This week saw a new low in the House of Commons. Rishi Sunak, under pressure at Prime Ministers Questions relied on a pre-prepared joke about Labour’s position on Trans people while the mother of murdered Trans teenager Brianna Ghey watched on.
The Tory benches honked and sniggered, the opposition looked aghast, realising the crassness of the comment. Sunak has always lacked credibility; he became PM without winning a General Election, or even a Conservative members vote, instead emerging from the car crash of the Truss Premiership as the last Tory standing. Whatever credibility or gravity he had before left him in that moment. He may stagger on for a few more months but he is utterly finished. Rightly so.
But how did we get here? Once upon a time a Conservative politician would aim for gravitas, statesman like, patrician. Competent and officer class. Good in a crisis. Stiff upper lip. There may have been moments when snobbery and triumphalism over took their better instincts, but these were rare.
How did they become so crass?
The Conservative party always had an ace up their sleeve when it came to winning elections; they could rely on the majority of newspapers to back them. The Times, Telegraph, Mail, Express, Sun, Star and News of the World all gave the Tories support, in the case of the Telegraph, Mail and Express uncritical support. Labour could count on the Mirror and the Guardian, the latter of which was supportive of only a very narrow band of middle class leftism. The extent to which those papers could swing elections was always overstated, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was power.
The Levenson inquiry laid bare the relationship between politicians and the media, particularly the Tory media. It was all about peddling influence; newspapers would promote a politician’s agenda, in return for which that politician would protect the commercial interests of the media owner. Almost always that agenda was right wing particularly around lower taxes.
But over the years the circulation of newspapers has got smaller, and the pool of talent they pick from has shrunk with it. As papers make bigger losses they are more and more dependent on their owners for financial support and less able to take their own editorial line. There are some obvious symptoms of this malaise:
The most striking is the decline in quality among the Conservative Press. The Daily Mail has always addressed it’s readers in tones of knicker wetting panic, but the Telegraph has now joined them in filling their pages with confected outrage and culture war panics.
As print media has declined new media have filled the gap – TV stations like GBNews and Talk TV, on line content like Guido Fawkes/Order Order, and masses of social media bait to be clicked, liked and shared. During the Brexit campaign huge sums were spent on “dark ads” to influence the outcome of the referendum.
With this the distinction between politician and journalist, or between think tank and lobbyist has totally broken down. United by social class and private education a limited pool of talent move between the media, the Conservative party and think tanks. Boris Johnson was ex Telegraph and Spectator, and now writes for the Mail and appears on GBNews. Jacob Rees-Moggs dad edited the Times, where Michael Gove was a journalist, and also has a show on GBNews.
Just as the old Tory media was owned abroad, so is the new generation.
Guido/Order-Order is owned by Global and General Nominees based in St Kitts and Nevis, a tax haven. They have never revealed who is putting all of the money in to run the site
Oddly enough GB News is also based outside of the UK in Dubai. They make huge losses – it lost £30m in it’s first year, bringing in only £3m in revenue. It is also opaque about where it’s money comes from – it’s largest owner is Legatum investments, whose CEO was named in Parliament as having links to Russian Intelligence.
Some-one is putting huge amounts of money into loss making right wing media companies based in secretive jurisdictions, all of who offer the same reactionary view points, peddling influence, and promoting Liz Truss style economics, mixed with increasingly weird conspiracy theories.
This is where the agenda is set for British Conservatism, in this mess where politics, influence and lobbying merge into one.
The problem is that agenda is a permanent state of outrage against anything and everything from Trans rights to the RNLI and the National Trust. A sensible PM would have dropped the bonkers Rwanda plan years ago, but it has been talked up so much on-line and in the Tory media that it is impossible to allow it do die quietly.
This agenda of outrage is designed to spill out onto social media; easily clicked, liked and shared. Messages get amplified by anger, and mix in with conspiracy theories. Those same conspiracy theories then get picked up by outlets like GBNews, the outrage boils over. After the failure of Brexit, and the disaster of Liz Truss’s economic policies the Conservatives are unsure what they stand for anymore, and toxic culture war politics fills the void
Successive Tory leaders have tried various attack lines on Starmer – he doesn’t know what a woman is, or that he allowed Jimmy Savile to abuse young children. The reason why they pick these lines is that they get traction on social media. No matter whether they are true or not there are people who spend a lot of time on-line who click, like and share these stories. That is why Boris Johnson repeated the lie about Starmer in PMQs when rattled, and why Sunak made that crass Trans joke.
For those in the loop, particularly those who made their name in the Brexit referendum campaign, this probably seems like a good way to communicate. But there is a difference between an opinion that is held widely and an opinion that is distributed widely. Daft stories about Starmer and Savile, or that Starmer doesn’t know what a woman is do well on line, they get clicks and likes. They drive traffic. But that doesn’t mean these are popular views.
The widespread shock at Sunak’s comments show how narrow support is for the permanent outrage of Tory culture wars. People are tired of the anger, the crassness, the sheer awfulness of it all. The more attention they seek, the fewer people are listening.
Sunak’s crass comments will, I hope, mark a turning point in the way Trans issues are debating, humanising the debate. I realise that lots of Trans people will feel that Starmer didn’t go far enough, and that one tragic case shouldn’t over shadow the experiences of other Trans people.But this feels like a big moment, and that a change in attitudes can come from this.
The right wing press are no longer an asset to the Tories, they are a liability, and they are dragging the whole Conservative moment in the UK down with them.
Spot on critique Jon. I just hope you’re right about the click-bait no longer being as useful to the tories as it used to be. It’s such a minimalist, dehumanising outrage that makes me worry where it will lead to…
Cheers. I think that people are fed up with culture wars nonsense. I don’t know what will be left of the tory party if they suffer a bad GE defeat, and it is clear that there are plenty of candidates who are willing to lead the Tories off into a nasty fantasy world or anger and betrayal. I am hopeful that the Brianna Ghey tragedy will lead to a change in how Trans people are treated
Every year I do my mandatory financial crime course, where we cover the stages of money laundering – placement, layering and integration.
That relationship of think tank and press seems like the same thing – a way for that narrow cabal of right wing MPs to launder ideas into ‘public opinion’.
Which as you note, often means widely distributed rather than widely held, the illusion that because the Mail and Sun vie for the title of Britain’s biggest paper, they represent a majority opinion in the way they perhaps did in the 80s.
They’re following a generation into the grave – unfortunately, the generations most likely to vote . .
They are. There is a cliche that people become more right wing as they get older. I always think that this is a mistake – people become more right wing as they amass wealth such as property. They turn to Conserative Parties to protect those assets. That tends to co-incide with getting older. But the recent cohorts of young people haven’t been allowed to amass wealth in the same way, and are getting more right wing. There is a small group or disenchanted young men watching Andrew Tate videos, but otherwise these are liberal generations who will stall liberal as they get older