PPE – following the money
The Guardian has quite a portfolio of inflammatory scoops to embarrass the government. Unlike the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses triumph, these have generally been played down or ignored by rivals. But with Lady Mone and the PPE contracts, everyone has been forced to come on board.
This was an absolute stonker by David Conn. The VIP procurement lane for equipment during the pandemic was controversial enough and Private Eye did a brilliant examination of the ‘Profits of Doom’ and the mountains of money made by just-set-up companies and their directors. It is still available to read free on their website.
But this Guardian story opened a whole new can of worms. For here was a Tory peer lobbying for a £200m government contract to go to a particular company – PPE Medpro – to which she was supposedly unconnected. Yet nearly £30m ended up in an offshore trust of which she and her children were beneficiaries. Not only that, but the PPE – for which the government paid double the going rate – was deemed unusable.
MPs sat up and started asking questions, giving the Guardian a Day Two lead. The Times picked up on it and reported that charities linked to Mone and her husband Doug Barrowman were giving her the cold shoulder. It also said that her Belgravia home was on the market for £20m, although her ‘representatives’ said she did not own it and would not benefit from its sale.
The Mail, always the smartest at grabbing other papers’ first-edition goodies for that night’s paper, managed a page 9 story – crediting the Guardian – on the same day, and followed up with a spread asking whether the scandal would sink ‘Baroness Bra’. (The paper has had a rollercoaster relationship with Mone, having been extremely hostile before suddenly going all soft on her for a bit. Now it seems to be washing its hands of her again.)
Then it got its own exclusive with Matt Hancock describing her ‘extraordinarily aggressive’ lobbying in the latest extract from his Pandemic Diaries, which the paper is serialising. (I’m not sure who is getting it more wrong here: Hancock for thinking his book, after his jungle escapades, will help to restore his reputation or the Mail for thinking that readers want more of the former Health Secretary, whom many blame for the deaths of their loved ones. Maybe the Mail is taking the ‘give him the rope to hang himself’ attitude, or maybe it has been hooked by the fact that its former columnist Isabel Oakeshott – she of the Cameron pig invention – is a co-author. Whatever the reasoning, I think it’s a misguided enterprise.)
Come Sunday, the Observer was on the case alongside its daily sister, while the Sunday Times came up with its own heavy-handed lobbying angle with Michael Gove accusing Mone of bullying and being a pain in the backside.
At that point, other Tory papers were playing it cool. But yesterday they were all there as Mone announced that she was ‘stepping back from the Lords’ to clear her name, just in time for the Guardian to claim that she had lobbied on behalf of a second company linked to her husband – this time for Covid test kits.
The Mail, which was busy bashing the unions on the front (I really want to write about these strikes, but not this time), reported this on page 13, along with a ragout of the Hancock splash and a second par that appeared to claim all the credit: ‘Earlier this week Mr Hancock revealed in his new book, serialised in the Daily Mail and The Mail On Sunday, that Baroness Mone sent him 'threatening' and 'extraordinarily aggressive' emails complaining the firm making lateral flow tests was missing out on deals.’ Except it had to admit that Hancock (and hence the paper) had not named the company, while the Guardian had now done so.
It is quite the scandal and good work by the Guardian. In these days where malpractice, incompetence, neglect are generally exposed only when some official body – from a Commons committee to a public inquiry – spells it out in words of one syllable, it is encouraging to see journalists rigorously going about their work to unearth such things off their own bat, without expecting someone else to do the spadework.
The right-wing papers are resistant to chasing stories that reflect badly on the Government and the Conservatives. (The Mail deserves commendation for at least doing so – not just here, but in the past – even if it is wont to spin such material to minimise the damage to the party.) But sometimes these things can’t be resisted.
It’s baffling, therefore, when papers like the Mirror don’t make more hay. It has had several bites at the story, but never further forward in the book than page 7. I did like its exclusive take on the day after the Guardian broke the story – which took the form of Mone and Barrowman clapping for carers ‘as firm’s PPE millions are moved offshore’. It could have been further forward than page 11, though it’s hard to fault the splash that day, which was in good old-fashioned Mirror territory, comparing Royal Mail executive pay and shareholders’ dividends with the wages of striking posties.
But what about the gem lurking in the Sunday Times’s Mone coverage last weekend. Another businessman who reportedly made a mint from supplying PPE that went unused was a man called Philip Johnson, majority owner of a West Midlands company called Ramfoam. His company made £70m profit from its contract and Johnson personally benefited to the tune of £13m.
