Government mouthpieces
Who do newspapers write for? Sounds like a silly question when the answer is so obvious: the reader.
But is it?
There are many things that concern or interest ordinary people. Top of the list these days are how to pay the electricity bill, how to feed the family? Will they be able to go ahead with that house purchase? Will the sale that was about to be completed fall through because the buyers can’t afford the new mortgage payments? When will they get that new knee? Why do the kids have to share text books at school?
For families jogging along ok, in spite of the economic turmoil, there might be a desire to get away from the gloom.
It’s quite the task to satisfy all sections of society, so there is a natural tendency to cater for your own niche. We know the stereotypes: tofu-munching sandal-wearing beardies for the Guardian, cloth-capped factory workers for the Mirror, white van men for the Sun, gardening grandfathers for the Express and aspirational twin set and pearls types for the Mail. All outdated of course.
Not just because those images are so last century, but because they are far too broad a spectrum. For the past few days, a great chunk of our press has been speaking to the narrowest of audiences – Conservative MPs. There are, at last count, 356 of them. So quite a small proportion of the newspapers’ readerships. But the right-wingers have been even more niche than that: they are aiming at the ‘disloyal’ ones, those disrupting our disruptor prime minister.
It's the only explanation for splash headlines like ‘Rebels urged to stop plots and show loyalty’ (it is completely beyond me why the ‘and’ should be underscored).
You could argue that the Express was merely reporting what the prime minister and her allies were saying, but what justification was there for the clutch of ministerial columns that appeared at the weekend, telling colleagues to get behind Liz Truss and warning of the electoral dangers of division? Couldn’t they just have approached them in the tea room or sent a WhatsApp message? Why was it necessary for them to do their geeing up in the pages of a national newspaper? Were they expecting grassroots party members to knock on their MPs’ door and tell them to shape up? And if that were the audience – 150,000 Tories, many of whom are suffering buyers’ regret – isn’t that still a pretty narrow target for the circulation department?
I have long been fretting about the amount of space that papers give over to ministers to put their case without question or examination. Time was when an interview with the PM was a hot property, a guaranteed splash, a rare and precious jewel. But Johnson put himself about all over the place and the currency was devalued. There may, too, be a case for a special ministerial oped when they are about to steer a ground-shifting piece of legislation through parliament.
This past week has been something else. Do readers not have televisions, radio or Twitter to see and hear for themselves what was being said from the Birmingham platform? They didn’t need front-page stories amplifying the message (look at this collection from Planet Express. And we thought boosterism had died with Boris.), they needed scrutiny and analysis. They needed explanations of what policies meant for them, not what they meant for the Tory party and its electoral chances in two years’ time.
Yet even the megaphones weren’t enough. Platform stars had not only to practise their speeches, they also had to find time to pen words of wisdom for favoured publications.
Before and during the conference, Liz Truss – the prime minister, with quite a lot on her plate – produced copy for the Sunday Express, Telegraph, Sun and Times. Suella Braverman wrote for the Express and Sun, Ranil Jayawardena for the Express, and Jacob Rees-Mogg fetched up in the Telegraph, as did Kwasi Kwarteng, who also gave an interview to the Mail on Sunday, about how he was the ‘wrong kind of black for Labour’, just as the markets were going into meltdown after his ‘fiscal event’.
And still, I could stomach this. But Sunday brought a new low. You know all that self-righteous guff about ‘speaking truth to power’ and ‘calling authority to account’. Well, this weekend, four newspapers surrendered space to allow those in power to marshal their forces, with Penny Mordaunt, Nadhim Zahawi, Braverman and Jayawardena on parade to demand obeisance to their leader and defend her ‘growth, growth, growth’ strategy. ‘Back Liz or Labour gains from splits’, urged the home secretary in the Sun; ‘Division now will lead to drift, delay and defeat’ warned Zahawi in the Mail on Sunday. Could they honestly say those messages were of interest to – let alone intended for – readers who actually pay for their papers?
These columns were all about people in power clutching to power for now and trying to work out how not to lose it in the future (in the face of opinion polls showing that vast swathes of the country want them out). What these columns were absolutely not about was what they intended to do with that power to run the country and make its citizens’ lives better.
A question of priorities
Nobody could have missed the section of the prime minister’s conference speech in which she said: ‘I have three priorities for the economy: growth, growth, growth’. So Times readers could be forgiven if they felt confused on reading her guest column the next day, which started: ‘Security, energy and migration are three of the most urgent priorities for the British people, so they are top of my agenda too.’
Whoever would have thought that what mattered for the country and what mattered for its economy were so completely different?
