Abstract
It should have been obvious to everyone, not least the last prime minister, that the influence of the media was going to be crucial to the outcome of his reckless decision to promise a referendum on Europe. It was always clear that the press was going to have a big part to play and, indeed, David Cameron only gave the undertaking to offer a vote because he was driven to it by the public fuss about Europe, which has itself been widely exacerbated by the press for years.
The antipathy to the EU within his own party and an understandable anxiety about the impact of Ukip on the Conservative vote has been a story for sections of the media for years, not least because of those influential proprietors and editors – you know who they are – who share the doubts about the supposed advantages of membership and simultaneously recognise the populist appeal of publicising such views. By acknowledging that problem so publicly in holding out the prospect of a plebiscite, Cameron was cynically hoping that the attendant publicity would greatly enhance his chances of winning the upcoming election. As so it proved.
What he got so tragically wrong, however, not least in terms of his own future, was his apparent belief that the power of the press in its widest sense would operate for his benefit and in the interest of the official case to maintain the status quo, and thus the UK's continuing role in Europe. He just didn't see how the world in which we work has changed. Nor did he appreciate how the concerted personal commitment of Messrs Barclay, Murdoch, Desmond and Dacre to frustrate his primary purpose would rebound upon him. Well, as they say in Scotland, “he kens noo”.
Nobody saw, or could have predicted, the extraordinary sequence of political events that were to follow Cameron's resignation as prime minister: the ferment in the Conservative Party, the suicidal chaos of the Labour Party and the apparent implosion of Ukip. There was no government, there was no meaningful opposition, the economy was threatened with freefall and there was a full-scale constitutional crisis. One minister observed that it would take Hilary Mantel to do literary justice to the madness of midsummer. It was certainly a heady time for journalism, like no other any of us have known in our lifetime, and both newspapers and broadcasters played a significant part in some of the developments. So too did new media.
The cabinet minister's wife (aka the Daily Mail columnist Sarah Vine) whose personal “Lady Macbeth” email to Michael Gove so mysteriously was sent in error to an unnamed stranger who leaked it; Rachel Sylvester's Times interview with Andrea Leadsom, a politician with five minutes’ experience who was – it still seems incredible – the runner-up to succeed as prime minister had she not committed political suicide in print; Ken Clarke gossiping in a television studio with the microphone still live about all his colleagues shortcomings, not least those of “that bloody difficult woman” Theresa May; the Christian candidate for the Conservative leadership, Stephen Crabb, who managed to stand down from the contest just before his amorous ambitions towards a woman not his wife, what we now call a “sext”, were published in the papers; The Johnson and Gove Show: one minute Boris Johnson is the inevitable next prime minister, the next he is not even a candidate. And that, of course, was just the scenery on the Conservative opera set before May emerged in Wagnerian triumph and the stage was strewn with bodies.
That these events should occur while Labour engaged in the kind of fratricide that seems likely to write the party out of history some time quite soon was beyond bizarre. Competing press conferences meant that it was impossible for any self-respecting journalist to be in the right place at the right time. The image of Angela Eagle launching her ill-fated leadership bid against Jeremy Corbyn to a solitary camera, the rest of the press having fled to a more highly rated attraction, will serve as a tragic testimonial to her political courage. It was as if the camera was there merely to mock her irrelevance. Yet she had set in train another leadership contest, as brutal but more ugly than that of the Conservatives. A brick through a window here, the trolling of those MPs who dared to speak out against the orthodoxy, a new anxiety about the personal safety of our politicians set against a public restlessness on the streets and always, still unimaginable, the memory of the tragic murder of a fine and admirable young woman MP, Jo Cox, whose funeral cortege was still a live image in most people's minds.
Robert Harris, the author of three books about Cicero and an expert on the fall of ancient Rome, pertinently observed in an interview with The Times during this troubled and turbulent summer that there is a parallel here between the UK today and the last days of Rome. Parliament no longer commands the respect it once did, the political party system is breaking up, the electorate refuses to bow a knee to the political loyalties observed by previous generations and social media is fuelling a resurgent populism. Power is moving on to the streets – a contemporary equivalent of the occupation of the Forum. In two days in July, 140,000 people signed up as registered supporters of the Labour Party, a greater number than the total membership of the Conservative Party, a majority of them expected to see off the challenge of the unknown Owen Smith, the man who came from nowhere to represent the traditional left, the remains of Labour, against the progressive populist appeal of Corbyn.
“You sense the modern world has slipped beyond the control of politicians,” Harris said. Even more alarmingly, he argued that once power is moved outside parliament – as it has been by granting authority to a referendum result that has not been endorsed by a parliamentary vote, and as seems likely with the probable re-election of an opposition leader in a contest that will be decided outside the House of Commons – the country is in danger of losing the safeguards that provide the bulwark to our democracy This is a concept with terrifying implications that Cameron clearly did not consider when he so casually and carelessly played that referendum card three years ago.
