Here’s one poll you might not have glimpsed amid last week’s Trump ’n’ Tusk melee. Consultancy ComRes asked 498 EU insiders – MEPs, staffers, lobbyists – what newspapers, broadcasters and online media they relied on. Their answers cut both ways, of course. Anyone who wants to rage against a Brussels bubble of incomprehension is welcome to their chance.
But just turn the figures around and point them at Britain. Who do the 498 find influential? Politico, the newly expanded US political website, and the BBC virtually tie at 52% and 51% respectively. The FT and the Economist are 39% and 30% powers. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal score 17% and 14%. But where, pray, is the thunderous might of the British press? The Guardian, at 5%, is just on the list. But the Sun, Times, Express, Telegraph, Mail, the bugles of proud, defiant Britain? They don’t begin to make the cut.
Nor do the issues that dominate those bugles’ thinking. Of the 498, 76% reckon the refugee problem Europe’s biggest issue, while 51% cite Isis/Daesh. Slow European growth (44%) and climate change (27%) are vexing, too. But Britain and that blinking referendum? Only 12% put it on their list. That may look like a mistake come June: but opinion polls aren’t there to signal mistakes, merely to give snapshots of attitudes. You can look through both ends of a telescope.
So on – that Tusk letter’s morning after – to “The great delusion” in the Mail and more ritual pun-ishment from the Bun: “Who do EU think you are kidding Mr Cameron?” Plus more of the same from all the usual suspects. But a quick flick through Europe’s front pages and websites tells a quite different story. El Pais is more worried about finding a Spanish government, naturally enough. FAZ in Germany has 5,000 missing refugee children top of its shop. Le Monde rates Leicester City – “l’une des plus grosses surprises de l’histoire moderne du football anglais” ahead of Brexit home games.
Where, you wonder, does this British obsession with exit come from? From the Greater Empire of the Sun, perhaps. Only last week Mr Murdoch was tweeting his orders. “UK-EU negotiations meaningless without complete control of borders. Must be able to choose immigrants.” Richard Desmond’s Express allegiances have always been Ukipian.
But consider the Mail, booming away about “tawdry charades”, “damning indictments” and Eurosceptic ministers “either bullied or bribed into silence… It would be a crime against democracy if open debate on this historic vote were sacrificed to the ambition and vanity of careerist politicians.”
Which, being interpreted, means start swinging, Theresa, Boris and Gove. Do what the Mail tells you. “Is there anyone in this pusillanimous cabinet with the guts to speak his mind and put principles and country before personal ambition?” Cue Richard Littlejohn, Max Hastings and the full repertory company. Cue a Day Two torrent of frustration covering all of page one and much of page 14. “Who will speak for England?”
It is, though, a little difficult to see where all this particular avalanche of invective comes from. Vere Harmsworth, the proprietor who, with David English as editor, built the modern Daily Mail, was pretty clear where he stood: “I left Thatcher’s Britain for Mitterrand’s France because it is in Europe that our future lies.” His son, the current Lord Rothermere, retained dad’s Parisian non-dom status (until the chancellor grew proactive).
English made it quite clear – to me – that his mind wasn’t remotely closed on EU membership. What drives Paul Dacre’s vehement scepticism, then ? “‘The politics of my newspapers … are what my editors believe the politics of their readers to be,” Harmsworth once told John Major. But is this now merely a rationalisation for endless assaults from Kensington High Street (whose denizens, as we discovered yet again the other day, don’t know the difference between the EU and the European Council even now)?
Who are these ruthlessly “gagged” voices within the cabinet? Northern Ireland secretary Theresa Villiers, perhaps, who “has a manner as cold as Sherpa Tenzing’s nose and a voice frosted by boredom. Listen to this one for a few minutes and you’ll be gnawing at your knuckles in despair,” according to – yes! – the Daily Mail.
Chris Grayling? The “gormless” leader of the house, “who stands at the despatch box like some tranquillised ungulate, his jaw slowly rotating as he produces a plop-plop-plop of prosaic sludge”. The Mail again.
Or Iain Duncan Smith: “Probably the feeblest Tory leader in living memory… when Mr Duncan Smith had the opportunity to distinguish himself in the months before the Iraq war, he proved himself more credulously pro-Bush even than Mr Blair, and at one stage seemed to suggest that Saddam Hussein’s fictitious weapons of mass destruction might be targeted at London” – according to the Mail.
Perhaps they’ll have to settle for Liam Fox, who isn’t in anyone’s cabinet because “he failed to observe the distinction between his public and his private life. He also followed a style of conduct that made him look odd, and brought criticism and ridicule on his office. In the end he had defective judgment, and paid for it with his job.” Simon Heffer, in the Mail.
Such a parade of failures and flops might, in a bracing Mail world, prompt any editor to hasten to the other side of the argument. So might the history of his paper. So, in part, might the anxieties of faithful readers: say the 100,000 or more waiting in Spain to see where Brexit (and no referendum vote) leaves their healthcare and pension rights. But this, it seems, is a battle without nuance, second thoughts or memory of judgments past. Mr Murdoch, a naturalised American, is allowed to sit in New York and endorse Ben Carson, Donald Trump or Marco Rubio at the drop of a tweet. He can change his mind in an instant if he wishes. But supposed principle ties the mighty Mail, winner of so many campaigns, to the mast – and a future led by politicians the Mail now openly excoriates.
Dacre has been an outstanding editor in the eyes of many among his readers and peers. He picks his middle-weight battles brilliantly, and often wins them. (As some grotesquely overpaid public service bosses may lament this weekend.) His Mail has an authentic voice that politicians fear. But there’s sometimes a thin blue line of bathos in the sand near his desk.
Who will speak for England? (“And, of course, by ‘England’… we mean the whole of the United Kingdom.”) Here’s the “supposedly neutral” BBC getting it in the neck again. Here’s the Conservative party, throwing off “all pretence of impartiality, proselytising for the EU in defiance of most of its rank and file”. Why, even Boris is no hero now, but a timorous blond beastie “never known for his courage” and playing “flirtatious footsie” in pursuit of “a plum job”. Leadership? There’s only “charismatic tub-thumper” Nigel Farage and “the magnificent Lord Lawson” left.
Is that the Lawson who walked out on Margaret Thatcher in 1989 because she didn’t like him shadowing the deutschmark? “Goodbye and good riddance,” said the Sun. “His policies were bankrupt,” cried the Mail. But magnificence is a movable feast at the Mail high table. No wonder those EU insiders, wondering what the hell to read, seem to reach for the New York Times as their paper of first resort while England, this sceptic isle full of blessed plots, redefines “impartiality”.
