Anyone looking for signs of change at the Daily Mail should study its reaction to the Bank of England’s Brexit analysis last week as much as its support for the prime minister. And particularly its description of the Bank’s governor, Mark Carney.
Pro-Brexit papers greeted the Bank’s warnings with outrage – “Carney unleashes Project Hysteria,” splashed the Telegraph; “Carnage,” shrieked the Sun. The first quote in the Boris-backing Telegraph story was from Jacob Rees-Mogg, who called Carney – who has never stood for public office – “a failed second-rate Canadian politician” who was trying to talk down the pound.
Central bankers are increasingly worried that the rise of populism threatens their hard-fought independence, and the reaction to a series of forecasts will do little to diminish that fear.
Yet some comfort could be found in the Mail, which chose to splash on an exclusive that the cabinet minister Andrea Leadsom would back the government’s Brexit deal. The last paragraph on the front page said Carney had “further electrified the debate by issuing a dramatic warning about the dangers of leaving without a deal”.
Inside, a spread headlined “Brexit doomsday storm” ran alongside a reasonable piece of analysis by the veteran City editor Alex Brummer, who wrote that the Bank’s “apocalyptic” report “might make MPs see sense”.
“It would have been a dereliction of duty by the government and the Bank if they failed to tell citizens of the worst-case scenarios should we leave,” he wrote.
Mail insiders see this lack of personal mud-slinging as the strongest indicator of the the “kindlier, gentler” regime under the new editor, Geordie Greig, contrasting with that of his predecessor, Paul Dacre.
When Carney appears before the Treasury select committee on Tuesday he could repeat his argument that it is his job to stress-test an economy faced with its biggest change in nearly half a century. Or he could say that for voters and politicians it doesn’t seem to matter what economists think any more. Nowadays, it seems, it’s not the economy, stupid, but the politics.
