Durhamgate: a full spectrum shambles

By Pete North - May 26, 2020

It would be negligent to point out that though Johnson has not fared well this week, the media hasn’t covered itself in glory lately either. Seemingly not able to land a decisive blow, it has less to do with the lack of evidence and more to do with the ineptitude of the media pack.

Predictably the usual suspects seek to engineer it all into another front in the culture wars, with the liberal left media going after the Brexit “mastermind” in a spiteful act of revenge, where we are again cleaved into two camps, compelled to choose between bent politicians and a feral media when they’re two halves of the same rotten enterprise.

Some people have great difficulty assimilating the idea that one can be pro-Brexit and think the media is beyond the pale while also accepting that Cummings has broken the spirit if not the letter of the law.

It continually irks me that people can’t separate the strands. Cummings is in charge of all media communications. He knows what any publisher knows, that the public doesn’t do detail. It absorbs messages. He crafted those messages that said to stay home, and especially so if you suffer symptoms. Particularly you should not travel to a second location even for isolation purposes to avoid additional pressure on local services.

The case all hinges on a technicality, but essentially he elected to ignore what was essentially a travel ban which aimed to prevent new infection clusters. He knew the purpose of the rules. Paid zero regard to them. That’s issue 1. The central issue. It’s a question of government integrity.

Whether the lockdown is the right call or not, the very least we can expect is for the government to practice what it preaches. That it now believes its own senior staff are exempt and face no consequences for breaches has forced them to reconsider current penalties issued to ordinary people, thereby making the lockdown unenforceable.

Lockdown will probably disintegrate now. The government’s flagship containment strategy will end not because of a vaccine or because the necessary control measures are in place, but because our weak oafish PM can’t let go of his only intellectual crutch. The second wave is on him. It is truly remarkable that this government would rather let its containment policy collapse than give up their guru. That’s an even bigger story.

Still though, Tory MPs have taken to Twitter to carry out their face saving instructions. They are all sharing the same carefully crafted message with the same keywords which roughly translates as “You’ve had your answer, plebs. Stop talking about it”. The right would have it that we should all move on and would prefer it if the media did as well. Rightly, the media are not satisfied and continue to probe the story.

We are told this is an ongoing vendetta against Cummings, but the media is entirely within its rights to campaign. I reject the notion that a campaigning media is a bad thing – just so long as they drop the peculiarly British pretence of impartiality. Cummings, by way of his abysmal track record and his own contempt for process and accountability, exemplified by this outing, makes him entirely a legitimate target, and if the PM wants this man at the heart of government then he accepts the baggage and bad press that goes with it. His choice, his consequences.

I still maintain the issue isn’t media bias. They’re just useless at what they do. There’s enough inconsistency from this government that they should be able to make something stick. All the media had to do is ask Cummings what he would have done if he hadn’t had the good fortune to have a spare house at his beck and call, at an instant’s notice.

Clearly, it cannot have been the case that driving 260 miles to a spare house was the only possible option. Other people have had to manage in similar circumstances without the luxury of a spare house so conveniently waiting for them. What was it about Cummings, that made him so different and so special that driving 260 miles to a conveniently spare house was his only possible option? If it was not his only possible option, then he had no reasonable excuse driving there with his wife and child. It was simply his preferred option.

That the media more often than not is banal, inane, shrieking and tedious is a wholly separate issue. One does not exonerate the other. I’ll make no excuses for either. Ultimately the media we have is a product of the style of government that’s evolved since Thatcher where government assumes total micromanaging control over policy which makes Number 10 a communications hub. 

Media follows power. If you centralise power you centralise media. If then the media is the primary mode of communication for government, everything is crafted and focus-grouped, robbing it of any sincerity. Media then spends its time reverse engineering to find the true message, which in turn spawns professional spin doctors who then become political actors in their own right.

It then becomes codependent, symbiotic even, to the point where there is no real distinction between the two camps. We now have a Telegraph hack as PM. I therefore view it as two cheeks of the same arse. If you want to break the media dynamic you have to break the stranglehold Number Ten has on power and restore it to its rightful place. We might then cultivate a local media and local democracy worthy of its name where Number Ten does so little there is no value in the networks maintaining the massive production caravan they have running 24-7. The only way to reform media without unwelcome regulation is to reform the nature of power.