Just another one to add to the Private Eye list? Have we come to the point where we are so used to these levels of government lack of diligence and private profiteering, that we take no notice any more? It’s a shame if we have.
But I really would have thought others would have chased up the nugget at the end of Gabriel Pogrund’s intro: ‘A businessman whose company made a £70 million profit on a contract for PPE that was mostly unused has paid himself £13 million – and celebrated his birthday last week by eating a "briefcase of cash" cake on a private yacht.’
Do these people have no shame?
Pictures of women yawning
Great minds thinking alike… or fools seldom differing?
Let’s think about these three front pages for a moment. Eighteen million people watched at least part of the England v USA match on ITV. So there is no question that the public were interested. But those people who cared enough to tune in already knew the score and what it meant.
The ‘new’ element was the photograph of Georgina Irwin in yellow England kit yawning. Ms Irwin is the fiancée of goalkeeper Aaron Ramsdale. Who was not playing. The Sun did at least tell us who she was in a four-sentence story that was – comparatively – packed with information: the result, the upshot, Ms Irwin’s apparent boredom and a quote from captain Harry Kane.
The Mirror also made Georgina the focal point. But it didn’t honour her with her full name. She was just ‘Goal sleeper: Aaron Ramsdale’s partner Georgina’. The Mirror also had two other ‘WAGs’ inset – ‘Lover’s sleep: Jack Grealish’s girlfriend Sasha’ and ‘Bore draw: Kyle Walker’s wife Annie’. They were ‘World Cup weary’ and the yawns were their ‘verdict’ on a ‘dull England draw’. There was no further text.
Then there was the Star, which had three women in little circles around a bigger picture of Kane. One was Ms Irwin, one was Mrs Walker – who actually uses her own name Kilner – and the third, I think, was Megan Pickford, wife of the goalkeeper who was playing. None was identified by the Star, which carried a single paragraph of text, starting ‘What a bore draw!’, promising the ‘full story’ on pages 2, 3, 4 and 5.
So here we have all three redtops leading on something that all its readers already knew and which they all agreed was boring, illustrated by a collection of women that two of them couldn’t even be bothered to identify properly. Yes, the ‘WAGs’ are by definition appendages on occasions like this and they tend to go along with it, as part of the job. It’s hardly surprising that Ms Irwin was yawning when required to watch a dull game in which her partner had no part.
I know that the World Cup is hugely important to the redtops and that they feel the need to milk every moment that the home nations are part of it – there’s always the fear that they could be knocked out at any moment. But this was the middle match of the group round that, even at the time, looked likely to have little, if any, bearing on whether England qualified for the knockout stages.
For this trio to give over their front pages to what was essentially a pun opportunity was, I think, a disservice to their readers and demeaning to the women used to facilitate it. There is, of course, an argument that since all three chose the same approach proves they were right and I am out of touch. I couldn’t possibly comment.
I can, however, tell you (and the Daily Mirror) that Grealish’s girlfriend is the model Sasha Attwood.
Sticking with the formula
OK, so let’s accept that everyone is football mad, especially with the France match coming up on Saturday. The royals are inescapable, and reality TV shows are reaching – or have reached – their climax. All of this is bread and milk for the tabs, as we noted last time when 23 out of the 24 Sun splashes so far in November were celeb-oriented (the odd one out had the King on it).
Well, they saw the month out without having to look beyond these staples, and have continued the run into this month. But now they’ve gone a step further. It’s not just the splash, it’s the entire front that is given over to this narrow band of topic. Since we last met, these are the only four ‘proper’ news stories to make a Sun cover. And, as we see, they are hardly show-stoppers. In any sense. A grand total of 130 words on people who don’t play football, live in a palace or appear on the telly.
Seems they’ve abandoned the real world.
Migration milestones
One of those three stories was the increase in net migration to pass the half million mark.
This figure for the year to June, released by the Office for National Statistics, was bound to cause a stir. Back in the days of the first Cameron administration, when the total was half that, there was a lot of talk of how the Conservatives were going to bring the figure down into the tens of thousands. By 2015, when the EU referendum was announced, it had gone up to 336,000. It was, of course, a key argument in the Leave campaign. Getting out of Europe would stop all those people coming over here, taking our jobs / benefits.
Now the Europeans have stopped coming – and many have gone home. Employers – especially in agriculture and the hospitality industry, not to mention the NHS – are begging the government to do something about the labour shortage. The Guardian splash on Monday last week was ‘The price of Brexit: 4,000 fewer doctors work in the NHS’.
