The strange power of the Tory press

Its propaganda works but not in the way you think

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Right-wing commentators have noticed a grim development this weekend that a few of us on the centre-left have been pointing out for years. The worst conservative leaders now behave like journalists, not politicians. They come up with stunts and poses that will generate a headline. They sound off as if they are pitching to the Daily Telegraph comment desk, rather than producing workable plans for governing a country. They scribble out prose and strike a pose, and then move on to the next easy hit.

“Suella has done nothing but embolden the left wing,” one complained to widespread approval from his fellow Conservatives. “An efficient Home Secretary would be nicely presented and give off a kind and worldly demeanour whilst slashing immigration and stemming lawlessness on the streets. Braverman is a pundit politician and little more.”

So she is. And so are many others. For overseas readers, Braverman is the Home Secretary (the British equivalent of an interior minister), who rants like any other far-right politician from any other western nation. Homeless people aren’t destitute but have made a “lifestyle choice” to shiver on the streets, she says.  The UK is facing a “hurricane”  of immigration. The police allow antisemitic marchers to demonstrate because senior officers were “playing favourites” and failing to treat “pro-Palestinian mobs” with the rigour they display towards right-wing and nationalist protestors.

Stirring stuff if you are a part of her target audience. And yet while she does indeed play into hands of the left by convincing wavering voters that the Conservatives are dangerous extremists, intent on inflaming division, nothing changes, any more than it changes when a harrumphing newspaper pundit files their latest lamentation.

The homeless are not swept off the streets. The demonstrations go ahead. Immigration numbers stay the same. The only sound you hear is of the Tory press defending its beloved politicians. “Come for Suella and you come for all of us,” cried the Daily Mail, as pressure mounted on Rishi Sunak to sack her.

He finally found the courage to fire her this morning, and in the process showed that Tory media power has its limits. But the influence of the Telegraph, Mail, Times, Sun and Express is still substantial. It pushed David Cameron into conceding a Brexit referendum. Before he was anything else Boris Johnson was a Tory journalist, a “pundit politician”. The Tory press helped him become prime minister because he was one of their own, and even now it dreams of returning him to power.

Come for Johnson and you come for the Tory press, come from Braverman and you come for the Tory press.  Tory journalists could not save either in the end. But here is a measure of their power. At the next Conservative leadership election, you can guarantee that the Tory press will back the most right-wing candidate and that that candidate will win.

Say what you like about the disastrous impacts Brexit and the Johnson premiership had on this country but you cannot deny that the Tory press still has an impact, and its continuing power deserves an explanation.

It seemed finished a decade ago. Mainstream media were dying in the 2010s. The web was taking their audience and their profits. Even in their pomp, it was very hard to find evidence that newspapers could sway the masses, however much leftists wanted to believe that capitalist press barons were brainwashing the working class to vote against its real interests. To take the most famous example, political scientists comprehensively debunked the claim by Rupert Murdoch’s Sun that its attacks on Labour won the 1992 general election for the Conservatives.  Now that the circulation, staff counts and profits of the Tory press have collapsed how can it still have influence?

In any case, the received wisdom of the early 2010s held that media extremism did not matter.

  In 2012, the Economist said

“In lots of European countries politics encompasses angry extremes, with the hard-right and far-left attracting hefty votes. By contrast, newspapers in such countries are often small-circulation, centrist, and prim. Britain does things the other way round. Partly because of first-past-the-post voting, the big parties cluster at the political centre. The brass-band blare of dissent comes from a fiercely partisan press.”

Unlucky foreigners had extremist parties; the blessed British merely had an extremist press. Its half-mad ramblings about yanking the UK out of the European Union could be safely ignored by sensible politicians, who knew that they must cluster on the centre ground if they wished to retain power.  

There were two flaws with this analysis, which ought to have been obvious even in 2012.