But he would perhaps have seen the trouble ahead if he had been present at an entertaining evening staged by Nuffield College, Oxford, shortly after his triumph at the 2015 general election. It was held in Smith Square at what was once the headquarters of Conservative central office and, ironically enough, is now called Europe House. The entertainment value was provided by the apologetic explanations from all the country's leading psephologists about how, severally and collectively, they had managed to get the result of the election so wrong – in which they were, of course, ably assisted by the media. The most telling session, however, was the analysis that followed about the implications of the Conservatives’ overall majority for the referendum on Europe to which Cameron was then committed. Not a single one of the distinguished academics present – and they were all there: David Butler, Vernon Bogdanor, Peter Kellner et al – had the slightest doubt that no renegotiation of the terms of the UK's membership of the EU was possible that would be sufficient to placate its opponents, specifically within the Conservative Party.
The pollsters were, for once, 100 per cent correct but what they failed to identify was that this intransigence on the part of a number of politicians was not now just some hard-line “bastards”, as John Major once called his eurosceptic critics but, much more significantly, a reflection of the public mood. The political disaffection that had already built up a year ago meant that there was a sense among a huge swath of the electorate of their having been betrayed, that they were the have-nots in an increasingly divided society, that parliament and politicians did not listen and could not hear them and that all their resentment and anger could all be bundled up and explained in one cross package labelled “Europe”. All that was needed then, once the referendum date was settled, was for those newspapers whose proprietors had an agenda for Brexit to publish the populist case in its support. They all relished the task – The Times being the sole exception in the Murdoch camp and Geordie Greig's Mail on Sunday having defiantly struck out from under the tutelage of Paul Dacre as editor-in-chief of DMG Media.
An obvious way to whip up public opinion successfully was through the publication of scare stories about immigration. One analysis revealed that from January 1 until the day of the referendum on June 23 the Daily Mail and the Daily Express published 34 front-page articles each on this subject. That is one story in each newspaper every five days for nearly six months and, as Nish Kumar subsequently lamented in a piece in The Guardian: “There were no headlines such as “Immigrant saves boy from killer shark” or “Foreigners make lovely jam”. The negative impact was considerable as the reported escalation in cases of hate crime after the Brexit vote result indicated only too potently. And this was true both in areas where foreign workers have been recruited for low-paid jobs that the indigenous population scorns, for example, in Grimesthorpe in Yorkshire, and somewhere like Merthyr Tydfil in Wales, a town that has received more EU development aid than any other in Britain, which recorded the highest leave vote in Wales, with immigration cited as the reason and yet is reportedly a location without any immigration, let alone a problem.
This was clearly an issue that was escalated by the press. The broadcasters were perhaps more circumspect but still reported what the written press was recording and certainly spelled out all the politics of fear: the repercussions of an out vote, the assembled international luminaries warning of the implications of Brexit, what amounted to the end of the world as we knew it. And that, perhaps, is not an inappropriate phrase. The world had changed already by June 24, at home and abroad. The unthinkable occurred: not just in Europe with the implications of Brexit, but in the US with the implications of Donald Trump as the Republican challenger. The ensuing weeks saw all the pieces in the kaleidoscope thrown into jagged new patterns in a way that the press has struggled to record accurately. “Boris as PM” is a certainty one day on every front page, and then he is yesterday's man, his political prospects in ruins. Yet when within the week he secures his unexpected resurrection, commentators fall over themselves in doubting his diplomatic skills at the Foreign Office. Thus the man they all anticipated as prime minister is now portrayed as a joke as foreign secretary.
Events have moved so fast that there is a risible quality to much of the reporting of our spinning political firmament. And it is scarcely surprising because of the laughable unlikelihood of so much that has happened. Cameron is lauded for his record when he resigns and then mocked for packing the Lords with cronies, honouring his wife's stylist, and making George Osborne a Companion of Honour. Nick Clegg (remember him?) recognising correctly that he has nothing left to lose, reveals that Michael Gove, the man who once wore the distinguished robes of the Lord Chancellor over a heart that clearly still beats as a journalist, was responsible for leaking the Queen's private comments about Europe to The Sun. One shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, continues to deny, saying, “If that's what it takes”, about the death of the Labour Party versus the political integrity of the Left – although we have all heard the tape. And another shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, is to compete on Strictly Come Dancing.
You couldn't make it up. But as was argued by the American academic Zeynep Tufekci in an essay on the rise of Trump, this “is actually a symptom of the mass media's growing weakness, especially in controlling the limits of what is acceptable to say”. In the past, journalists in mass media organisations were the gatekeepers about what was acceptable to discuss or report, she suggested, but that no longer remains the case. Now, anything goes. The last two reporters have just left Fleet Street and they are unambitious about their legacy. One of them expressed the hope of becoming the answer to a pub quiz question. It says little for our history.
