Dispatch from the Hall of Mirrors
After months of sleaze, scandal and stupidity from the Conservative Party, the opposition have heeded the media's advice and made their strategy clear: If you want to beat them, join them.
It is important to avoid paying too much attention to British political media. This is because gazing into that abyss is a hazard to one’s senses and sanity, much like staring directly at a solar eclipse, or a Gorgon.
Here are two things you have to understand about British journalists. The first is that they are incredibly intelligent, capable, and well-educated people. This is demonstrated by the fact that an overwhelming proportion of them were privately-educated, and that many of them studied the same degree at one of the country’s most prestigious universities. The second thing you have to understand is that all this education has imbued in them an understanding that the ethics of their profession demand that they be incredibly stupid.
There’s a well-worn journalistic axiom that says if one person says it’s raining and another says it isn’t, it’s the journalist’s job to stick their hand out the fucking window and check who’s right. This ceases to apply in political journalism, particularly the closer you get to explicitly political concerns, and especially those concerns that are treasured cudgels of the right-wing, such as immigration, state provision of goods and services, or crime. On those matters, it is not the political journalist’s job to examine claims, weigh them against empirical evidence or observable reality, nor to pass any judgments on what constitutes ‘truth’. Instead, it is their job to believe; to recite, like a stenographer, whatever they are told, and if asked whether what they are repeating is true, to respond with a glib Steve Urkel shrug. “Who can say?” Nobody in our political ecosystem, be they an MP, journalist, or commentator, knows why this is. Except that they do. It’s just that the smart thing is to act like you don’t.
Few British media consumers would dispute the claim that Fox News is little more than a faux-journalistic propaganda outlet explicitly serving the interests of America’s business elites and right-wing political movements. A quick Google search for the terms “Tory propaganda machine” or “Murdoch press” reveals politicians, commentators, celebrities, and international news outlets all acknowledging the existence of a comparable, multi-faceted apparatus in the UK. But ask any British journalist or politician about the effect this produces, and you will be told that the press does not exercise any influence on public opinion, but merely reflects what the public is already thinking.
The American right-wing is notorious for its use of a media strategy known as ‘working the refs’. Knowing that their desired policies and the outcomes they produce are wildly unpopular when presented in clear terms, American Conservatives bleat endlessly about unfair coverage, media bias, and dishonest narratives to browbeat even ostensibly objective or balanced news platforms into accepting and legitimising their framing of events.
Terrified of being accused of liberal bias or, worse yet, being labeled ‘coastal elites’, news outlets go above and beyond to accommodate right-wing perspectives in their coverage, regardless of whether said perspective remotely correlates with reality. This is how you get things like humanising interviews with white nationalists in the New York Times, or that same outlet’s resident “reasonable conservative” writing bizarre fan-fictions ventriloquising Trump voters’ sentiments to their liberal audience while attempting to make them sound more sophisticated than they actually are. The problem is never that the right-wing’s views might be at odds with what should be a democratic society’s most basic principles, nor that their views might be out of touch with reality entirely. It’s that everyone else hasn’t tried hard enough to understand and be more like them.
Nevertheless, it’s possible to discuss dynamics such as this openly in American media because, despite its many flaws, there is at least some understanding that media narratives are part and parcel of struggles for political power more broadly, and that part of that struggle involves allowing countervailing views, opinions and ideologies to be articulated on their own terms. It has not always been that way, and such an approach comes with its own problems. But as one Twitter user recently remarked, it is meaningful that a columnist for one of the country’s papers of records opened a recent piece directly quoting Marx’s Eighteenth of Brumaire without the rest of the media class losing their collective shit and accusing him of being a radical fifth columnist who should be hounded out of the public square.
It’s harder to talk about right-wingers working the refs in the UK, because the right-wing and the referees they would theoretically be working are one and the same people, a dynamic that is readily understood and accepted by the liberal politicians and press who ostensibly exist to oppose them.
At its worst, the fact that lobby journalism largely operates on whisper networks and WhatsApp messages between politicians and their journalist friends they went to school with, or whose weddings they attended, is treated as a charming quirk of our quintessentially British way of doing things. This is why whenever an American journalist looks over at our media and asks, “Good lord, what is happening in there?” the standard columnist response is to scoff and remind you that they just don’t understand ‘us’.
At best, it’s treated as a fait accompli; something that anyone who does not accept such lopsided terms is powerless to confront or challenge in any way, and should in fact learn to overcome through tactical capitulation.
