Amid so much important and disturbing news, including the worsening conflict in the Middle East, it seems to me that partly due to the power of right wing media, there’s been a major and non-stop attack on Keir Starmer and his government. Said one tweeter: ‘The amount of shit being dumped on Starmer at the moment , most of it inconsequential nonsense, makes one think it’s coordinated. But nobody could do that – could they Rupert?’ It seems that Tory politicians, still flailing around in disbelief at their massive loss in July, have been instructed to keep tweeting and stating in interviews that this or that which they’ve never previously been interested in is a terrible mistake and very different from what they would have done. Tobias Elwood, a former MP and defence minister, is a goodexample of this denial and delusion, alluding to the Conservatives’ ‘proud record’ on addressing climate change. An X user responded: ‘Proud record”? Don’t claim Tory achievements on energy & climate change, Tobias Ellwood. Your lot stopped insulation schemes, ended solar funding, sold gas storage facilities, blocked onshore wind, rowed back on net zero targets and even wanted to open a new coal mine’.
But more scrutiny than that usually applied by the media shows just how hypocritical these are, for example on the donations scandal: true that Starmer and his colleagues should not have taken these but those received by many Conservative politicians have amounted to much more and these haven’t stopped. Tory leadership hopeful Robert Jenrick has accepted a massive donation from a company which has no employees and hasn’t made a profit, insisting that this is ‘within the rules’. And quite a few haven’t kept the Register of Interests up to date. Even last week, as she lambasted Labour, Tory leadership candidate Kemi Badenoch was using for her campaign a luxury penthouse flat loaned by a party donor. And the examples go on, perhaps the most egregious (but apparently devoid of self-awareness) being former anti-corruption czar John Penrose popping up to pronounce that something definitely needed doing about corruption in politics: this, when the number of corrupt Tory transactions was so significant and when his own spouse, Dido Harding, was responsible for the notorious wastage of £38bn on the Covid Test and Trace programme.
It’s the sheer amount of misinformation we need to concern ourselves with as well, because many will just believe these social media and newspaper headlines. Tories immediately leapt onto the news about the Chagos Islands deal, on two grounds, saying that it should have come before Parliament and that this move represented a huge threat to UK security etc. A few problems with these simplistic and misleading statements: the Conservatives (as Commons Speaker Hoyle often lamented but did nothing about) frequently announced policy in media briefings, bypassing Parliament altogether, and the security argument (according to some commentators) is specious because we still have the base on Diego Garcia and former Foreign Secretary James Cleverly had initiated the negotiations in the first place. The issues seem complex and there would be reasonable arguments for and against the decision, but the fact that it began under a Conservative government reveals the hypocrisy of outraged former MPs and ministers who have been accused of colonialism.
According to the BBC: ‘One of the largest islands on the tropical atoll, Diego Garcia, will remain a joint US-UK military base and is expected to remain so for 99 years with an option to renew….The International Court of Justice previously ruled the UK’s administration of the island, that some had called its “last colony in Africa”, was “unlawful” and must end….The government of Mauritius has long argued that it was illegally forced to give the Chagos Islands away in return for its own independence from the UK in 1968.Britain later apologised for forcibly removing more than 1,000 islanders from the entire archipelago between 1965 and 1973, and promised to hand the islands to Mauritius when they were no longer needed for strategic purposes’.
A clear source of resentment concerns the handing over of the islands to Mauritius without consultation with the Chagossians. Human Rights Watch said that unless there were proper negotiations with the Chagossians, ‘the UK, US and now Mauritius would be responsible for a still ongoing colonial crime’. It will be interesting to see how the situation progresses, including the potential for parliamentary debate now the party conference ‘season’ has concluded. I admit to not having been that interested when I first heard this news but on further exploration it does throw up key issues around defence policy, the rights of the indigenous population, some of whom would like to return, and sovereignty.
Going back to right wing attempts to destabilise the government, a disturbing example is today’s resignation of Sue Gray from her Chief of Staff role. This follows on from the calculated article on the BBC website by the political editor Chris Mason, whipping up false concern about Gray’s salary when he and many of his colleagues are grossly overpaid. It’s been dismaying to see her capitulate to this politically motivated pressure. Those saying ‘she became a distraction’ etc are being very naive, in my view: this ‘distraction’ was manufactured and fuelled by Mason and others. An X user tweeted: ‘Weirdly a man on almost £100,000 per year more than the subject he is reporting on finds her salary a “news” story and backs it up with tittle tattle. BBC political journalists doing the bidding of Robbie Gibb and his tory friends. Leveson 2 required urgently’.