The presentation of this effort was also intriguing. There was no mention of it on the front page, when you might have expected a pull quote in the splash or at least a x-ref of its own at the bottom. Instead readers who turned to ‘Politics news and analysis, pages 4-9’ will have happened upon it on the last spread. There it was given no fanfare – or even a headline – just a blue tint panel labelled ‘Comment Liz Truss’.
It all felt a bit ‘sigh, if we must…’
Times broadside
Maybe Zahawi, Braverman and the whitetops had the Times in their sights when they were stamping around demanding loyalty or risk the horrors of Starmer and the SNP. The Thunderer clearly would have preferred Sunak in No 10, and it is spectacularly failing to ‘get behind’ the alternative. News pages have laid out in all their gory details the travails of the administration and the frightening consequences of its approach; the opeds and leaders have been brutal. Matthew Parris calls for the Conservatives to ‘despatch’ Truss in short order, Daniel Finkelstein says we’ve passed the ‘smoked salmon moment’ when it is obvious that anyone who matters has moved on and is planning for the next Labour government, William Hague offers a ‘not-to-do’ list to avoid making matters worse (which Truss seems to have misread as a ‘to-do’ list).
These aren’t just random columnists, they have all had central roles right at the top of the Tory party – one of them actually led it for a while.
Meanwhile, Hugo Rifkind pokes fun at them not only in his spoof ‘My week’ Saturday diary, but in his mainstream column where he ridicules Zahawi’s bald assertion that after twelve years in office, and with a leader who has served in cabinet for ten of those years, this administration is ‘only a few days old’.
Seeing the funny side
Humour is a powerful weapon and the Guardian’s John Crace and Marina Hyde have been deploying it mirthfully and mercilessly. The Star characterised Truss as Noddy in Toytown, Metro had her as Bob the Builder, which must be down a notch from the clowns the Star was using to depict Johnson and his ministers throughout the pandemic. At least clowns also entertain adults; Noddy and Bob are strictly for the children. And toddlers at that.
PM avoidance
Perhaps the Mirror might pick up a few tips on effective ways to make your feelings clear. Anyone who has stuck with this Notebook over the months will know its golden rule: news should be told straight, opinion should be labelled as such. The Truss administration is in such a mess in so little time that her ideological opponents need do very little to bolster their case for its removal. (Keir Starmer and his team understand this, much to the dismay of those at either end of the political spectrum who desperately want them to spell out a radical agenda, fully costed, two years before they have to put it to the electorate.)
The Mirror could have allowed Truss to damn herself through her own words – her speech provided both words of comfort for supporters and ammunition for opponents – but, instead, it got it wrong (to my eyes) in two ways.
First it played the ‘squirrel’ card. Relegating the speech to that little box under the titlepiece while splashing on ‘Stop the killer dogs’. This was straight out of the Mail playbook from the Labour conference when it went with a totally time sensitive (not) story about Stephen Lawrence’s killer’s mobile phone on the day after the Starmer address. Whatever you think of the prime minister, if you see yourself as a player on the political stage (All newspapers do. Should they? Discuss), her speech to her party conference should be your main story. Barring another Putin atrocity, an earthquake or a train crash. Killer dogs aren’t quite in that league.
Then when it did report the speech, on the 6-7 spread under the headline ‘Amoral, amateur’, it went in feet first with comment rather than fact. The heading could be justified on the basis that all tabs have ‘attitude’ in their presentation, but this intro was beyond the pale: ‘Liz Truss's empty conference speech gave no hope to struggling families as a poll found she is even less popular than Boris Johnson.’ The next three pars talked about her ‘awkward address’ doing nothing to bolster support and it being ‘so bad’ that odds against her leaving Downing Street were being cut. So much for straight reporting.
Hidden treasure
While the Mirror has been busy using its poop scoop to hide the prime minister, the Sun has been busy hiding its scoop to expose the prime minister. Harry Cole was, by all accounts, the first with the story that the non-U-turning PM was about to do a U-turn and reprieve the 45p tax rate for high earners.
That day’s splash was from the conference in Birmingham – but about the Spice Girl Mel B addressing a Sun event on domestic abuse. Conference ‘proper’ was on 6 and 7, focusing on Truss’s Sunday interview with Laura Kuenssberg and the row over that tax rate. (The headline, Peaky blunders, baffled me. I know that Peaky Blinders is set in Brum. I get the ‘blunders’ bit, but Peaky? Do they mean Pique-y or that they were feeling sick?) I digress. The first edition story was about Truss ‘throwing the chancellor under a bus’ and the threat that anyone voting against the tax cut would be kicked out of the party.
