Much the most hilarious headline of the past couple of weeks was in the Daily Telegraph. It read: “Starmer’s worst mistake yet.” Starmer had been Prime Minister for barely five days. Deep in denial, the mourners at the Telegraph couldn’t bear to hold off. The same journalists who were imploring the Conservative Party to take a hard look at its record of failure were disqualified from reporting that the only institution to have had a more damaging election than the Tories was the British press. Newspapers had approached the whole thing through the wrong lens, just as so many of them had called Liz Truss’s budget wrong. Why weren’t they now preparing to take a similarly long, cool look at themselves?
Nobody can object to the determination of newspapers to go on defending governments on whom the public have long given up. That’s their right. Or rather, the right of their proprietors. But what is less clever is to ignore the biggest story of the day, and to show no curiosity about its origins. Why was there so little proper, on-the-ground reporting of what was going on? At a time when the direction of travel abroad is so often towards right-wing populism, why was Britain moving in the very opposite direction – towards the centre left? Why were so few ready to tell us?
You may, if you wish, pass your time in the seductive embrace of John Curtice suggesting that this was an anti-Tory vote, not a pro-Labour one. But no analyst can approach today’s politics without first abandoning the universal cliché that has provided the framework for all the laziest journalism of the past eight years. Throughout Fleet Street, the Brexit vote has been repeatedly invoked to demonstrate that liberal elites are uniquely out of touch with the people. In 2016, voters, it is said, seized the chance to show that they had a mind of their own of which the establishment was condescendingly ignorant. It is asserted over and over that the BBC and the civil service were taken aback by the result. Insular and insulated, they reeled at the revelation that what washed in Whitehall no longer had purchase in the country at large.
If I had a pound for every article that was structured round that proposition – progressives complacent, the people ahead of them – I would be rich indeed. How many times do we still need to read, especially in left-wing publications, that Nigel Farage is the most significant politician of the age? Such an interpretation of popular sentiment would be great except for the fact that it is clearly no longer true. Why is the recent passionate disgust with right-wing elites, speeded on by Downing Street parties, the pathology of Johnson, the hopelessness of Truss, the neglect of prisons and the decline of the NHS, not afforded the same epochal significance? If the people were ahead in 2016, why are they not being just as discerning in 2024? At this election, the public turned ruthlessly against politicians who disbelieve in the constitution, international alliances and the functions of the state. They chose instead to put their weight behind a party that defends traditional ideas of the common good. Who is equipped to draw far-reaching conclusions from that?
In this volatile turnaround, the Tory party must answer for itself. To any non-member, it’s bewildering why, with 507 parliamentary representatives to the left of them, and five to the right, so many Conservatives are convinced that the answer to their unpopularity lies in moving rightwards. But that’s their business. What is far more serious is the survival of such large swathes of the population who feel impoverished, bitter and disenfranchised by increasing inequality of wealth and opportunity. Not only are these citizens materially deprived, they also find themselves libelled a thousand times over in the rhetorical phoney war waged by the British press. For progressives to be portrayed as unrealistic and airy-fairy, it has been necessary to characterise the people as xenophobic, homophobic and anti-immigrant, and therefore, in some demented way, more “real”.
When considering the shortcomings of any enterprise, journalists love to insist that the market is always right. Things fail because they deserve to. Capitalism’s strongest asset, they say, is its unerring flair for doling out moral justice. But when contemplating the plummeting circulation figures of print newspapers, editors seem reluctant to draw conclusions they would freely draw about anyone but themselves. In every survey, television news elicits a level of trust of which newspapers can only dream. Why, faced with this evidence, do editors disdain to do anything about it?
William Hazlitt said that he never picked up a newspaper without a sense of anticipation, and never put one down without a sense of disappointment. I can think of few pleasures in life greater than buying a couple of broadsheets and getting on a train. I love print. But if I were now an editor, I would make it a sacking offence to go on representing “real” people as prejudiced and chauvinist in order to advance a dead argument about the governing class knowing nothing. Democracy has just delivered a group of highly educated people who hope to use the privileges of their education to govern well. Sneering at them for that desire is a mug’s game – or contemporary journalism, as we call it.
[See also: Britain will never be an energy superpower]
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This article appears in the 25 Jul 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Summer Special 2024