Let us be gracious in defeat. Now he HAS to deliver.
It was a “loveless landslide”. Our challenge to Labour in shaping Britain’s
future.
The arrogance of it. The self-serving, self-important, self-indulgent delusion. Who are you to tell your readers to be gracious? Who are you to assume that they see the election result as a defeat? Some of them voted for our new government. Who are you to issue orders to the prime minister, to demand a role in shaping a Labour future you fought tooth and nail to prevent?
The Conservatives, the Telegraph says, should take time to
lick their wounds. You, their clients in the rightwing press, should do
likewise. You can lash out like a mortally injured tiger, you can spit and you
can growl and you can howl, but it won’t make a blind bit of difference. Just
go somewhere quiet and watch the football or the tennis or something. Leave us
in peace.
You can’t though, can you? It’s not in you. Your lack of
self-awareness is breathtaking. You don’t see that you are at least partly to
blame for the agony you are feeling, an agony you presume is shared by the
people for whom you claim to speak. You are the journalistic manifestation of
the Dunning-Kruger effect. You think you know everything and you can’t resist
parading this imaginary superiority.
But for the past five years (at least) you have resolutely
refused to listen, to look at or to smell what has been under your noses. You
thought the Johnson landslide was vindication of everything you stood for. You
never questioned the preposterousness of the promise to build 40 new hospitals,
that Britain would be anything other than a reinvigorated global force once
Brexit was done.
And when anyone with a brain could see that things weren’t quite as rosy as promised, you were deaf, blind – and dumb, the latter in the sense of being wilfully dense, for you were certainly never mute.
The thousands
of lives lost in the pandemic were anyone’s fault but Boris’s. The squandering
of billions on faulty equipment from dodgy sources, the loss of billions more to
fraud, the contracts for mates, the incompetence, the sleaze, the corruption –
all should be overlooked in the interest of the bigger picture. Who could have
done any better? And, of course, the cost-of-living crisis was all down to
Putin’s war.
Even Conservative MPs woke up to the reality that you
resolutely ignored, finally ditching their lying leader. But you railed at
them for their ingratitude – and then urged them to replace him with Truss.
That worked out brilliantly, didn’t it?
And so to Rishi and his final throw of the dice. This
election is about the future, not the past, he said. And you parroted him. Set aside your recent lived experience, you
said. But also heed the lessons of history. The Tories may have made mistakes
along the way this past 14 years, but we should stick with them because Labour
can’t be trusted – look at what it was like when they were in power in the 70s.
Couldn’t you hear yourselves? Couldn’t you see the nonsense of that, the double
standard?
Just who exactly are you talking to?
“Crushing blow to Tory party in election wipeout”? Was that
honestly what you thought was the first thing on your readers’ minds the day
after the election? Boris’s ten-point
plan to save the Tory party (hint: do what I said I’d do, but never actually
did)? Who’s listening?
Your readers aren’t interested in a crushing blow or a plan
to revive the political party the country has just rejected. They really aren’t
bothered about which party survives or withers, any more than they fuss about
the corporate fortunes of their energy supplier. They are invested in the
product, not the conduit. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Scottish Power or EDF,
they want a constant flow of electricity at a fair price. Similarly, they
mostly don’t care whether it’s the Tories or Labour “delivering”, they just
want to be able to get a doctor’s appointment, for the rivers and seas not to
be awash with sewage, and for someone to mend the bloody roads.
Those of your readers with more of a social or moral
conscience might also wish that fewer children were in poverty and that food
banks were no longer necessary. But do be clear, the fate of the Conservative
party is not their primary concern. And you telling them that a vote to punish
the Tories is a vote to punish themselves will not change that. If anything, it
will get their backs up further.
So they didn’t take your advice. They went their own sweet
way. And now you’re trying to put a gloss on that. Wary of going down the Trump
road of openly calling into question the legitimacy of the result, you pussyfoot
round the edges. Labour got only 34% of the vote. (I don’t remember you
fretting about Cameron getting only 37% in 2015 – where is the line between
those three points that determines the acceptable and the undemocratic?) There
was a low turnout, so it was 34% of 60%, which means only a fifth of the
country wanted this government. Even Corbyn got more votes. And look at the
mismatch between Reform with its 4m votes and five seats and the LibDems who
won 71 with only 3.5m votes. It’s not fair! As Sir John Curtice said, it was “the
most disproportional electoral outcome in British electoral history”.
But hang on, didn’t you run special supplements telling
people to vote tactically to get the result you craved? You wanted your readers
to vote for candidates they didn’t support “to keep Labour out” or at least to
deprive it of that mythical supermajority that was somehow going to gift Starmer
eternal power.
Two can play at that game and the other side did it more
effectively. Many did vote tactically; not to spite Labour, but to turf out the
Tories. So yes, the Labour vote was smaller than it might have been – because
its supporters were not only just as capable as yours of lending their votes to
others to achieve the desired overall result, but also far more efficient at it.
Now you’re muttering about electoral reform and musing about
the benefits of PR. Something for which the LibDems and the Greens and other
small parties have been crying out for years. Well, guess what? We had a
referendum on that in 2011 and it was the “will of the people” that we stick
with first past the post. You surely can’t be suggesting that we should think
again? Because to go back on such a recent referendum would be a betrayal,
anti-democratic. Even if it hasn’t turned out as we think it should have done.
Even if the will of the people might have changed.
When it comes down to it, Labour and the LibDem played by
the existing rules and won. Like a cricket captain who makes a decision based on
the state of the pitch whether to bat or field, whether to play fast or spin
bowlers, they looked at the political landscape and deployed their resources
accordingly. Last time round, you successfully rolled the pitch to your
advantage, badgering Farage into standing down his Brexit party candidates to
give the Conservatives a free pass. He wasn’t playing ball this time, so you
turned on him.
Then you hailed your own success in “saving” 40 seats through
your tactical voting guide, while mourning 170 lost seats where Reform split
the right. Farage would probably say that it was the Tories who split his vote.
Now you’ll carry on pushing the narrative that the Tories
lost because they were too leftwing. Because you’re still not listening. To the
country. To tens of thousands of your customers – when classified according to
their main source of news, 43% of Express readers, 40% of Mail readers and 37%
of Telegraph readers told Redfield and Wilton last month that they intended to
vote Labour.
But you never do. You’re like the pub loudmouth who shouts
over everyone, the mansplainer who likes to tell women what they’re thinking, the dinner party guest too
busy mentally polishing his next pearl of wisdom to take on board what anyone
else is saying.
Perhaps now would be a good time to shut up and listen for a
change. You lost, get over it.