By the second, it was ‘Liz Truss was last night preparing to ditch scrapping the 45p tax rate in a humiliating climbdown. After a day of brutal Tory backlash, the PM summoned her chancellor to crisis talks where they drew up plans to axe the controversial tax cut for millionaires.’ The main head remained the same, though one of the subheads was updated. There was no tweak to the front.
Meanwhile the Mail was showing yet again how slick it is at the quick turnaround, even before it could stand up the story, slipping its Gove-bashing front to pose the question ‘Are Tories on brink of 45p tax U-turn?’ For once, the answer was yes.
All of which served to show how slow-footed the Telegraph can be. It splashed on Truss delaying a vote on the tax to try to quash the rebellion and ran an all-editions leader celebrating the abolition of the 45p rate and asserting that Truss was clearly not a leader buffeted by events. The headline? ‘Liz Truss is not for turning’. Oh dear.
Pointing the finger elsewhere
For all the Express’s puppy-dog slavishness, it is the Telegraph that has been the most staunch in support of the prime minister. I was surprised, therefore, to see ‘Sterling falls’ as the top line of its lead headline yesterday when the whitetops were snatching the opportunity for a bit of Coronation deflection. But the splash continued ‘…as Bank pulls plug on pension help’. Ah yes, it’s all – and always has been – the Bank of England’s fault. So that’s all right then.
Anti-growth coalition: a who’s who
The Telegraph has also shown its fealty by running with the second of Truss’s key speech soundbites: the ‘anti-growth coalition’. Of course most of the people and organisations lumped together aren’t ‘anti-growth’ per se, though Truss may have had a point that they tend to put obstacles – such as seeking to protect the environment or workers’ rights – in her chosen path to achieving it. And, of course, there is no ‘coalition’. Or are podcasters constantly messaging Brexit deniers, trade unionists, the RSPB and possibly Jamie Oliver to co-ordinate their strategy to make sure the economy stays in the doldrums?
Everyone recognised this. Even the loyalist press put the phrase in quotes, while the leftwingers mocked and derided, delighting in declaring themselves part of the coalition. T shirts are already on sale.
Only the ministers-turned-columnists in their Sunday begging letters to recalcitrant MPs presented it as a Real Thing with no quotes to cover its embarrassment.
And the Telegraph. It embraced the notion wholeheartedly, Charles Moore was quick off the blocks declaring the BBC to be the ‘broadcast wing of the anti-growth coalition’. The leader described the identification of this creature, ‘always standing in the way of anything that will release enterprise, create wealth, boost jobs and swell tax revenues’, as a powerful observation.
Matthew Lynn took up the baton with gusto, according the coalition capital letters and suggesting it should be known by its initials AGC, as other previously unidentified members of the group – the CBI, IFS, OBR – were. He also unmasked the Resolution Foundation, the Bank of England, HR departments, woke businesses, rewilders and the WWF. Gosh!
Old royal news
That’s enough Tories. Time to turn to that other staple: the royals. Most specifically the late Duke of Edinburgh. ‘Fury over Crown Philip slur’ yelled the Sun on Monday under the strap ‘Weeks after Queen’s death’. This was an exclusive by Rod McPhee, based on the fact that the next season of the series is due to appear next month. It will include, we are told, insinuations about the Duke’s relationship with Penny Knatchbull. And some people are cross about it. Or they’ve been asked if they’re cross about it and have obligingly said yes. They include the go-to ‘royal expert’ Ingrid Seward, who said ‘It’s in exceedingly bad taste’. What? To look at a relationship she herself had written about – in a book and in the Sun – five years ago under the headline ‘Was Prince a Philanderer? Possibly… but Queen is the only one he LOVES’.
The Queen’s former press secretary, Dickie Arbiter, is quoted as saying: "Coming just weeks after the nation laid Her Majesty to rest next to Prince Philip, this is very distasteful and, quite frankly, cruel rubbish...Netflix are not interested in people's feelings."
Because the Sun (and the rest of the popular press) is desperately interested in people’s feelings.
I have never watched The Crown, but understand that it is a fictionalised account of the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, with an ever-changing cast of B-list stars to reflect the ageing of the central characters. For some reason, the Sun (and occasionally others) are dismayed that it should include uncomfortable periods of that reign. Papers that do not believe in self-censorship or self-restraint think that there should be no-go areas for Netflix. Starting with that Panorama interview and now any suggestion that Prince Philip was a bit of a ladies’ man.
Is any of this news? Not really. Especially as McPhee pretty well wrote the same ‘exclusive’ last August. Then it was the inclusion of the Philip-Penny narrative in the script; now it’s about it being broadcast.
