We Own This Town

The changing political weather means that every Prime Minister can expect good days and bad days in the press, but the extreme oscillations seen in recent years, and the short to almost vanishing periods between the peaks and troughs, is unusual. Since 2016, every head of government has been undermined by one section or another of the media from their first appearance in front of the lectern outside Number 10. In the case of Theresa May, this focused initially on the debate over what Brexit meant and then the deal she negotiated with the EU, but that emphasis on policy shouldn't mislead us. While the liberal press chafed at what it saw as a historic mistake, the conservative press were only willing to give her unqualified support when she veered to the right and supported their prejudices, e.g. in the attack on the higher judiciary as "enemies of the people". Their attitude to the Brexit negotiations can best be described as querulous. Boris Johnson enjoyed a short interlude during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, when his optimism briefly chimed with the resoluteness of public opinion, but this simply highlighted the attacks on his consititutional impropriety beforehand and his personal corruption thereafter. 

While these attacks were mostly made by the liberal press, it's worth remembering that the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph's contribution to "Partygate" wasn't to undermine or dismiss the charges but to claim that Keir Starmer was guilty of similar breaches. Beyond the internecine warfare of the political cartel, what we saw was a media united in the belief that it could stampede politicians into policy changes or even resignation by leveraging their eating a piece of cake or drinking a bottle of beer. It is this corporate belief in their power and authority that we should be attuned to, and not be distracted by their partisanship. Liz Truss obviously made a disastrous start and compounded that at every turn up to her resignation this week, but much of her folly sprang from her misreading of the media, particularly the Tory press. She appeared to take their sometimes lavish praise of her during the summer leadership election contest seriously, failing to understand that she was only ever promoted to stop Sunak. The latter was stymied because he brought down Johnson, and Johnson, in the eyes of the Tory press, was one of their own.

This consistent undermining over the last half-decade isn't the norm in British political history. All governments suffer periods of public criticism, and no Prime Minister is ever free from gravely-expressed doubts about their abilities, but the relentless campaign of destabilisation is novel. Thatcher, Major, Blair and Brown could all claim to have been undermined by the press, like Heath, Wilson and Callaghan before them, but the negative coverage reflected substantive political differences and often came after extended periods of acclaim. Enoch Powell, a man who could ruefully reflect on his own progress from senior office to the margins, once claimed that all political careers end in failure. But that trajectory no longer holds unless you imagine that securing the highest office itself is the proximate moment of failure. Truss and Kwarteng's mini-budget was a massive error, but its consequentiality was as much a result of negative media as bad macroeconomics or the skittishness of the financial markets. There was no honeymoon period but it seems unlikely that any future Prime Minister will enjoy much of one either.

The pivotal figure in this development was David Cameron, not because his decision to hold the EU referendum introduced so much toxic bile into political discourse but because he quit office immediately on the day that the press decisively turned against him. This emboldened them to think they could directly control who would occupy Number 10. For the rightwing press in particular, this was a sweet moment of revenge because of Cameron's indolent sponsorhip of the Leveson Inquiry, which had washed a lot of dirty linen in public and would, if it had proceeded to phase 2, have explored the relationship of the press and politicians directly. That Cameron was only bounced into launching the phase 1 inquiry by the liberal press, following the phone-hacking scandal, was another irritation for the right. While the financial crash of 2008 and the following austerity of the coalition years cast a shadow over the economy and society, the biggest political event was actually the expenses scandal of 2009, which reinforced the press in its belief that it had the whip-hand over politicians. 

For liberal commentators like Rafael Behr, the sequence of weak office-holders since Cameron quit Number 10 for his writing shed is explained by an apparently congenital, even biblical, lack of virtue, thus "Johnson begat Truss. Before that, Theresa May begat Johnson." Behr does acknowledge the influence of the press, but only as a supportive environment rather than as the chief begetter of this uninspiring lineage: "Her plans grew from seeds of US Republican-style anti-government conservatism that isn’t native to Britain’s political soil, in a micro-climate controlled by the Tory press." Anti-government conservatism is obviously neither alien nor historically recent: it is one of the dominant strands of British political history and much of the American tradition can be traced to theorists on this side of the Atlantic. Naturally, Behr will not be commenting on the liberal media's role in promoting Johnson as a flawed but still more suitable incumbent of Number 10 in 2019 than the then leader of the opposition. He will however take pleasure in the role he personally played in that outcome while decrying the role of the Tory press in influencing politics.

This belief in the press's kingmaker powers has contributed to a counter-movement, by both liberal and conservative opinion, away from party democracy. Party members are now routinely denigrated as unrepresentative fools, despite being sociologically closer to the general population than MPs and often motivated by public-spiritedness and engagement with political theory. The implication is that they have been misled by the press as much as by mythical entryists, evil antisemites, or Nigel Farage. Once more we are told that the election of a party leader, and potentially a Prime Minister, should be reserved to MPs. The people telling us this are often the same ones applauding the appointment of Jeremy Hunt to Number 11 as "a safe pair of hands". That's the same Jeremy Hunt who received 18 votes from his fellow MPs in the first round of this summer's Conservative Party leadership election. It's important to understand that this counter-movement is not about bending to the will of the press but resisting it, and the consequences of that can be seen in both of the leading parties.

The purging of the left in Labour might appear to be just the latest round of factional bullying familiar since the party's inception, but its often comically intemperate nature (disqualifying people for liking the social media posts of a Green MP, for example) suggests that there is something else at work here, and that something is about protecting the PLP not only from CLP members with a mind of their own but from the media. The tight message-management and Westminster discipline over relatively trivial matters (e.g. appearing in solidarity on a picket line) aren't just about the leadership's paranoid determination to appeal to rightwing voters but a desire to not provide any opportunity for the press to divide the party or build up challengers to the leadership beyond anointed loyalists. Should Labour form the next government, it will differ from the New Labour years in one important respect. It will not attempt to bully the press, as Alastair Campbell notoriously did, but nor will it seek to cultivate a chummy relationship with it. Rather Starmer will seek to draw a tight boundary around the PLP to minimise the party's attack surface. You can expect accusastions of a "bunker mentality" if Labour take office.

The symbolic end of the Truss administration came with the failure of lobby discipline on Wednesday night (the pearl-clutching reports by Labour MPs like Chris Bryant were also telling). The accelerated leadership election, and the humming and hawing over what role (if any) the Conservative Party membership will have in it, clearly reflects a rueful regret over the course of the summer contest, with its embarrassing media-controlled hustings and the uncritical way in which Truss was promoted by  rightwing newspapers to the party membership. This is an attempt to restore what we might generously refer to as parliamentary democracy, but which more cynically is best described as the cartel. What we're witnessing is a power struggle within the politico-media caste that has been going on since the phone-hacking scandal came to prominence in 2005. Much of what happened since, from the response to the financial crash through to Brexit, has been coloured by this struggle, and there is every reason to believe that it will continue for some years yet. Starmer's defensive strategy does not suggest that press reform is coming any time soon.