Yet the numbers are still soaring. What is going on?
Well, there are refugees from Ukraine, Afghanistan and Hong Kong. They accounted for more than 300,000 arrivals. And then there were 476,000 students, nearly half of them from India or Nigeria, who brought with them 116,000 dependants. Meanwhile, 560,000 people emigrated. There was also movement to and from Europe – with 50-odd thousand more Europeans leaving than arriving. So Brexit sorted that ‘problem’ then.
Those are the bald figures. How did the Government and Press respond?
The Prime Minister homed in on the students, making the splash for the Times with ‘plans’ to bar anyone not planning to attend a ‘top university’ and a clampdown on the number of dependants they bring with them. But hang on, don’t universities depend on overseas students, who are charged more for their courses than home-grown teenagers? Wouldn’t they be worried about such a policy? How would they make ends meet? The Times didn’t ask any.
But it did remind readers of the government’s own International Education Strategy from 2019, which had ‘set a target of 600,000 foreign students by 2030 to boost the value of Britain's education exports to £35 billion per year.’ It also noted: ‘The target was met in 2020-21, and celebrated by the government when Sunak was chancellor.’
And what did the Home Secretary, who is responsible for immigration policy, have to say? ‘The public rightly expects us to control our borders and we remain committed to reducing migration over time in line with our manifesto commitment. This level of migration has put pressure on accommodation and housing supply, health, education and other public services.’
Now, as far as those half-million extra settlers were concerned, the government did control our borders and decided to open the door to them by granting visas.
The Times left Suella Braverman’s contribution to the debate there. But she didn’t. She went on to say: ‘My priority remains tackling the rise in dangerous and illegal crossings and stopping the abuse of our system. It is vital we restore public confidence and take back control of our borders.’
Which, of course, has almost nothing to do with the ONS statistics on net migration, since the people landing in little boats are deemed ‘illegal’ and have to wait months for their asylum applications to be considered.
The Guardian joined her in linking the two issues, reporting the ONS figures, her full quote, and then going on to detail Home Office statistics on the numbers of people waiting to learn whether they’d be allowed to stay here. There is, it reported, a backlog of nearly 150,000 cases, with nearly two-thirds of them having been on the books for more than six months.
All this was on page 8. The Guardian had a different migration story on the front, an anniversary story about the drowning of 31 people in the Channel and the bereaved families’ criticism of the investigation into their deaths. An interim report by the Marine Accident Investigation Branch, published the day before – whether deliberately or coincidentally timed for the anniversary – had confirmed that their dinghy had reached UK waters when it capsized. The victims had sent repeated SOS messages to both Britain and France, but neither sent help, each saying the boat was in the other nation’s waters and telling them to call that country’s rescue services.
The only other papers to report this story were the i and the Express, in both cases on a spread majoring on the new migration figures. The Express had a little picture and 150 words, the i a bigger story and a main picture of a French lifeboat crew throwing a wreath into the sea in memory of those who had died.
Both also splashed on the ONS. The i turned the students angle (also the focus for the Mail and Telegraph’s reports) into a cabinet row, while the Express seized the opportunity for a bit of client journalism with its splash ‘Suella vows to cut net migrant record of 504,000’. In this iteration, the determination to stop the Channel boats was the third sentence before acknowledging that more than a million had arrived ‘legally’.
[I put that that word in quotes because if there’s one thing that bugs me more than almost anything, is the widespread acceptance by the media of the use by Braverman (and Priti Patel before her) of the word ‘illegal’ to describe people arriving on Kent beaches. No country has the right to dictate what means of transport is legal or illegal. People who arrive by unconventional means are here ‘illegally’ only if they are travelling on false documents or if they try to hide from the authorities. Climbing out of container lorries and scurrying into woods and copses could legitimately be described as illegal immigration. Landing on a beach and saying ‘I’m here, please can I have asylum’ is not. Sorry. Rant over.]
But back to that Express splash. It really isn’t the job of newspapers to convey a government message. Even were that message not a promise to do something that has been promised a hundred times before by a government that has been in power for a dozen years.
A question of faith
It’s the way they tell ‘em, as Frank Carson would say.
And so it was with the news from the 2021 census that fewer than half of Britons now describe themselves as Christian. If that was indeed the ‘news’.
Oh, we do love a landmark figure. A few thousand people in a different category turning the story into ‘only just over half’ wouldn’t have cut it. The message sent out in almost every headline was that Christians are now a minority in Britain. Which in turn sent the subliminal message ‘See, those Muslims and Hindus have finally overrun us’. Which, of course, they haven’t.
