THE Tories seem to have lost all sense of irony, or at least a boatload of memories.
Otherwise what could have possessed them to have written to the SNP leadership candidates complaining of “hysterical attacks” on the media?
Did they forget about their own recent history? The Jouker certainly hasn’t.
What follows is a far from exhaustive list of the times the Tories have blamed the media for their own failures ...
Boris Johnson
At the beginning of June 2022, Boris Johnson was still prime minister. He had faced a litany of scandals and finally now faced a confidence vote in his leadership as more and more Tory MPs came to see him as a liability and not an asset.
But was Johnson contrite? Was he heck.
In a speech urging MPs not to oust him, he blamed a “media-driven focus on the leadership of the Conservative Party”.
“Refuse to dance to the tune of the media,” he told them.
According to the Telegraph, a letter sent to MPs at the same time ended with a plea to back him as leader and “put an end to the media’s favourite obsession”.
Anyone with a memory that stretches back to Johnson’s disastrous tenure will remember that was far from his only shot at the press.
Liz Truss
It wasn’t only the one useless Tory prime minister of 2022 that blamed their failure on the media. Liz Truss also had a punt.
One of her first acts in office (and also one of her last we suppose), was to create and blame an “anti-growth coalition” for the UK’s woes.
Who was in this coalition? Trade unions, opposition parties, and of course the media. Only she called it “the talking heads” who “taxi from north London townhouses to the BBC studios to dismiss anyone challenging the status quo”.
Then in February, months after her short-lived time in No10 had come to an end, she penned a 4000-word essay about her disastrous tenure.
Truss used a Telegrpah front page to write of the economic chaos that characterised her leadership: “Political and media commentators cast an immediate verdict blaming the mini-Budget.”
She added: “Large parts of the media and the wider public sphere had become unfamiliar with key arguments about tax and economic policy.”
Everyone understood it, Liz. It was just awful.
Liz Truss and Boris Johnson
And it wasn’t only her downfall that was due to the media. Truss also blamed it for Johnson’s.
At a hustings event in August 2022, Truss was asked: “Are you clear that Boris Johnson’s downfall was his own making or someone else’s?”
Some audience members shouted “the media”, leading Truss to say: “Who am I to disagree with this excellent audience?”
She wasn’t alone though, as Tory MP Daniel Kawczynski also claimed the media had “hounded” Johnson out of office. Kawczynski said that made him “very sad”. Oh no.
Lee Anderson
“30p” Lee Anderson, the Tories’ deputy chairman and controversy machine, also has a fondness for pointing fingers at the media.
One example came after his boss, Rishi Sunak, brought Suella Braverman back into government in an attempt to appease the extreme right of the Conservative Party. Braverman had been fired as home secretary by Liz Truss for a security breach just days before.
But for Anderson, the outrage was all down to the “gutter media at the Guardian and BBC”.
After reports emerged of his fraternisation with people who have expressed far-right and white supremacist views, Anderson again blamed the media for digging around.
“The depths that some people will go to in order to besmirch my family name is incredible,” he said of the press.
Nadine Dorries
The firebrand and former culture secretary Nadine Dorries has also done a fair bit of blaming the media in her time.
In one example on Twitter, she raged at the BBC after it interviewed Defence Secretary Ben Wallace about Boris Johnson’s questionable source of funds to refurbish his Downing Street flat.
Dorries claimed the issue was just “media indulgence in nasty gossip meant to hurt the PM and prevent us doing well in #HartlepoolByElection”.
On the issue of Brexit, she has also raged about the “London based supercilious media bias [being] alive and well”.
On the topic of Jeremy Corbyn being pro-Brexit – which Dorries claimed hadn’t been widely reported – she wrote: “The answer has to lie with the media and the @BBCNews who must now employ journos too deciteful [sic] or dense to report the truth.”
With Dorries, there really are more examples than are worth mentioning.
Suella Braverman
More an honourable mention for madness this one. The Home Secretary made headlines for all the wrong reasons in late 2022 – before she was fired by Liz Truss – after she went on a tirade in the Commons.
Taking aim at the Just Stop Oil protesters who had closed a crossing over the Thames, she told MPs it was the “Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati” who were to blame …
Craig Hoy
You may be forgiven for asking “Who’s Craig Hoy?” given the comparatively big Tory names which have come higher up this list. But the MSP and Scottish Tory chairman deserves a mention for sheer hypocrisy.
It was Hoy who wrote to the SNP candidates claiming they’d all hysterically attacked the media during the leadership race, so surely Hoy wouldn’t have done the same, would he?
Except, as they say, “there’s always a tweet”.
In October 2022, the Tory MSP complained: “As if the country is not suffering enough blinkered nationalist propaganda under Nicola Sturgeon.”
Hoy really needs to worry about the plank in his own eye.
