting that neither the paper nor its columnist know what motivated Amess’ killer, he has written an entire piece that opens with an MP’s violent death and shifts quickly into arguing that:
it is no longer possible to draw equivalence about the toxicity that exists within the two main parties. A visceral hatred of Tories is now embedded in Labour’s DNA in a way that is simply not reciprocated…
It’s not OK any more. Casual hatred of Conservative politicians and activists simply for committing the crime of being Conservatives is not acceptable. Not just because it ultimately proves counterproductive to the Left’s cause. Or because of the threat it poses to wider political engagement and democratic discourse. It’s wrong because it’s wrong.
There’s no mention in Hodges’ piece of Tory MP James Gray’s joke about planting a bomb in the office of Labour’s Annalise Dodds which occurred in the same week that Rayner made her scum comments or, for example, the unprovoked attacks on two septuagenarian Labour activists during the 2019 general election.
Nor does he mention that the Finsbury Park Mosque attacker also hoped to kill Jeremy Corbyn. And imagine how he’d react if anyone were to suggest that his months of often violent rhetoric about the former Labour leader had any connection to the actions of Darren Osborne.
Instead, Hodges argues — in the pages of The Mail on Sunday, which along with its daily sibling, has a long history of hatred, doxxing, and demonisation — that:
Tories are good, honest, decent, committed public servants, who just happen to have a different political philosophy.
That’s an easy argument to make when you’re a political commentator whose life is not affected by the cruelties of government policy. When a “different political philosophy” is built on denying your existence, arguing that your rights should be removed (as Matthew Parris wrote about GRT people in The Times), and ensuring that donors and friends are well compensated while others suffer, it’s no surprise that people feel angry.
To link that anger to the murderous intent of extremists is a cheap political stunt that uses an emotional moment to achieve a calculated aim. Like Keir Starmer’s speechwriter Philip Collins before him — who wrote when he was still a Times columnist that Labour’s racism is worse than the Tory kind — Hodges is trying to make political attacks on the Conservative Party unacceptable speech, to tie political anger to murderous ends.
But how does Hodges’ argument stand up when applied to the “vampire Jezza” column? How does his argument against ‘dehumanising’ language fair when you compare it to his insistent framing of Corbyn as a uniquely evil and demonic presence in British politics?
The deliberately obtuse will say that Hodges doesn’t write the headlines or choose the pictures but delve into the text of the vampire column and you’ll find the copy follows suit:
[Jeremy Corbyn] has ceased to be a leader, and has instead become a political vampire. Paralysing and then feeding on his party, slowly sucking the blood from its veins.
Imagining a politician as a blood-sucking horror movie monster who must be staked easily trumps a rhetorical use of the word “scum” in my book. Especially when you’re penning that violent imagery 10 days after the murder of an MP who you eulogise later in the same piece.
Of course, Hodges did not literally want to see Corbyn with a stake through the heart3 — I assume — but his argument is that intense rhetoric directly contributes to a climate in which violent actions are more likely. He just doesn’t mean his rhetoric or that of compatriots like Tom Newton-Dunn, Times Radio Chief Political Correspondent and former Sun Political Editor, who opened his show this morning by asking:
What is it that makes our politics so toxic?
This is the same Tom Newton-Dunn who published a front-page Sun ‘exclusive’ that screamed HIJACKED LABOUR in its headline and claimed that Corbyn and a grab bag of other politicians, left-wing political commentators, and journalists were at the heart of “a spider’s web [that] stretched from Marxist intellectuals to militant groups and illegal terror organisations.”
Newton-Dunn’s piece was heavily based on a ‘network map’ that he claimed had been compiled by “ex-military veterans… in their spare time” and revealed “a party in the grip of a hardline cabal”. Several entries on the chart linked out to extreme right-wing sources, including an antisemitic conspiracy site that talked of “the Jewish hand in the world wars”, and the website of Aryan Unity, the mouthpiece of the defunct neo-Nazi group, the British People’s Party.
The story was removed from The Sun’s website that weekend. No explanation, correction, or clarification was forthcoming.
Perhaps trafficking neo-Nazi conspiracy theories on the front page of a national newspaper has some role in the toxic environment, Tom. Or maybe The Sun’s targeting of individual politicians over decades has, in some way, contributed to a culture of playing the person and not the ball.
Remember when Charles Kennedy had the temerity to speak against the Iraq War? The Sun’s front page pictured him alongside a snake with the headline Spot the difference: One is a spineless reptile that spits venom… the other’s a poisonous snake. Or we could travel back a little further to the Chesterfield by-election of 1984 when The Sun ran a feature on Tony Benn, one of the candidates, headlined Benn on the couch: a top psychiatrist’s view of Britain’s leading leftie and claimed he was “a Messiah figure hiding behind the mask of the common man… greedy for power and willing to do anything to get it”.
The American psychiatrist quoted told a World In Action report that he had been asked to speak in hypothetical terms about a man he didn’t know.
Meanwhile, Hodges is writing his calls for civility from the pages of The Mail on Sunday4, the Sunday sibling of the paper that published the headline Enemies of the People and gleefully called on Theresa May to Crush the Saboteurs. If the waters of British political debate have been soiled, Hodges is a loyal employee of the biggest sewage plant emptying straight into the river.
I can find no Hodges column condemning the shooting ranges (and British soldiers) who used Jeremy Corbyn’s image for shooting practice.
Elsewhere in today’s Mail on Sunday, future ex-wife of Michael Gove, Sarah Vine goes even further than Hodges, writing:
… the persistent bile and vitriol aimed at MPs across various social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter eggs on sick individuals, encouraging and – perhaps most importantly – [has enabled] abusive and dangerous behaviour.
Add to that the childish and toxic popularism of individuals such as Angela Rayner, who seem to think it's OK to call her fellow parliamentarians 'homophobic, racist, misogynistic Tory scum' for the sake of a cheap round of applause, and it's not hard to see how, in an unsound or wicked mind, stabbing a defenceless man to death might seem justified.
Remember bile of the kind offered up by Vine is fine because it’s delivered from the authority of a byline. And explicitly tying Rayner’s comment to the killing of David Amess is, in her mind, fair comment rather than hypocrisy.
While Hodges at least pretends to be circumspect, Vine doesn’t even try that; she directly links Rayner’s words to what she imagines to be the thoughts of an “unsound or wicked mind” and even more grotesquely to the “stabbing of a defenceless man to death”.
To steal and reformulate Hodges’ words: Today we have to begin to talk about and confront the scourge of national newspaper extremism.
The headline was later changed to “… must dump vampire Jeremy Corbyn” in the online version.
Who deserves another Oscar for pretending not to be embarrassed.
After all, he’s great mates with well-known undead community advocate John Rentoul.
Which also carries a false story about the Roman Catholic Priest who prayed for Sir David Amess. You can see his response here.