So how about a bit of judicious juxtaposition to reinforce the prejudices? Here are the first two sentences of the Daily Express splash: ‘For the first time, less than half the population describe themselves as Christian, census data reveals. In a sign of how the nation is changing, white residents form a minority in the two biggest cities in England.’ (Actually, it was the three biggest – and the assertion is wrong anyway*.)
Everyone dutifully reported the figures, but it is the order in which they are reported and the interpretation that matter. Yes, the census shows a big decline in the numbers of people calling themselves Christians, putting them in a minority ‘for the first time since the Dark Ages’, according to the i. But that is mostly because there has been a big increase in the numbers of people who say they have no religion. There are still 27.5m Christians, while 22.2m profess no faith. Other faiths have all shown increases, but they are tiny, tiny minorities, with Muslims coming a distant third in the table with just under 4m.
The Mail, which cottoned on to the ‘no religion’ aspect better than many others, carried a good chart showing the proportions. The Times told the story in a sequence of indigestible figures, supplemented by some analysis, but it was left to the leader to address the mostly unasked questions of whether there was any wider significance to the census findings beyond ‘fancy that’, or if there should be ramifications. Such as, if less than half the country believes in Christianity – and that includes Catholics, Methodists and other denominations – should the Church of England still have such an entrenched role in state affairs?
The Guardian, on the other hand, confronted these ideas head on in its news coverage, under the front-page heading ‘Census puts Church’s role in the spotlight’, while its leader moved away from faith to celebrate the country’s diversity.
On that question of diversity. A number of papers (and Nigel Farage) reported that London, Birmingham and Manchester were now all ‘white minority’ cities. No, they aren’t. Only Birmingham is. Fewer than half the people living in those cities described themselves as ‘white British’. But there are other nationalities who can also be white – and there was space on the census for them to describe themselves as ‘white other’. When they are included, 54% of Londoners and 57% of Mancunians are white. And, for the record, more than 80% of people living in England are white.
Yes, the papers were right to say that fewer than half of us are Christians. But, to my mind, the headline should have been ‘We’re turning into a godless society’.
Racism at the Palace
Those non-white Londoners include home secretary Suella Braverman, foreign secretary James Cleverly, England footballer Bukayo Saka – and charity campaigner Ngozi Fulani. All were born and bred in the city. Though Fulani had quite the job convincing the late Queen’s favourite lady-in-waiting that such a history was possible.
Lady Susan Hussey’s refusal to accept this information direct from the horse’s mouth cost her a Palace role that had been her life for 60 years. Her interrogation of Ms Fulani at a Palace reception focused on domestic abuse is off the scale in toe-curling, behind-the-sofa, cover-your-eyes awfulness.
This wasn’t Grandma struggling to find the currently acceptable description for a person of colour or Grandpa almost-apologising before saying ‘They’ have different ideas from us. At least they have a notion that their instincts are perhaps not quite right. Lady Susan hadn’t the faintest concept that what she was saying was wrong, that she was being rude, that she was treating the black woman in front of her completely differently from the way she would approach a white guest.
There is only one word to describe it: racist.
But even in the face of such overwhelming evidence, our newspapers are reluctant to call out racism. It’s almost as though to be described as racist is worse than actually being racist.
The Telegraph front page had a photograph of Hussey in a gilded coach under the headline ‘Lady-in-waiting resigns in Palace racism row’ and a caption that she had quit ‘after being accused of making racist remarks’. Accused? This is like saying Matt Hancock was ‘accused’ of breaking lockdown rules in the stationery cupboard with Gina Colangelo. It was an open and shut case; the evidence was there for all to see.
For once, the Express did comparatively well, splashing on the Prince of Wales condemning his godmother. There was no attempt in the inside coverage to excuse Hussey’s behaviour and two opinion / analysis columns touched on the wider concerns for the Palace and how embarrassing it would be for the Prince and his wife, who were about to embark on a visit to America.
The Express, in common with others, reminded readers of William’s ‘good’ record on racism because he’d said the royals were ‘not a racist family’ – as though that were the last word on the matter – after those Meghan and Harry claims in that Oprah interview.
Ah yes, Meg and Haz. They’re back causing mayhem with their Netflix documentary and their trailers, timed to disrupt William and Kate’s trip to the States. We’ve had days and days of it. There is fear and trepidation in the Palace, apparently, about what they will say next. And well there might be.
