Without Allegra to stand on: You're told to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears about the parties...
Without Allegra to stand on: You're told to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears about the parties...
... as most of the media shifts to sympathy for one of its own.
Sorry for the lack of newsletter yesterday. An Amazon Web Services outage meant lots of things that I use to put together these emails were inaccessible.
I will be covering the issues raised by this tweet…
… later in the week.
When Allegra Stratton appeared in front of her home today to deliver a tearful apology for comments revealed in a leaked video of a ‘mock’ press conference from last December, I immediately thought of her previous public apology. On 30 August 2012, Gavin Esler was the one who had to say sorry for Stratton’s reporting in an item broadcast on 23 May 2012.
Presented by Stratton, it had falsely implied that a young woman was unmployed and wholly dependent on benefits. The woman only received the on-air apology delivered by Essler after starting a petition that ended up receiving over 20,000 signatures. There was no one to rally round her in the national media or attest to her goodness as friends and former-colleagues are now doing on Stratton’s behalf.
The original version of this section of the newsletter named the woman featured in that report and including clips from the package and the subsequent on-air apology. But during the writing of this edition, I was passed a message from the woman which said she receives unwelcome attention whenever the interview is reshared or reenters the discourse. So I’ve rewritten this section and deleted tweets of mine that included the video:
In her message, the woman rightly noted that if “if there is nothing worse you can find to report on her from the last decade, perhaps she’s not newsworthy at all”. And in a sense, Stratton as an invidual isn’t newsworthy; as someone who has spun through the revolving door between press and politics, she’s just one of many. But what she represents and how the rest of the media has responded to her resignation definitely is worthy of analysis…
Stratton, who became the Prime Minister’s spokesperson for COP 26 after the press secretary role she was hired to undertake was scrapped along with the daily televised briefings — in a new £2.6 million briefing room at Downing Street — that she was practicing for in that leaked clip.
You can see why Number 10 might have seen her as the ideal figure to resign; a ‘name’ by dint of her previous career as a national political hack and senior enough to seem like a ‘scalp’, but not actually engaged in anything particularly pressing now that the conference part of COP 26 is done.
Ed Oldfield — the special advisor featured in the leaked footage asking Stratton about the party — is low on the pay grade and, before yesterday, hadn’t troubled even the wonkiest parts of the political media since Politico London Playbook revealed his promotion from the Tory Party press office to Number 10 in September 2020. It had to be Stratton to provoke more than a shrug.
Robert Peston, for whom Stratton once served as an onscreen sidekick, tweeted after her resignation that “whatever you think of what she said in the clip… she was a model for many in modern politics.” His colleague, Paul Brand — who broke the story of the leaked footage and succeeded Stratton as ITV News’ Home Editor — said her press statement “appeared to a very heartfelt and sincere apology” which showed “genuine regret”.
This kindness towards his former colleague is put into a rather different light by Brand telling Radio 4’s Media Show that ITV had the leaked video for “weeks” but did not publish it until Pippa Crerar at The Daily Mirror broke the Christmas Party story. That suggests a serious lack of news judgement at ITV News — not surprising with Peston in the building — or that they were worried about going for a friend and fellow (once and future) hack.
Having worked for both BBC News and ITV News as well as being in possesion of a wonky husband — James Forsyth — who is political editor at The Spectator and a columnist for The Times and friends scattered through the rest of the Westminster press pack guarantees Stratton an easy landing.
She is one of their own. That’s why you’ll see tweets, TV packages, news stories and columns saying not only that she was a scapegoat — she was — but that she had “a good resignation”. Take Peston claiming she “[took] responsibility and quite without prevarication” and the i paper’s Policy Editor, Jane Merrick, tweeting that:
[She] was wrong to make light of No. 10 party and it is right she has resigned over it, but compare her response — resigning less than 24 hours after it emerged — to Dominic Cummings and Matt Hancock, to name just two — who clung on for days/weeks after actual rule breaking.
Former Spectator editor — now Editor and Partner at scarcely read ‘slow news’ money pit Tortoise — Matthew d’Ancona declared:
Allegra Stratton is a decent, talented person who made a mistake and has done the honourable thing. Would that more of her former colleagues acted similarly. She will be back.
Yeah, she’s like the Terminator but with less genuine remorse and an even worse set of previous employers. At least Skynet never wrote a novel.
The wagon circling from the current Spectator has been something to behold. This morning, hours before Stratton’s resignation, Spectator deputy editor and confirmed Éric Zemmour simp, published a piece headlined The phoney war on Allegra Stratton. It reads like heavy-handed satire of the fash fancying fanzine but is, in fact, deadly serious.
Gray opens by castigating “our slightly depraved opinion-forming class” — this man is deputy editor of a magazine that publishes Rod Liddle, Douglas Murray, Toby Young and Taki, remember — and says Peston “threw his former colleague under the bus”. This, he says, “is phoney”, coming of like Holden Caulfield if he really hit the Hayek.