Mason began: ‘I want to explain how we brought you the story about the salary of the prime minister’s chief of staff, why we did, and why it matters’, prompting at least one commentator to observe that if he felt the need to patronisingly ‘explain’ why he did it, it did not matter. He went on: ‘As journalists, we have to be sceptical about where information is coming from, its accuracy and why we are being told it – and seek to explain to you what we know and do not know, and the motivations of those telling us stuff’. This is manifestly, in so many examples, what the Tory BBC fails to do: besides that bias pervading the entire news and current affairs output, there’s also the issue of news omission, stories which are suppressed or not reported on at all if they don’t suit the required narrative. Just today someone has brought out an important story related to the Middle East conflict, excluded by the BBC and only once appearing in an insignificant place on their website. This is dangerous stuff because so many only get their news from the BBC and other MSM.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czxgdgkew81o
On the party conferences, much amusement was experienced by some journalists covering the Conservatives’ outing – ‘You’ve disappeared through the wormhole into the mephitic swamp where any intelligent life comes to die. Where only the clinically deranged and terminally deluded are to be found. Where the sanest voice is Michael Fabricant’s rug pleading with its owner to be allowed to go home. Welcome to the Tory party conference….Four days when the Tory party has nothing better to do than to turn its gaze in on itself. Four days when you can take centre stage. When your narcissism can go unchecked. You’ve been dreaming about this for weeks. People actually pretending to be interested in what you have to say…. The main event of the afternoon was a session entitled: Dispatches from the election campaign. It was hardly a truth and reconciliation committee. More a coming together of the weak and the fallen, trying to console themselves that the public still loved them really’. This so captures the self-important delusion emanating from so many of them like John Redwood and party members, all taking it terribly seriously as if they’re not a spent force.
But it gets worse, in the form of the absurdly long drawn out party leadership election, which few care about but which the media have discussed endlessly. The candidates’ promotional tweets and videos have been embarrassingly bad, boasting about non-achievements, Cleverly saying he will unite the party (good luck with that) and getting a standing ovation at the end of his speech with ‘Let’s be more like [Ronald] Reagan. Let’s be enthusiastic, relatable, positive, optimistic. Let’s be more normal’. At least this suggests that he gets how cruel and insane some of them have sounded, especially Liz Truss, still jetting around the world making speeches wherever she can find anyone to host her (currently Australia). For his part Tom Tugendhat is fond of constantly reminding us of his military experience, a recent tweet, accompanied by a photo of himself armed, in uniform, declaring ‘I’ve never failed a mission’. He was part of a government which massively failed its mission of running the country, of course.
John Crace again: ‘It is an election that is at best inconsequential and at worst an irrelevance. At a time when the Middle East is about to enter another full-scale war, the Tory party has chosen to take indefinite leave of absence to talk about itself….
Mostly though Cleverly sounded just like David Brent. “There’s no time to lose and I don’t lose,” he announced, clearly thrilled with what he had said. He didn’t mind that it could have been lifted straight from The Office…The Show That Never Ends. At least, that’s the way it feels. Hard to believe, after weeks of nonsense and four days of the Fearless Four saying the same thing minute after minute, that we’ve still got a month of the Tory leadership election to go. I guess we just need to be thankful for small mercies: we may not be at the beginning of the end, but we are at the end of the beginning’.
But surely none of them can be worse than Boris Johnson, whose ‘memoir’ (the absurdly titled Unleashed) the media are constantly alluding to and which has been described in very unflattering terms by reviewers. A sickening video showed him excitedly tearing into a parcel of recently arrived tomes, predicted to be on remainder shelves within weeks. We have to wonder if he deliberately avoided the reviews but he’d ignore them anyway. Nothing, as we’ve been reminded via his appalling tv interviews, can penetrate that entitled thick skin.
‘All the fancy verbiage in the world cannot disguise the emptiness at the heart of this self-serving, solipsistic book. He uses his wit, appearance and persona to deflect from serious matters and to advance his own cause. His language is a form of collusion with his audience to stand apart from the tough business of governing. As Ed Docx observed in 2021 in these pages, Johnson has perfected the role of the clown king, whose speech is “not – in truth – eloquent, but rather the caricature of eloquence”. It is the same with this memoir’.
But worse was to come…. We have to wonder why our media keep platforming this bloated piece of irrelevance but since they are….. It was shameful (confirming what many of us suspected all along) that the BBC had to pull their interview with Johnson because the long discredited Political Editor, Laura Kuenssberg, was caught out ‘mistakenly’ forwarding her questions and briefing notes to Johnson himself. Few believe this was a mistake and the BBC made it worse by trivialising a sackable offence into a case of ‘red faces’. Other channel presenters offered to step into the breach, although we later learned that several interviews had been planned, not just the BBC’s.Tom Bradby’s half hour on ITV wasn’t a bad job but he had to resort almost to shouting in order to be heard above Johnson’s ranting and wall of word salad. The famous Johnsonian smirk disappeared as he was repeatedly challenged on core issues, such as did he now accept (confronted with relevant statistics showing the UK’s economic decline since Brexit) that Brexit had been a big mistake? ‘No, not at all’.