Then it was a double-column sidebar to a spread on the new Diana actress in lookalike dresses. Now it’s the splash.
The day before, it had run another spread on the ‘new’ Charles and Di and a couple of days later, it ran a further feature on ‘Philip’s Penny’ who was apparently so close to him, the family called her ‘And Also’.
Oh yes, and that Seward piece from 2017? It was written because there was a suggestion that the Crown would hint on the Duke cheating on ‘Her Maj’.
So we knew the show would address the subject. We know that the Duke is dead. We know that the Queen is dead. What is exclusive? That a programme that has been filmed with a storyline we expected is going to be shown as per schedule, which happens to be a couple of months after the state funeral. Wow! Well done that team.
Meanwhile, the Mail is busy offering us glamorous red-carpet pictures of the actress who played Princess Margaret.
That’s what Netflix – and the BBC – are for. To bash and to provide celebrity pix.
Fury at unimaginative headlines
So we’ve had fury over the Crown and fury over Gove. There’s been a lot of it about. It’s not just me getting crotchety it seems.
In the two weeks to yesterday, the word had appeared in national newspaper headlines 75 times (76 if you include the short-lived Gove splash in the Mail). Fifteen of those referred to boxers Tyson and Tommy, so they don’t count. There was also fury from Hurricane Ian and in the bombs raining down on Ukraine.
But what else was making people cross? Quite a lot in sport: authorities in rugby, football, golf and F1 accounted for a dozen red-in-the-face rants. Politics, of course. Fury at the Bank of England over the plunging pound, fury at the young Tory who called Birmingham a dump, fury over Nicola Sturgeon, being rude to / about Truss and vice versa, Johnny Mercer’s fury at the PM over veterans, fury over Kwarteng’s fizz with hedge funds, fury that the government is taking too long to deal with the ‘internet menace’, fury at ambulance waiting times, Angela Rayner’s boyfriend’s fury at being deselected from his safe Labourt seat, and fury that Rees-Mogg’s energy-saving campaign was being ditched.
The Prince of Wales has been quite furious in the Mail and Telegraph about the treatment of a palace insider, and royalty fans are furious that they have to pay £28 to visit the Queen’s grave. There has even been fury – in the Mail – about unclaimed lottery winnings and – in the Observer – over Panini sticker mania (what?)
The same paper vents families’ fury over the failings of inquiries into the deaths of two black men, while the Express has families being furious that a judge has quit the Scottish covid inquiry. Families were also furious with Air France and Airbus at a plane crash inquiry. The brother of Moors murder victim Keith Bennett has been furious all over the place. Much of this familial ire is understandable – as in yesterday’s Express story, ‘Mother’s fury at cocaine driver ex who killed son’.
In some cases, people have actually expressed fury in the body of the story – as in the Times’s account of F1 drivers fulminating about a tractor on the track – and the word was surely justified in the same paper’s report of an encounter between covid vaccine high priestess Kate Bingham and former health secretary Matt Hancock, which includes the phrase ‘stuck to the ceiling in fury’. In others, it has been obvious in the nature of the event – as in the Iranian protests.
But mostly, it’s just headline shorthand where the story is devoid of emotion beyond mild irritation.
My favourite story in this mould was the Sun’s ‘Gran fury at courier “nude” pic’. She was neither furious nor nude (hence the quotes, I guess). Helen Campbell was having a birthday bath when a Yodel driver turned up with a present from her husband. She wrapped a towel round herself and leant out of the window. He laughed and took her picture ‘as proof of delivery’. She said she had shouted at him to leave the parcel in the porch and asked him not to take her picture. That he went ahead left her feeling ‘violated and embarrassed’ and spoilt the rest of her day. So much detail in such a little story. But not so much fury.
There was even less in the Sunday Mirror’s ‘Car-throw pups fury’. This story identified a ‘horrifying new trend’ of people throwing pets out of car windows because they can’t afford to keep them. The cases of a kitten, a puppy, two snakes and a rabbit are cited. But there is absolutely no fury in the story at all. Three animal welfare workers are quoted, noting that some people couldn’t cope. “I would prefer to think it’s people in a desperate situation rather than someone who does it maliciously,” says one. “Times are tough and we understand families are struggling… owners don’t know where to turn,” says another. The third does talk about the snakes being ‘callously’ tossed out of a moving car. But that’s as condemnatory or as cross as it gets. So no fury and no plural ‘pups’. An all-round poor headline.