What’s apparently not phoney is Gray’s “disclosure” that:
I do know Allegra a bit and I like her, though I am not nearly as friendly with her as many of the people I saw publicly declaring themselves on social media to be shocked at the video.
He neglects to mention that he knows her “a bit” because James Forsyth is her husband. Another example of this cackhanded lying by ommission can be found in the latest episode of Coffee House Shots podcast in which Spectator editor and uncanny valley Scotsman, Fraser Nelson, adds as a mere aside:
I should say, by the way, that I know and am friendly with Allegra Stratton.
The episode — titled ‘Partygate: How much trouble is Boris in?’ — manages to spend 20 minutes on the story without once mentioning James Forsyth.
It’s less an elephant in the room that a tap dancing herd of them since the Spectator’s Political Editor usually appears on the show and has not disappeared in the past when there were blatant conflicts of interest involving him and his wife. I suspect someone else will hop into his Times column slot this Friday with the familiar line “James Forsyth is away” at the bottom of the page.
This isn’t the first time that The Spectator has been at the centre of a Johnson administration scandal. Dominic Cummings is married to Mary Wakefield, The Spectator’s Commissioning Editor, and she published an article about their experience with Coronavirus, in which she described her anguish as he “lay doggo” with Covid-19 for 10 days before emerging from quarantine “into the almost comical uncertainty of London lockdown”.
We know now, of course, that Wakefield and Cummings had actually headed north to Durham, leading to his infamous eye-testing drive to Barnard Castle, which unaccountably has not resulted in him being signed up as a Specsavers influencer as well as a Substack success story.
That The Spectator is now playing cute about how intertwined it is with the Downing Street party claims shouldn’t be surprising at all. It often presents a fairground mirror vision of the world and Nelson’s approach to scandal is quite similar to Johnson’s: Attempt to pretend it’s not happening. The Wakefield column — excerpts of which she read on the Today programme — remains in The Spectator archives unedited and uncorrected.
When Stratton married Forsyth, his best man was Rishi Sunak, his best friend from Winchester and now Chancellor. When Stratton left ITV News to work in government, it was as to become Sunak’s Director of Strategic Communications. Forsyth writes columns and appears on podcasts, radio, and TV to speak about Johnson’s government and Sunak often but never discloses his connections. In the US, it would be a professional necessity; here it’s considered none of the readers and viewers’ business.
Cummings — British politics’ most reliably unreliable narrator — tweeted on Monday that it was…
[very] unwise for No10 to lie about [the party] but PM set course of lying on lying when he decided to start rewriting history, deny herd immunity plan etc.
NB. some lobby hacks were also at parties in No10 flat…
Couples where one person is a journalist and the other works in an industry that they might or definitely do write about usually claim not to discuss sensitive information. This is almost always horseshit. It’s apparent that Cummings and Wakefield definitely do and Forsyth’s Friday columns in The Times have often seemed to be little more than kite flying exercises for the government.
That closeness between political operators and the journalists that write about them occurs all over the British media. It is cosy, complicated, and riven with both soft and hard corruption. Stories don’t appear until its politically expedient or simply do not appear at all because someone is married to someone who works for someone who’d rather it all stayed unsaid.
Responding to someone who questioned Pippa Crerar’s reporting on No. 10 party story last week, the FT’s Chief Political Correspondent, Jim Pickard said:
… the unsubtle implication was that she may have sat on the story for months, anyone who understands journalism would know that’s nonsense.
But on today’s edition of The Media Show, Crerar told Ros Atkins that she:
… started to hear rumours way back in January and they were just that, I wasn’t able to substantiate them. I tried my best but I didn’t manage to get there.
Then about a month ago I got handed what I would describe as a metaphorical brown paper envelope which contained enough evidence in it for me to start asking questions again.
So then I spent several weeks speaking to sources about whether a party had taken place and then, once I had established that it had, speaking to them about who was at it, what was done at the party… and then we were just really waiting for a moment that would be the right time to publish.
Obviously it’s a fact of journalism that you will hear rumours that you cannot stand up at first but that become a story once you have evidence. But the interesting element of Crerar’s recounting of the process is that, just as with the rash of stories about second jobs after the Owen Patterson scandal and the sudden uptick in reports about Westminster drug taking, expedience counts.
And just as sources wait for a convenient time to share their “revelations”, the “right time to publish” is heavily influenced by pressures that flow down from the top. ‘Sleaze’ came to engulf John Major’s government when Rupert Murdoch had decided that the Prime Minister was not a winner and would not acquiesce to his requests. The Sun hid the Stratton video story on page 4 of its print edition today, while The Daily Telegraph buried it on page 9 because neither is ready to see Boris Johnson gone.
Stratton was the sacrificial lamb today but any Prime Minister who outstays their usefulness eventually receives a sustained battering from the press. Johnson’s time just hasn’t come yet. And when it does, he’ll be back as a Telegraph columnist within the year. Probably sharing its pages with Stratton.
LOVE IT! Hilarious 'without Allegra to stand on. It's brilliant.