Loth though I am to repeat myself (arch look to camera) I'm afraid that I'm going to be partly re-treading old ground this week. I hadn't intended to, but then all the fun and games of yesterday occurred and I thought oh bugger me, they're at it again.
Yes, sorry, but I'm irritated with the press again, well the media in general, but mostly the commentariat concerned with the news. You may recall that last time I got round to posting a blog, it was to express disquiet at the collective forgetting of what the early days of Covid were like, and how the Government's chaotic response is somehow a surprise to people who presumably were being paid to notice at the time.
This week, in the latest instalment of "Britain, WTF?" Pretend Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has Done A Politics, and been, the commentators all agree, Very Clever by engineering the return to frontline politics of one David Cameron, the semi-retired halfwit whose fault *all this* largely is.
The coverage of this particularly jaw-dropping piece of fuckery has been fairly nauseating to behold for a number of reasons, but chief amongst them has been the Forgetting. What a masterstroke, they say, how clever, they say. But in doing so, all they are doing is applauding politics as theatre, what a storyline! What a narrative twist! At no point does anyone seem to be saying, hang on, don't you remember what a complete and unmitigated fucking disaster he was?
Has anyone stopped to ask the relatives of the maybe 330,000 excess deaths linked to austerity? That was one of his wheezes. How about his attempt to intervene in Libya, exacerbating a refugee crisis that persists to his day? We've forgotten the bedroom tax, have we? The one found to have substantively increased poverty? How about the swingeing cuts to disability benefits? You'll note I've not even mentioned sodding Brexit yet.
Cameron was atrocious. But, crucially, he wasn't as atrocious as Johnson, or Truss. So the commentariat can paint him as a returning prince, back to sprinkle his laid-back stardust over the shires and win a few Lib Dems back. Plus, we're all talking about this, rather than the (deeply necessary) sacking of Braverman! So Clever.
Oh Lord, I want to play the British Press at poker. Rubes, the lot of them. Getting Cameron back is an act of desperation and an admission that the Tories are going down at the next election, his return is an attempt to mitigate the damage, nothing more. It's bringing an extra defender on when you're 5-0 down. He might well win a few pale Blue Wall waverers back, because there is a media perception of him as a moderate centrist.
This brings me to my second problem with the coverage of his comeback, the assumption that it's a clever idea because he's a "moderate". I would argue that he's anything but. Austerity was right-wing brutalism at its worst, an ideological war on the poor. If you look at Cameron and think "hey, he wasn't that bad" I guarantee you that you were comfortably off at the time. If you were poor, he was Genghis Khan, his policies laid the country to waste. The press are middle class, they were well off, so they remember 2010-15 as a fairly jolly time, the Olympics! Wasn't that nice? The reality beyond the South East was somewhat bleaker, how do you think Brexit even happened? How do you think everyone got so angry?
So the idea that he's a healing centrist, who'll bring the tribes back together by channelling the spirit of 2012 is dangerous nonsense. He might win a few Lib Dems back, but if he does, those people are a) stupid and b) deliberately ignoring the reality of what Cameron and Osborne unleashed on this country.
I haven't really brought up his culpability for Brexit because, well, if you can't see what a catastrophic error that was then I'm afraid I have nothing to say to you. I've also not brought up his corrupt approaches to Government on behalf of Greensill Capital, or his shilling on behalf of the Chinese Government. I've not even mentioned the pig thing, largely because I think that's made up and also it's not as important as being responsible for the deaths of thousands. Though from all the jokes on twitter, it appears that mine is the minority view.
We have a real problem with letting bastards off the hook in this country. In any sane and ordered universe this serial failure would be banished to the outer darkness, never to return, but in British public life there's no such thing as a terminal failure, it's only a matter of time before you return to a thousand think-pieces wondering why we don't utilise our former Prime Ministers better, draw on their expertise. I know the answer to that one, it's because they failed.
A more grimly amusing echo of DC's return lies in the recruiting to this years Jungle Programme of Actual Fascist Nigel Farage. Not content with helping World's Worst Person, Matt Hancock, airbrush his reputation last year, ITV now thinks it would be a good idea to rehabilitate a man who has done more than most to destroy this country. This, to my mind, is irresponsible. In much the same way as Boris Johnson was allowed to hone his persona guest-presenting Have I got News for You Farage will get the opportunity to show he's in on the joke, he'll be a good sport, do some trials, hey guys, I'm just like you, and aportion of the audience will come away thinking hey, he's not that bad.
In this way the media is complicit in grade a scumbags being allowed to cling on in public life, to prosper, to rehabilitate. Because this is a game with no endpoint, in three years time it could be Tommy Robinson, or Andrew Tate. Allowing people with genuinely repulsive views the oxygen of safe, mainstream programming normalises them. It is wilful ignorance, with a profit motive, which makes it even worse.
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