While I’m whingeing, ‘New H’boro probe fury’ in the Star was a bit of a shocker. Telling a story in three pars with a punchy heading is the measure of a true tabloid sub. This, reproduced here in full, shows just how hard it is. Let’s take it as a given that there’s no fury. And if there were, who in this story would be furious? The mysterious politicians of the first par or the three gentlemen who apparently chorused the ‘thoughtless, tactless’ quote at the end? And what are they furious about? Moves to halt the inquiry or the failure to keep the families informed? When did it ‘emerge’ that the victims’ families did not know about the investigation? On the 18th reading, I think that the quoted trio are the politicians of the intro and that they want the inquiry stopped because it was launched without the families’ knowledge. But I can’t be sure.
And H’boro is hideous. But I guess I have to let that one go as I see the Liverpoool Echo also uses that abbreviation – and it should know.
There is a germ of a serious point here. Words like ‘fury’ and ‘outrage’ and ‘anger’ are at least 50% of the time commentary: a reflection not of the opinions of people in the story, but of those publishing it; a guide to what the reader is supposed to think – or a way of avoiding telling an unpalatable story as it is and shifting culpability from where it’s not wanted. Hence the fury at the Bank of England yesterday. Just tell the story straight, not someone’s reaction to it. As the Mirror could have done with, ‘Pets flung from cars’. I believe that would have fitted the count.
Does the Mail have a case to answer?
Is there a culture of omerta among the Fleet Street papers? Supporters of Hacked Off believe there is and, even if there isn’t, there does seem to be an attitude that could most generously be described as ‘people aren’t interested in the workings of the press’.
How else to explain the way most papers underplayed the news that Prince Harry, Baroness Lawrence, Elton John and others are suing the Mail for breach of privacy. This is a big deal. Not because of Harry – his fights with the Associated titles are old news – but because the Mail has made so much capital out of its pursuit of the gang who killed Doreen Lawrence’s son Stephen. Only last week, it was splashing on the one man convicted of the murder having a mobile phone in jail (albeit as a deflection from Keir Starmer’s speech). The paper is supposed to be on her side and now she is taking it to court, alleging that it paid a private investigator to bug her conversations.
The Mail, to its credit, put the story at the top of page 4, albeit couched as ‘Mail rejects celebrities’ claims of intrusion’. The Guardian, which led the way on phone hacking, obviously went in big. But coverage elsewhere was muted. The Express and Times headlines were particularly perplexing. The Express had ‘News group sued over breach of privacy’. Why not be specific about its biggest rival? At least the Times was, although ‘Mail publisher in claims over breach of privacy’ was a bit abstruse.
This is a story that can only grow. It deserved more than four pars in the paper of record.
As a matter of interest, when the phone hacking saga boiled over, leading to the closure of the News of the World and the sacking / resignation of Andy Coulson from Downing Street, a league table of papers using private investigators circulated the newsroom.
It turned out to have come from an Information Commissioner’s report in 2006 entitled ‘What price privacy?’ which was looking at illegal accessing of private information. I’m not saying that the investigators or their newspaper clients were acting unlawfully, but I did find that table interesting and still do.
At the top with 952 commissions was the Daily Mail, way out in front of the People on 802 and the Mirror on 681. The Mail on Sunday was fourth with 266 – so the Mail titles combined came to 1,281. Most of the others in the table were in double figures.
Paul Dacre told the Leveson inquiry that his paper was absolutely never involved in phone hacking or illegal information gathering. It may be that the heavy use of PIs supports that assertion – proving that it didn’t need to because it was using legitimate investigators to find stuff out. The Mail also did and does invest far more heavily in journalists than other papers, and so would have the staff to do more conventional and more honourable (or less dishonourable) digging.
But the fact that such high-profile people are now emboldened to take him to court means a can is about to be opened, whether it contains worms or hot air. It may be that while the honours vetting committee considers Conor Burns’s putative knighthood, it might also advise that Ms Truss pauses that peerage.
Front page of the fortnight
I liked the Noddy and Bob the Builder pages in the Star and Metro mentioned above. Meanwhile, the Sun has shown it still has what it takes when it comes to reporting proper stories as opposed to footballer gossip and royal pap. I’m not sure that the ‘prosecutor tells court’ in the strap should obviate the need for some quotes or qualification on the main headline on the baby murdering trial, but the page was clean and clear and relatively unsensational for a story that most of us really struggle to come to terms with.
Then yesterday it did it again. I long since wearied of Madeleine McCann stories. But this did seem to be a new angle and was again simply presented. Not world-beaters or earth-shattering, but good up-and-down tabloid journalism.
I also thought this headline and presentation was witty.
Liz Gerard’s Notebook is a fortnightly column published in the InPubWeekly newsletter. To be added to the mailing list, enter your email address here.
