Abstract
When you are in a trade that offers poor pay, pariah status and reducing relevance, it's comforting to feel that everyone is in the same boat. That's why reporters are so happy to moan when they get together over a drink. But then Boris Johnson goes and becomes prime minister.
A little piece of every journalist dies when another achieves success, so we can imagine the pain felt by so many when the sometime reporter and columnist walked into Downing Street. Life is meant to be tossing bottles towards the pavement lectern, not deploying an unusually grave voice to speak to the nation from behind it. The columnist Ben Machell spoke for many on Twitter: “Every night I will trudge home from the office to my 17 mewling children and harridan of a wife, who will jab at Boris Johnson on the TV with her cigarette stub and demand to know why I, too, didn't get myself sacked from The Times for lying. That could have been me…”
We should therefore admire the newspapermen and women who rose to the task of presenting a man from their own ranks as the answer to the nation's woes. Not since the joy reported at the coronation of Theresa May, more than three years ago, have readers of The Sun, the Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph had the opportunity to celebrate such an outstanding leader. We often discuss whether newspapers lead or follow their readers’ fancies, but even those Conservative Party members who voted for Boris Johnson must have struggled to match the enthusiasm of the right-wing titles that reported his success.
A special award should go to The Daily Telegraph for its emotional, frontpage coverage of Mr Johnson. Some may criticise its decision to abandon all objectivity in its news coverage. Others, in an industry in which kindness is in short supply, will surely admire its care of a former employee. The paper has sought for more than a decade to become the country's biggest tabloid: in its huge picture of the new prime minister – so close up we could trace every crease and stain of his baggy suit - it succeeded.
Let's not be sanctimonious about this. Newspapers are private enterprises: if they want to make themselves look stupid by leaping from one saviour to the next, that's their business. What's the point of owning a paper if it does not reflect a proprietor's views? And amid the twists and turns of those Conservative MPs who decided power was more important than principle, these papers have at least been constant in making a beeline for Brexit. We've never known how much they influence voting, but we do know that they inhabit a world of declining sale. In any case, critics of Mr Johnson were hardly silenced: there were plenty in other titles and an angry army of them on social media.
The more important lesson is about the power of the media. They don't have as much as they think. We've learned that because the media wanted interviews and Mr Johnson did hardly any. A talk to a friendly paper here, a safe broadcast opportunity there. But an interrogation on the Today programme? Why on earth would he submit to that? His advisers have clocked that he comes over better with the sound off. When they send him to a leaking dam, television presents him like a visiting royal. If he does have something to say, better to get it across without journalistic interruption, perhaps on that safe, neutral, benign platform Facebook. The media don't like it, but what are they going to do about it?
The other evidence of their declining power is that a past that would have done for any other politician has not done for Boris Johnson. MPs aren't meant to survive stories about lying, cheating, affairs, abortions and illegitimate children. He has. For reasons media cannot comprehend, the world no longer turns in the way it did. Mr Johnson simply refused to discuss his private life. His response was an invitation to the media to do their worst. They did. Now, on these rainy days of late summer, he speeds by in an armoured government limo, splashing the reporters who stand on the sidelines.