As a consequence, the terms set by Britain’s right-wing triad of political, media and business elites are accepted as immutable from the outset, and the goal of any challenger to Conservative hegemony is to ape their image, and dance to their tune as closely as possible while maintaining the illusion of presenting a genuine alternative. It’s an elaborate dance, dressed up as reflecting the needs, wants, and desires of the British public, but one that’s ultimately directed toward a tiny cadre of incredibly wealthy, incredibly powerful kingmakers; a performance in which the dancer prances around the stage, gesticulating wildly, in a manner that insists, “This is what the people want.” But all the while, their eyes tell a different story, one of a courtier nervously looking to the head of the room, asking, “Is this what you want?”
This reaches its apotheosis in Lovecraftian horrors like the Murdoch-owned Times Magazine’s recent profile of Keir Starmer. In a profile of the leader of the UK’s ostensible opposition party, the centrepiece is the shock revelation that this man doesn’t actually oppose his political opponents, and would in fact quite like to kiss them. The rest of the puff-piece then repeats various worn, vacuous tidbits about his personal life in the hopes you won’t notice the complete absence of any discussion of politics other than nervous reassurances to Murdoch and his readers (but mainly Murdoch) that ooh-hoo-hoo, he wants to be like you. UK media commentator Mic Wright has already done a masterful dissection of the piece over on his Substack, so head there if you want to understand ‘the work being done’ here.
It’s all a dance, but who is it for? Certainly not the public – who, after month after month of Conservative sleaze and debacles, scandals about shit being pumped into our waterways, utility companies bleeding us dry, concentration camps being built on our own shores, and wave after wave of strikes that despite our reactionary press’ best efforts have only garnered increased public sympathy – are clearly desperate for someone, anyone, to have the courage to come out and say what everyone is thinking: That another way is possible, and that they will be the ones to take you there.
Time after time, Keir Starmer’s Labour Party have been offered opportunities to say they would be that alternative, and time after time they have refused. Some will argue it’s because they are playing a savvy game of carving off swing voters to eke out a victory, even though recent polls have finally given them the twenty-point lead they insisted any Labour leader should be capable of, and which would presumably afford them the leeway to do something other than rehabilitate the right-wing’s reactionary politics. Others will argue it’s because they simply don’t want to. I waiver between the two, but increasingly I find myself asking whether that distinction even matters.
Over the past two years it has been made clear to us that the Conservative Party, the UK’s ‘natural party of government’, are little more than a gaggle of opportunistic chancers, cynical shitehawks, ice-chewing psychopaths and political mediocrities. And the conclusion that has been drawn by the savvy figures now widely recognised as our next government in waiting has been if you want to beat them, join them. It’s not what you want. It’s not really what any voter who opposes the current government wants. But it’s what somebody wants. Who? Nobody knows. Well, they know. But it’s their job not to know.
In Hal Ashby’s 1979 film Being There, Peter Sellers plays Chance the Gardener, an imbecile who, upon being forced to vacate the D.C. townhouse and its walled garden in which he has spent his whole life, experiences a meteoric rise to global fame. Though he possesses nothing but an obsession with the television and a child’s mind filled with inane gardening tips, the wealthy and well-connected he encounters take him for a singular genius. From a well-kept society wife, to the wealthy industrialist who keeps her, to the President of the United States, the further up the ladder of power Chance climbs, the more enthusiastically his vacuous ramblings are received.
Elsewhere, in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, Tom Cruise plays an upper-middle-class doctor whose knack for climbing up the bourgeois social scene reaches its limit upon his discovery of a secret society that operates on and for a social stratum beyond even his access. Having ingratiated himself with Manhattan’s upper crust through his ability to handle any situation with air-tight discretion, and a reassuring demeanour that pacifies whatever sordid situation his clientele have gotten themselves into, he learns that his use to them was always more instrumental than personal, his access to their scene always conditioned, and his ability to know true power always, and forever, foreclosed.
Central to these two narratives and their protagonists is a notion of mirroring, or reflection. In the former, you have a character so vacuous, and so utterly devoid of original thought (or any thought whatsoever), that the rich and powerful project whatever it is that they want to see onto him – which, of course, is themselves. Meanwhile, Tom Cruise’s more tactful, educated protagonist merely follows this same strategy, but consciously, navigating the social network by being the mirror the powerful need in order to see themselves as normal. His ascent into the bourgeois underworld comes to a halt when he is asked for a password, and he doesn’t know what to say. In a film where characters endlessly repeat lines back and forth at one another, his plot unravels because he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to be repeating.
Put these two stories together, and you have a metaphor for the dynamic of the relationship between British politics, the powerful interests that direct it, and the press that covers it: A bunch of wealthy people looking for any idiot who will say what they want to hear, and a bunch of cynical careerists who understand that the best way to achieve success is to be that idiot.
There’s Keir Starmer, on the front cover of the Times Magazine, letting you know he’s ready and willing to kiss a Tory. An empty mind, coupled with a vacuous expression, quietly puckering up. He’s got a question, but it’s not for you.
“Is this what you want?”
Really like the way you write. Good stuff