I think this all started with 24-7 news channels, with network bosses believing politics to be more eventful than it actually is. In reality it’s months of tedium punctuated by fleeting events. Blogging Brexit exclusively for years was a measured exercise in boredom, but for the media there is a commercial imperative to fill airtime. Thus, it speculates and invents and politicians desperate for exposure are happy to indulge it – usually the more cretinous ones – which distorts overall perceptions of politics that results in the destructive and highly tedious culture war we have now.

Rather than recognising the threat this posed, New Labour wholeheartedly embraced it to ensure government business was never out of the news, which was like crack to our media. This is why it hated Theresa May who refused to feed the beast with a running commentary, leaving pundits kicking their heels for weeks at a time. Ultimately its within the power of government to change the nature if media but it requires of them that they relinquish power, thus hopes of genuine reform are slender. This has to play out to its miserable conclusion, whatever that may be.

Though the culture war rages on Twitter, I’m far from alone in my sheer boredom with it and its achingly predictable format. The populist right is now eating itself by way of a Corbynite purity test. The Leave Alliance are not considered kosher Brexiters because we supported a deal with a backstop that could be replaced if ever activated. We are supposed to support Johnson’s near identical one that hands NI to the EU with no meaningful exit clause.

Meanwhile we have various figures on the right blethering about “the establishment”. The Tories have cleansed every top job and replaced experienced expert officials with party hacks and think tank goons. Playing the underdog victim at this point starts to look a little ridiculous. They have a near total control of the agenda without much reference to parliament where it enjoys an eighty seat majority.

It would seem the objection is the paranoid belief that the entirety of the media is institutionally opposed to Brexit and seeking to stop it by bringing down Johnson. That we have already left the EU is a fact that has temporarily been suspended for the duration of this latest row.

What the populist right actually wants is a pliant media that gives a free pass to Boris Johnson. Asking questions as to what our future trade strategy might be, how businesses are going to absorb new tariffs and new regulatory barriers, and how we are going to install and operate new customs facilities in under a year constitutes Brexit obstructionism. These days even the suggestion of extending the transition so as to conclude a viable long term agreement is viewed with deep suspicion.

When you take the point of view that your own side is incapable of error or deception and that the only legitimate Brexit is one that terminates all formal relations with the EU it’s actually quite easy to see why you’d imagine the entire media and “deep state” civil service is conspiring against you.

There is plenty of evidence to suggest the civil service does not like their new political masters, but by the same token the Tories have done everything possible to antagonise them, particularly with the installation of one Dominic Cummings. There have been some highly unprofessional outbursts from people who should know better, who have done more than their fair share to validate populist perceptions.

It can also be said that there are those in the media who will never be reconciled to Brexit, but we know who they are and what they are likely to say. It remains the case, though, that Britain still needs a deep and comprehensive relationship with the EU and with this government seemingly not engaging in the process seriously, the threat of falling over the cliff edge at a time when we can least afford it is very real.

In such circumstances, if this government wishes to impose that on us then it can expect the maximum resistance from all corners, including from a growing contingent of leavers who recognise the reality of our post-Covid predicament.

The populist right have had it all their own way for a good long while now. They didn’t want May’s deal so they got rid of her, installed their man and got the deal they wanted and have since purged parliament of the more egregious remainer rebels. The field belongs to them. The power is theirs but now they are the defenders of the political establishment and all their wrongdoings. They’re just enraged it doesn’t come with a free pass to do as they please.

It was always going to be the case that Johnson’s honeymoon would come to an end, along with his political and moral authority. The man has too many skeletons in the closet, a string of unforced errors he cannot pin on someone else, and now he’s traded his positive ratings to keep his political stooge.

They say an animal is at its most aggressive when cornered. That perhaps explains the “ScumMedia” hashtag which is now a torrent of ultra-Brexiter vitriol. But this is entirely a mess of their own making having repeatedly abused the Brexit mandate to mean whatever they want it to mean, and use as a blank cheque for whatever they wish to impose on us.

I’m no fan of the British media. But these days rather than complain about it I simply elect to ignore it. I filter out legacy media content and am no less informed for doing so. If they want my attention again then they’ll simply have to up their game and improve their output. Trust in them is at an all time low and that’s well deserved, but nowhere does it say that as a fierce critic of our media I have to roll over and accept the abuse of power from Number Ten. If I have to choose a side, I’ll choose my own – that way I’m not lied to by media or taken for a fool by government. If only others would choose the same.