Hell on Fleet Street

“Damn it, this should be our moment, with the right in the ascendancy again in the US, South America and on the up again in Europe, we should be rejoicing and lambasting left-wing regimes without mercy,” declares Horace Heebey, Deputy Editor of right wing Fleet Street tabloid the Daily Excess. “But instead, we find ourselves forced onto the bloody defensive, having to put out articles critical of extreme right-wing foreign leaders when we should be praising them! It’s like being in Hell!” Indeed, With Trump in the White House, the natural instincts of the likes of the Excess, The Shite, The Torygraph and others would normally be to revel in his ‘achievements’.  Unfortunately for them, rump’s unpopularity in Britain, fuelled by him and cronies cosying up to Putin and other dictators, stabbing Ukraine in the back, insulting the UK’s military prowess and wrecking the global economy with insane tariffs, means that they instead have found themselves having to keep writing broadly negative pieces about him.  “Damn it, he’s firing civil servants left, right and centre, promising tax cuts to billionaires, trashing diversity and equality initiatives, he’s even bashing the EU and being rude to foreigners.  It’s like a wet dream for us,” despairs Heebey. “I mean – riding roughshod over democratic and academic institutions, trying to intimidate the judiciary, locking up pesky non-white people who disagree with him, even deporting them in chains without due process: it’s what we’ve been calling for in the UK for years!  We should be holding Trump up as an exemplar for British politicians to follow!  But he’s just so toxic and destructive, we don’t dare for fear of what it would do to our circulation!”

Nevertheless, the Excess and its Fleet Street cohorts remain reluctant to completely condemn Trump and his allies. “You can tell, reading many of the articles they publish about Trump, that they really, sneakingly, admire what he’s doing,” opines professor Jerry Mire, Senior Lecturer in Extremist Media at the Camden College of Advanced Husbandry. “There’s always that slightly approving undertone when they write superficially critical pieces about his immigration policies or his sucking up to Putin. Let’s face it, it must be absolute Hell running a right-wing newspaper these days, unable to be completely open about your fascist sympathies.” The same is also true of the various right-wing British politicians who have, in the past, banged the drum for Trump and courted his attention, argues Mire. “Just look at how Boris Johnson has been desperately trying to spin Trump’s approach to ending the war in Ukraine as anything but the betrayal of Kiev that it actually is,” he says. “While Nigel Farage – Trump’s self-styled ‘best buddy’ – now an MP with ambitions of parliamentary respectability is doing his best to avoid answering questions about his ‘friend’.  Openly supporting a foreign leader despised in the UK is a sure way of losing votes rather than expanding your tally of MPs.” Mire contends that the effective muzzling of the right-wing press and the compromising of right-wing rabble rousers like Farage should be celebrated as one of the few positives to come out of the re-election of Trump.

But with a Labour government in power in the UK, the right-wing press might expect to find some respite on the domestic front. There should be lots of scope for lambasting ‘loony lefty’ policies, outrageous government spending on benefits for one legged black lesbians and the like. Instead, however, they find themselves in the unusual position of having to criticise a Labour government for cutting benefits to minority groups, including OAPs, proposing to slash public spending by sacking civil servants and not rolling back Tory devised restrictions on civil liberties. After all, this is the stuff they used to heap praise on Tory governments for doing, screaming for them to do more of the same.  You’d think they’d be happy that Labour finally seem to have seen it their way.  “Oh Jesus, it’s just so bloody frustrating,” bemoans Heebey. “Day after day we’re having to try and crucify them for doing exactly what we wanted Tory governments to do! There’s no bloody justice, is there?”

The current situation is forcing the right-wing press into uncharted territory, such as calling for governing politicians to be called to account. “Fourteen years of Tory corruption, years of defending Tory ministers for taking backhanders in all manner of hospitality and freebies, justifying it all as somehow being a necessary part of the process of governing, they are now jumping on even the tiniest hint of an irregularity,” observes Professor Mire. “It’s amazing how they’ve suddenly become so keen on holding politicians to account.” The academic contends that the UK’s right-wing press have cornered themselves into these ever greater acts of hypocrisy, because what’s the alternative is, to them, unthinkable. “Having spent so long painting Labour as irresponsible ‘tax and spenders’, they can’t really admit that this Labour government is fiscally just as right-wing as their Tory heroes.  But to offer a coherent critique of current Labour policies would mean embracing progressivism, both economic and social.” he muses.  “Which would mean aligning themselves with the likes of Jeremy Corbyn who, to them, is the devil.”

In the meantime, the British press finds itself engaging in a series of hypocritical convulsions as they try to navigate the current unfamiliar political situation, both at home and abroad. “The hypocrisy isn’t so bad – we’re used to that, after all we spent fourteen years switching our support between successive Tory Prime Ministers, condemning the outgoing one who we’d previously helped get the job while welcoming the new one we’d previously mocked,” says Heeby. “No, it’s the sheer frustration of the situation. Our journalists just don’t know where they stand – by nature, we’re Trump lovers, but we instead have to condemn him! If we champion Farage, we risk the wrath of the readership as he’s so associated with Trump, who they now hate!” The right-wing press can’t even fully embrace the Conservative Party any more. “We’d really like them to go extreme right – but then they’d be too Trump-like for the electorate. But if they go the other way then they’d just be the sort of wishy washy liberal types we hate!” Laments the newspaperman. “I’m telling you, it’s Hell here on Fleet Street – we’ve got to the stage where journalists are so confused and frustrated that they are jumping out of tenth floor windows in despair!”