The most disgraceful aspects of this interview were his constantly shoving his book into the camera, ‘If you read Unleashed…. In the book…. In Unleashed…’ etc, his denial of Covid mismanagement, his insistence that the ‘outstanding’ vaccine rollout had been enabled by Brexit, his throwing colleagues under the bus eg David Cameron and even Gavin Williamson, his alleging that what resulted was not the Brexit he wanted, his attempt to cancel his Partygate apology (‘Partygate was a lot of overblown nonsense’) and, surely the most egregious given how the country has suffered, giving his Brexit rationale as ‘I wanted to win the argument’. So the country was sacrificed (and this is where the widespread political ignorance in the UK massively enabled him) on the altar of his egocentric Oxford Union debate determination to ‘win’. He also attacked Sue Gray despite having appointed her himself, prompting the following viewer comment: ‘Johnson bleating about Sue Gray is as irrelevant as it is dishonest. He wants us to forget that the separate inquiry by the cross-party Commons Privileges Committee, which had nothing to do with Sue Gray’s inquiry, found that he had deliberately and repeatedly misled Parliament’.
As you might expect, today’s GB News interview was even worse, Johnson talking over the Telegraph hack interviewer at every opportunity, insisting how ‘important’ his point was, desperately trying to convince viewers of his twisted version of reality. I had to switch off after half an hour but even the first bit had him even more aggressively shoving his book into the camera and ranting incoherently. He’s been described as ‘self-mythologising’ and that was very evident here. Not unlike Liz Truss strutting her stuff on the world stage, he’s trying to rewrite his appalling legacy. Let’s hope not many are taken in. You have to despair at some of the GB News comments, though, one saying ‘Boris didn’t mismanage Covid – it was Whitty and Starmer’. Starmer?? Another said ‘I love Boris and can’t wait to read his book’.
The complex issue of assisted dying has been much discussed this week as a result of Kim Leadbeater’s private member’s bill being put before Parliament this month. MPs last rejected legislation back in 2015 so it could be argued reconsideration is way overdue. It’s also had some high profile supporters, such as Dame Esther Rantzen. Views seem pretty polarized, some desperate for such legislation to be enacted, and others feeling it could be a slippery slope to shuffling off the sick and disabled prematurely and that in the event many who opted for it later change their minds. A key issue is the inconsistent provision of palliative care in the NHS – if this was provided consistently and effectively this would perhaps reduce the support for such a big change. I’m prepared to be corrected if wrong here but an important dimension seems to have gone under the radar: that is the philosophical issue of the extent to which we put ourselves in the hands of experts (doctor/priest/lawyer purveyors of social authority).
Nowadays we are much likely to opt for autonomy, to question traditional sources of authority and this has been evident in views expressed. Yesterday’s Radio 4 Any Answers was entirely devoted to this topic and at least one caller said surely he should have the right to decide when and how he could end his life. Years ago this would have never been an expectation and these longstanding sources of authority don’t always take kindly to this being challenged. (An example of this is the introduction of ‘Martha’s Law’ in the NHS, pioneered by the mother of the little girl who died from sepsis following inadequate hospital care. We’ve often heard the mantra ‘the doctor knows best’ so many patients will simply go along with what they’re told. Having worked in the NHS, I will be interested to see how this initiative pans out). On assisted dying one thing is certain, though, but difficult to guarantee given the run-down state of the NHS: if such legislation reaches the statute book, there would have to be crystal clear safeguards as to how decisions were reached and implemented. It’s clear that some do not have faith in that process. The current situation cannot continue – no one should have to have the threat of legal action hanging over them for 6 months, as one caller did after he accompanied his wife to Dignitas.
Finally, a bit of levity but it won’t be felt in all quarters…. Remember the large lettuce banner with the words ‘I crashed the economy’ which unfurled at an event where Liz Truss was promoting her new book? ‘That’s not funny’, said she, as she walked off that stage. Unfortunately for her, many found it very funny, possibly because such a stunt would pierce that thick skin in the way tweets, for example, would not. Now Tesco in Walthamstow (North London) has unveiled a fake blue plaque to honour the lettuce that outlasted her stint as PM (49 days). The article states that Liz Truss ‘has been approached for comment’. What’s the betting she’ll try to get it taken down?
Politics and mental health - the missing link? 