The insufferable gushing of the pro-Starmer media

We all knew the media coverage of Labour’s return to power was going to be gushy. Even the supposedly impartial broadcast media had hardly made a secret of their loathing of the Tories, and their longing for a more thorough-bred liberal-left alternative, particularly since Brexit. But my stomach wasn’t prepared for quite how gushy – and cringe and occasionally creepy – it has been thus far. They’re carrying on like a cross between Pravda and Smash Hits.

At Keir Starmer’s first media conference as PM last weekend, the assembled political editors were visibly giddy. ‘If I may, have you unpacked yet, have you found your way around?’, asked the BBC’s Chris Mason. ‘Good afternoon, prime minister. Firstly, have you got used to hearing yourself get called that yet?’, asked Channel 4’s Paul McNamara. They stopped short of asking ‘who’ he was wearing, but you could tell they were dying to know. I’ve so far struggled to find evidence of them lobbing similar, Sunday-supplement softballs Boris Johnson’s way.

While the combination of a historically low vote share and a historically low turnout meant Starmer was elected by just 20 per cent of the electorate last week, I think it’s fair to say his support was considerably higher among the media. ‘Tell me you’re cock-a-hoop about Labour’s victory without saying you’re cock-a-hoop about Labour’s victory’ appears to be the game the oh-so-impartial broadcasters are currently playing on X (née Twitter), producing this tremendous word salad from Krishnan Guru-Murthy:

‘The challenge for political broadcasting is enormous, and rather satisfying to watch. After years of personality-driven and chaotic, shallow politics coverage across much of the media… we now have a government with [a] massive majority, widespread internal agreement and no likelihood of massive instability anytime soon. A great environment for a programme like Channel 4 News, full of policy nerds and people who prefer to argue about what ideas work [rather] than who should be the front person.’

Elsewhere, the columnists have been in a state of erotic excitement. Literally. ‘Keir Starmer has turbocharged my arousal levels. I feel fruity’, screams a Caitlin Moran headline. ‘There is nothing more erotic to a middle-aged woman than competency’, she writes. Her political horniness, her thirst for competence, extends to all of Starmer’s new cabinet appointments, too: ‘All my friends were watching these arrivals as if we were watching Magic Mike Live. We were rubbing our thighs.’ If you wanted a neat demonstration of how weird and out-of-touch the British commentariat have become, surely it is them being brought to near-climax by a government that has just won a majority on the weakest mandate of the postwar era.

Andrew Marr – formerly of the BBC, now free to spout his opinions on LBC and in the pages of the New Statesman – was himself in raptures on Question Time last week. ‘For the first time in many of our lives, actually Britain looks like a little haven of peace and stability’, he said. While, as a pundit and commentator, he is now under no obligation to be politically impartial, I was reminded of his outrageously partial coverage of Tony Blair’s disastrous Iraq War back when Marr was the BBC’s political editor. On 9 April 2003, as tanks rolled into Baghdad, Marr stood outside Downing Street and spoke as if he was Blair’s spokesman, rather than, you know, a political journalist:

‘He said that they would be able to take Baghdad without a blood bath, and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating, and on both of those points he has been proved conclusively right. And it would be entirely ungracious, even for his critics, not to acknowledge that tonight he stands as a larger man and a stronger prime minister as a result’

Ungracious? Tell that to the people of that benighted, wartorn nation now.

I bring that grim episode up not to score points – that’s just a satisfying byproduct – but to say that this isn’t the first time the media have ended up behaving like the government’s personal mouthpiece, with disastrous results for the integrity of journalism. On certain issues and at certain times, the media have all but fused with the state – pumping out state propaganda almost without realising they are doing it. Covid was a prime example. While the media continued to take potshots at a supposedly ‘reckless’ Johnson, painting him as a thorn in the side of the sensible technocrats and advisers, it essentially became the media wing of the lockdown, amplifying the fearmongering messages of the ‘expert’ Blob and demonising any dissent, including presenting Johnson’s own doubts about the enterprise as proof of his terrible judgement and character.

Now, we have a truly unholy trinity of a liberal-left elected government, a liberal-left civil service and a liberal-left media class. I fear we’re in for a poundshop replay of what the American media have turned into under Joe Biden – that is, his own personal press office. They even pretended not to notice his mental and physical frailty until it became impossible to ignore a few weeks back. Only now that he’s mistakenly introducing President Zelensky as President Putin is everyone admitting that the jig is up. And even that pales in comparison with the refusal of liberal media to cover the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, pointing to Joe’s potential involvement in his son’s dodgy dealings in Ukraine and China, back in 2020. They dismissed it as Russian misinformation, at the encouragement of spooks, before shamefacedly admitting there might be something to it.

Of course, anyone with a pulse had already noticed that much of the British media – including the sections of it that claim to be impartial – were reflexively anti-Tory, anti-populist and pro-liberal-left. No one has ever read a Paul Brand tweet and wondered if he might have voted Brexit. No one has ever mistaken Beth Rigby for a closet Faragist. No one was surprised to learn what Emily Maitlis’s views were when she left the BBC and started that dreadful podcast with fellow ex-BBC journalists Jon Sopel and Lewis Goodall. For all of polite society’s bashing of GB News, its hosts are completely open about their opinions. The supposedly impartial mainstream insults our intelligence by trying to pass off their one-eyed commentary as unalloyed truth.

Krishnan Guru-Murthy is right, in a sense. The Starmer era will pose a tremendous challenge for the media. The Brexit years have made them even more openly politicised than before – and even more desperate for a supposed ‘grown-up’, for Someone Like Them, to be back in charge. Can they restrain themselves, stop rubbing their thighs, overcome their arousal, and actually do their job of holding the powerful to account? I’m not holding my breath.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater_