Tabloid Britain

[Sheilbh]

Fear and loathing in tabloid Britain
British Journalism Review
Vol. 20, No. 3, 2009, pages 45-50

Chris Mullin is the Member of Parliament for Sunderland South and a former editor of Tribune. He has recently published a volume of diaries entitled A View from the Foothills.
Of course politicians were culpable but for years there have been media lies about MPs. So have we lost all sense of proportion?

Forgive me, I know that as a member of the despised political classes I should be wearing sackcloth, but it does stick in my gullet to be lectured from the moral high ground by a newspaper whose previous owner is in jail for fraud and whose present owners live on a rock in the Channel Islands in order to avoid tax.

"THEY'RE ALL AT IT" screamed the Daily Mirror of March 31 over a front-page report by one Bob Roberts about MPs' expenses. Actually, we're not. The only place I have ever worked where they were "all at it" was Mirror Group Newspapers in the early 1970s, where my first week's expenses claim was rejected by the man who was supposed to vouch for its accuracy on the grounds that it was so low that it would embarrass my colleagues. I was then treated to a short course in how to construct fraudulent expenses, which, when no one else was looking, I threw away.

Yes, I know we MPs had it coming. To be sure, some indefensible scams have been exposed. And, yes, I have reluctantly to admit that much of it would not have come to light had the Telegraph not paid a so far undisclosed sum of money for what appear to be stolen goods. All that I accept. I do wonder, however, whether we haven't slightly lost our sense of proportion. The Telegraph and the rest of the tabloids (for some reason I keep thinking of the Telegraph these days as a tabloid) kept up their unrelenting assault for more than 40 days. Then it was the turn of the local media, feeding off the crumbs left over. Meanwhile, the heat was off the bankers who brought the world economy to the edge of ruin.

One of my most assiduous colleagues in the Commons, Ann Clwyd, a woman with significant achievements to her name, was telephoned by one of her local newspapers and asked if it were true she had claimed 29 pence for two oranges three years ago. Unable to sleep (because she could foresee the headlines), she got up at 3am and started trawling through her submitted expenses receipts and in due course located a Tesco receipt, on which one item was for the 29-pence oranges. When dawn broke she rang the House of Commons Fees Office, only to be told that they had published the receipt by mistake and that she had not claimed. By such slender threads do reputations hang. And guess what? Her local newspaper ran the story anyway under the strapline: "Oranges not part of claim – I paid for them myself".

As it happens, I escaped lightly being, at last count, number 518 in the league table of claimants. The discovery that I was still using a black and white TV even prompted an editorial or two attesting to my general saintliness. I derive no satisfaction, however. We are all vulnerable to the old 88-pence bath plug trick played on Jacqui Smith. There never was a receipt for an 88-pence bath plug. Instead there was a receipt for a list of household items, one of which was a bath plug. The trick is to select the most trivial item on the receipt and make that the focal point of the story.

"He doth protest too much," I hear you say. Indeed. So, for the avoidance of doubt, let me repeat: I accept that the Telegraph story was legitimate and that the fall-out was made worse by the failure of the political establishment to come clean in the first place.

If, however, I sound just a little cheesed off it is because, over the years, much of the media have connived to tell a series of falsehoods about MPs which, long before the recent frenzy, have become so deeply engrained there is scarcely any point in attempting to rebut them. One is the suggestion that, when Parliament is not sitting, we are all on holiday. I have lost count of the number of times a passing constituent has remarked: "It's all right for you with your three months holidays." On occasion, this has even happened as I have been coming down the steps of my office at 6 o'clock on a summer's evening. To begin with I used to get quite tetchy ("Where do you think I've been all day?") but now I just shrug it off. What's the point?

Then there is the suggestion, each time MPs' pay is discussed, that we are all demanding massive increases. This is an old favourite. It comes round every year. The trick here is to find an anonymous MP (invariably a Tory) to claim that we're worth £100,000 a year and then to pretend that he is speaking for all of us. This, for example, was a front-page headline in The Sunday Times on June 22 last year over a story by its Whitehall editor, Marie Woolf: "MPs set to claim £40,000 perk." The suggestion being that the second home allowance was to be converted into a salary increase plus £10,000 in lieu of tax and another £8,000 for good luck. Close inspection reveals that this was very much the most fanciful of three options being considered by the Members Estimates Committee for reforming parliamentary allowances. The one that was actually adopted was "to retain the present system... but with closer scrutiny".

And this was the Daily Express (on a rare day when it wasn't denouncing asylum seekers) four days earlier: "OUR GREEDY MPS DEMAND MASSIVE PAY RISE", over a story that began: "Senior MPs have demanded a shocking 21 per cent pay rise..." This is entirely cynical. The author of this story – one Macer Hall – must have known that there was no chance of an increase of this size or anything resembling it. Indeed, a few days later we voted ourselves an increase of just 2.25 per cent, in line with the rest of the public sector, but I defy anyone to find that reported in the following week's Express or Sunday Times. The reality is that at no time during the past six years has a pay rise for MPs exceeded 2.8 per cent and it has been as low as 0.66 per cent.

A larger and more insidious falsehood, nowadays stated brazenly (I have even seen it in The Guardian), is the pretence that we are somehow pocketing the office costs allowance. When details of our expenses were first published – in headline form – many newspapers simply lumped together the various allowances, added them to our salary and either told, or strongly implied, to their readers that this was all income. The Mirror's "They're all at it" story cited above was a particularly shameless example. The opening sentence read: "Greedy MPs pocket an average of £144,176 in expenses on top of their bumper salaries, shock figures revealed yesterday..."

My local newspaper, for two years running, ran the story under an identical headline: "Our MPs cost £1 million" – a figure achieved by adding together the salaries and allowance claims of all the MPs in its circulation area. The story underneath clearly implied that we were pocketing money that is given to us to pay for the running of our offices. When I pointed out to the journalist concerned that in my 20 years in Parliament not a penny of the office costs allowance had ever touched my bank account, that it paid the salaries of the three people who worked for me, the rent of my office, utility bills and so on, he came over all defensive and said he wasn't implying anything of the sort. The giveaway, however, was in the final line quoting the national average wage. Why would the national average wage be relevant if that wasn't what he was pretending?

On April 4 this year, an ignoramus called Ian Cowie in the Money section of The Daily Telegraph went one step further, implying not only that we were all pocketing the office costs allowance, but that we were all somehow afforded special treatment by the Inland Revenue. Blithely ignoring the insistence of a spokesman for the Revenue that there were no special tax arrangements for MPs, Mr Cowie wrote: "Now that the average MP claims £135,600 a year for expenses – yes, that's right, more than five times national average earnings – this means they avoid paying £54,000 a year in tax which HMRC would demand from anyone else lucky enough to receive such payments." He developed this bogus thesis over a full page and when challenged simply brazenly repeated his false assertions. In what other profession would staff salaries, office rent, utility bills, the hire of the photocopier etc be considered as income?

This shameless, blatant misrepresentation has been a feature of coverage of MPs' allowances in media outlets, national and local, up and down the country every year since the information was first published. If you wonder why MPs – wrongly in my view – proved so reluctant to allow the full details to be published, could the fact that much of what had already been published had been so comprehensively and repeatedly misrepresented have had something to do with it? Freedom of information does not simply confer responsibilities on the holder of the information. It presumes a degree of maturity and integrity on the part of the recipient – and all too often that has been absent.

The sad truth is that for much of our media (and not just the tabloids), political journalism has become a form of warfare in which anything goes. "Tabloid" journalism in particular requires a constant supply of victims – be they fallen rock stars, misbehaving footballers or errant MPs. The beauty of the expenses scandal – and for the avoidance of doubt I again concede that in some cases it was a scandal – is that it served up a rich treasure trove of potential victims.

Unhappily, in recent years the tabloid virus has spread well beyond the traditional tabloids, even into the broadcast media. It is no longer enough for a television reporter or newscaster to report the facts. They are expected to let us know (perhaps only by the tone of voice, a raising of the eyebrows, a grimace – but sometimes in words of one syllable) what we should be thinking, too. I am told it is known in the profession as "news with attitude". I first heard the expression from a reporter on Channel 4 News. Much of the news is now read by shock jocks wandering round the studio emoting, rather than calmly reading, what is on the autocue in front of them.

Where political reporting is concerned, the underlying message is usually a combination of corrosive cynicism and deep pessimism: They're all at... Everything is bad and getting worse. Is its any wonder that, despite nearly two decades of rising prosperity, there has been no comparable increase in happiness? Or that fear of crime continues to rise inexorably even as crime rates plummet? Or that foreign students at the University of Sunderland have on occasion been assaulted and abused by tabloid-reading youths who mistake them for asylum seekers? Or that people who have not recently used the NHS have a far lower opinion of it than those who have? Or even that those who have actually had dealings with their Member of Parliament tend to have a higher opinion of him or her than those who haven't?

The last couple of decades have also seen the rise of a new British phenomenon, the feeding frenzy – a subject worthy of a PhD thesis. There is now a range of subjects – tax policy, immigration and asylum, the treatment of sex offenders, alternatives to prison – where no rational discussion is possible without the risk of triggering hysteria. Tabloid culture thrives on ignorance. Remember the mob of shaven-headed tabloid readers who marched on the home of a paediatrician because they didn't know the difference between a paediatrician and a paedophile?

Feeding frenzies come and go. Some fail to take off and disappear as quickly as they appear, only to be replaced by new ones. One of my favourites, in June 2002, was the suggestion that Tony Blair had somehow manipulated to get himself a more prominent place at the Queen Mother's funeral. It raged for several days before it suddenly disappeared, as if someone had flicked a switch – which is, I suspect, exactly what happened. My guess is that someone in the Palace sent word to the Tory front bench, probably via Nicholas Soames, that the Queen was not amused at this shabby attempt to make political capital out of her mother's funeral.

Does any of this matter? Should we be worried? Tony Blair used one of the final speeches of his premiership to reflect on the impact of what he called "the feral media". The deterioration of political reporting had, he claimed, "sapped the country's confidence and self-belief; it undermines its assessment of itself, its institutions and above all it reduces our capacity to take the right decisions in the right spirit for our future". He added that the increasing momentum of the news cycle was "seriously adverse to the way public life is conducted".

One result is that politicians have wasted inordinate effort in trying to ride the tiger. Former Mirror editor Piers Morgan in his diaries records the following: "Bored one evening, I counted up all the times I had met Tony Blair. And the result was astonishing really or slightly shocking – according to your point of view. I had 22 lunches, six dinners, six interviews, 24 further one-to-one chats over tea and biscuits and numerous phone calls with him..."

In addition, Morgan was forever being wined, dined and stroked by Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson. All to no avail, since he turned on them big time over Iraq. If this much effort was spent on the Mirror, one can only speculate as to the contortions the Prime Minister and his team must have gone through to keep The Sun sweet. Truly, we've all gone barmy.