For Hussey was the very woman who was appointed to help Meghan settle in before her marriage (as she was with Diana and Sarah Ferguson before her). So here we have a woman who has demonstrated in the most graphic terms her inherent, ignorant racism being put in charge of another woman who has since complained of her experience of inherent, ignorant racism at the Palace and our ‘Wills and Kate good, Harry and Meghan bad’ Press is wilfully refusing to join the dots. Or, rather, to colour in the picture and brace itself to ask ‘Might Meghan have had a point?’ and perhaps look for evidence one way or the other. (Albeit with the caveat that it’s almost impossible to get an accurate picture of what’s going on with the Royal Family. We still don’t even know what really killed the Queen.)
The Times came closest, with a ‘behind the story’ panel by Valentine Low, which said, ‘At a stroke all the efforts to try to prove the Sussexes wrong have been undone…The royal family has tried hard to prove that it is there for all of Britain, regardless of race. But critics say that when it comes to the workings of the palace, they lag far behind. There are few black faces in Buckingham Palace and none in senior positions…[it] is what one former insider called a "misogynistic, pale, male, stale environment".’
At the other end of the scale, the Mail did its utmost to excuse this loyal servant. The splash heading deliberately avoided accepting the obvious ‘Racism at the Palace’ line in favour of ‘Meet and greet that sparked a royal disaster’, while six inside pages included a Richard Kay spread headlined ‘Lady Susan will be mortified at causing offence. But friends accuse Palace of acting with indecent haste’. So the only people being accused of anything here are the people who recoiled from a racist interrogation.
The incident had rekindled the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s ‘inflammatory accusations’ that a member of the royal family had made a remark they had ‘construed as racist’, Kay wrote. ‘But it had also ‘triggered a heated debate about what ‘many described to me as the “unjust” treatment of an 83-year-old widow who had devoted her life to the royals’.
Then two days later, Mick Hume was back with an opinion piece headlined ‘When even the Palace is in thrall to cancel culture, we really ARE in trouble’. He says that ‘to many eyes’ the meeting of Hussey and Fulani looked like a ‘diplomatic misunderstanding’ and that the fallout confirmed that ‘woke cancel culture is now so all-pervasive, it has penetrated the hallowed halls of Buckingham Palace’. Which meant there was no hope for any of us. ‘If Prince William's godmother can be thrown under a carriage for unwittingly causing offence, what chance do us plebs have?’
Still, at least everyone carried the transcript of the fateful conversation.
Are we any better than social media?
As I said earlier, there is no escaping the royals. But, until that documentary is aired, I am studiously trying to look the other way. Even in the face of headlines like the Express’s ‘Harry, do you really hate your family so much?’ – the paper’s splash the very day after the Hussey affair. It is difficult to avoid the animus seeping out of every pore of our tabloids and the whipping up of hostility towards the couple. I’ve been down this road before and am resisting the word hatred, but Labour MP Chris Bryant had no such compunction when delivering the Leveson lecture the other night. He accused social media platforms of ‘knowingly monetising hatred’.
‘This is not just ordinary, spontaneous or altruistic hatred,’ Bryant said. ‘It is deliberate and co-ordinated. It uses social media recommender systems to amplify hatred. Like all clickbait, it uses hatred to entice people to follow a link to an article or another client web page, where money is to be made.’
Yes, but that’s social media. We all know that social media is lawless and reckless and not at all regulated like newspapers. Except Bryant continued that the same incentives were evident in the Press, with the Sussexes their websites’ ‘richest clickbait seam’.
‘It drives viewing and earns advertising income, which is why so many British opinion writers pen so much drivel about the couple,’ he said. ‘Not because the story matters, not because the writer genuinely cares about it, but because it makes money. That is not journalism, it’s a perversion. And yet again it means that the press see other people’s lives as commodities to be traded.’
I find it hard to argue against most of that. Nevertheless, I have to admit to a sneaking admiration for this Sun headline and for its takedown of the Netflix trailer, which seems to have knitted together a set of random press-pack video clips to show the ‘hounding’ of the couple.
I do think H&M need to work a bit on their PR.
Perhaps they could ask the Sun’s advice. After all, it managed to airbrush the Hussey debacle with an inside spread illustrated by the glamorous Kate, while splashing on Chesney Hawkes appointing himself the England mascot. Because that’s absolutely what its royal-obsessed readers cared about most.
Front page of the fortnight
Back to where we started. The Guardian set the Mone ball rolling with its £29m revelations. But I prefer yesterday’s front page, which may be less dramatic and more conventional, but it’s still clean and (IMHO) even more damning.
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.
