Don’t knock the British press. You are about to need it more than ever. Each
day the rascals feed you lies, shove their hands in your pockets and stifle
every other monitor of their incompetence. British government needs the
constant attention of an alert, confident and preferably abusive press.
It needs a press that plays the man, not the ball. Play the ball and this
bunch are over the horizon hooting “don’t blame me”. Only by pinning
responsibility firmly on human beings, dismantling their footling
reputations and hounding them from pillar to post will we ever get a noose
round their necks. Don’t feel sorry for them. They claim grotesque power
over your life and happiness and every day they take more.
At first I honestly thought Tony Blair’s “poor diddums” speech last week was
farewell satire. He could not really think himself the most persecuted
politician since Carlyle declared the supremacy of the “fourth estate” back
in the 1840s. Besides, how could the master of spin admit that he had
botched his entire modus operandi? He called journalists “feral beasts” who
hunted in packs and spread cynicism wherever they went.
What a perfect description of Blair’s office for the past 15 years. Yet the
man seemed close to tears. So plaintive was his cry that a stage army of
sycophantic columnists leapt forward to hug him and say how right he was. I
recall no such media mea culpa when John Major made the same, and more
merited, speech on retirement.
The media have certainly come to occupy a larger role in public affairs under
Blair. But the reason lies with Blair, not the media. There are the same
number of papers as 10 years ago, the same BBC and Sky, the same
proprietors, allegiances and columnists, the same feeding frenzies and
ratpacks and sleaze. The difference is that Blair always claimed to “set his
own agenda”, tell his own “narrative” or, as Peter Mandelson said, “create
his own reality”. The Blairites thought they ruled the world because, for a
while, they induced the press to be far more horrid to Major than it ever
was to Blair. But having deluded the press, they then deluded themselves.
Such hubris always ends in tears.
There is a fantasy that British newspapers were once pillars of journalistic
independence and are now polluted by sensationalism, commercialism and venal
proprietors. This is rubbish. Until the 20th century, indeed through to the
second world war, most papers were owned, produced and written by and for
political parties.
The Times was usually in the pocket of the government. The Westminster
Gazette, founded by Newnes for the Liberals, was duly described by Rosebery
as “a pioneer of clean popular literature”. The Express and the Mail under
Beaverbrook and Rothermere pretended to run politics, their bluff
occasionally called by Lloyd George and Baldwin. The office song of Labour’s
Daily Herald was “We want no party, creed or bias; we want a peerage for
Elias” (their chairman). As for Blair dredging up Baldwin’s “power without
responsibility” quote, surely that was a cliché too far.
Newspaper editorials (and their promiscuous siblings, columns) are probably
more independent than ever in history. This is partly because there are so
many of them and partly because the companies for which they write are far
more concerned with keeping their papers afloat. The 1985 Wapping revolution
gave Fleet Street a decade of soaring profits, which it saw evaporate in a
blizzard of price-cutting, freesheets and internet competition. Even so,
more papers are being read on the streets of London than for half a century.
More front pages are scanned, thanks to the internet, than ever before. More
opinion is being formed, debated and regurgitated, to the point that
arguments not worth a pint in a pub can circle the earth through the
blogosphere.
I recall when a politician’s worst moment was in defending a decision to
parliament or to party colleagues. Blair has so degraded parliament and
party as to leave only the media.
The media are the nearest that politicians have to a mirror on the wall, a
review of their daily performance, the one feedback not within their pay and
control. This mirror fixation has been true of no politician as much as of
Blair and his circle. No predecessor made his press officer his most
intimate aide. The actor was inseparable from his make-up artist, the
embodiment of political narcissism.
As a result, Blair said last week, “a vast aspect of our jobs today . . . is
coping with the media, its sheer scale, weight and constant hyperactivity”.
If this was a burden it was entirely self-inflicted. Having cast aside the
civil service, the Labour party machine and all expert guidance but that of
a focus group, Blair’s government let itself be defined by the media.
It virtually took orders from the Murdoch and Rothermere press. Its total
failure to tackle drug abuse, Britain’s most pressing social problem, was
wholly media-driven, as was policy on the euro, nuclear power, sex crime and
excise taxes.
In the interwar period there would have been some truth in saying that press
barons occasionally dictated policy and could make life most uncomfortable
for politicians. But prime ministers such as Attlee and Thatcher took no
orders from Fleet Street. They did not float their decisions past
consultants, spin doctors and editors as does Blair. No wonder he spoke of
spending so much time dealing with “24/7 media”. He should have craved their
approval less and ignored them more.
Letting the press run the country is a sure route to disaster. Journalists are
not governors but judges of governors as critics are of actors. They are
potent only in so far as power allows them influence. American journalists
are brought up to respond to that status, to be dignified and responsible,
to be “unofficial legislators of the nation” working for a tiny group of
self-important newspapers.
I follow a different star, that of Britain’s more open market press, with the
journalist covering a range of tastes and styles, worshipping only at the
shrine of indignity and irresponsibility. The reporter’s primary duty is not
to “legislate for the nation” but as rat-catcher, setting the traps, laying
the poison and catching the little bastards. It is to make life hell for
those who purport to wield immense power in the public’s interest and so
frequently fail.
The journalist’s duty is not to let Blair off the hook but to ram him down on
it good and hard. He has protection and to spare.
Ministers should not be, as portrayed by Blair, delicate prima donnas,
brooding over their cuttings and spending “vast” amounts of time currying
favour with the press. Britain at present is seriously misgoverned. There is
not a ministerial department that would pass muster in an average banana
republic. Not a day passes without some new computer scandal, budget
overrun, policy shambles or muddled war. These are not political devices.
They are real lives that Blair is playing with. Men die every day because of
his ill-judged, inadequately criticised wars.
Were it not for the press, he would have us think all is well in Iraq and a
roaring success in Afghanistan. Were it not for the press he would present
tax credits, farm payments, child support and out-of-hours doctors as
triumphs of public policy. Were it not for the press he would pretend that
BAE/Saudi was a model of commercial intercourse and extraordinary rendition
was a new budget airline. This is the mendacity with which the press must
daily contend.
It is not the press’s job to pick and choose which policy to approve, which
minister to “lay off” or which manifesto pledge quietly to bury. The press’s
job is to be indiscriminate, hounding and muck-raking. It is the modern
practitioner of trial by ordeal and, as Blair keeps saying, “the innocent
have nothing to fear”. So tear into Ruth Kelly when she lies about localism,
Patricia Hewitt when she invents waiting lists, John Reid when he boasts he
will conquer Helmand without firing a shot. Let these people out of your
sight for a minute and they are behind the woodshed going through your
wallet.
Politics does not give the press an inch except when trying to bribe it. Nor
should the press give an inch in return. All else is corruption and
sycophancy. But we have seen nothing yet. In 10 days’ time Gordon Brown,
that master of obfuscation, comes out to play. What a time that is going to
be.
simon.jenkins@sunday-times.co.uk
