on media


Creating the monster and bringing it down


The media oversaw Boris Johnson’s career, says Raymond Snoddy T


he phenomenon that is Boris Johnson was largely created by the right-wing national newspapers and,


ironically, they too were responsible for his nemesis when it arrived at last. The Daily Telegraph is probably more


guilty than any for smoothing Johnson’s path to 10 Downing Street. For years, the paper happily published his ridiculous or grossly exaggerated stories from Brussels, which helped to poison the public mind about the European Union. Former Telegraph editor Sir Max Hastings sacked Johnson and later warned he was totally unsuited to be prime minister of this country. But the paper gave him a lucrative perch as a columnist and supported his premiership. It praised him for ‘getting Brexit done’ when years later the chaos, political instability in Northern Ireland and widespread economic damage to the UK are with us still. Now Sir Max says: “We have had


government by clown and it is not funny.”


Papers such as the Daily Express, the


Daily Mail and The Sun were witless cheerleaders for the worst prime minister in UK history, underplaying or ignoring behaviour that would have brought down any of his predecessors. There was always going to be a


problem of credibility for the right-wing press when Johnson crashed and fell to earth, which was only a matter of time. How then to explain their enduring


support for a leader who misled MPs, lied as easily as he breathed, presided over riotous misrule in Downing Street and could face criminal charges of misdemeanour in public office. The writing was on the wallpaper thanks to the reporting of the


Partygate scandals by Pippa Crerar of the Daily Mirror and Paul Brand of ITV. Yet it was Johnson’s handling of the


curious case of deputy chief whip Chris Pincher that proved a scandal too far. The Sun broke the story of pinching Pincher while the Mail on Sunday reported that Johnson had described the whip as ‘handsy, that’s a problem. Pincher by name Pincher by nature’, before promoting him.


The political history of these strange times will record that the coup de grace came on the BBC’s Today programme from Lord McDonald, the retired senior civil servant who insisted that Johnson had been personally briefed on Pincher’s behaviour – and then Johnson was gone. Any contrition from the right-wing papers about the prime minister they had supported through thick and thin? Hell no. Rather like Johnson himself, they


looked for someone else to blame. What Have They Done?’was the


Mail’s take on the day of resignations before attacking the ‘utterly duplicitous’ Nadhim Zahawi, while the Mail on Sunday had its knives out for former chancellor Rishi Sunak. The Sun admitted Johnson may have


been ‘flawed’, a euphemism in anybody’s money, but was still ‘a giant figure in our nation’s story, the most significant politician since Margaret Thatcher’. There was no ‘mea maxima culpa’, as


he put it, from Allister Heath, editor of the Sunday Telegraph. Johnson had been the right choice in 2019 because he saved Britain from Corbyn and the remainers. The prime minister’s performance


may have been ‘atrocious, delusional and indefensible’ as he used his Brexit triumph to impose ‘socialism and eco-extremis’ on the UK. Despite this,


“ ”


according to Heath, Johnson will be remembered as one of this country’s most consequential prime ministers. Let’s wait for the result of the inquiry


into whether Johnson misled parliament, the official inquiry into government handling of the Covid pandemic and to see whether Brexit has any advantages to compensate for a 15 per cent drop in UK trade before making such grand judgements. There is a coda to this gothic tale.


Johnson is gone (or soon will be) and Labour leader Keir Starmer has been cleared of any wrongdoing in the Durham Miners Hall. The Daily Mail failed to retain a shred of grace in its coverage of the beer and curry supper. It accused the Durham police of ‘bottling it’ as Starmer was ‘piling pressure’ on them by promising to resign if given a fixed penalty notice. You had to read to the very end of the Mail piece to see Durham Police said that ‘following the application of the evidential Full Code Test… there is no case to answer… due to the application of an exception, namely reasonably necessary work’. We can now look forward to


Any contrition from the right-wing papers about the prime minister they had supported through thick and thin? Hell no


Johnson’s resignation honours list with the certainty that Paul Dacre, the man responsible for calling judges enemies of the people, will get a peerage and will be able to sit in the House of Lords with some of those judges. We can be equally sure that the Daily Mail – with or without Dacre – will circle the wagons around whoever emerges from the Grand National size leadership field, however deluded, delusional, compromised or incompetent they turn out to be. At least there will be no journalists among them and, given recent events, that is probably a good thing.


theJournalist | 09


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