Over the weekend, the columnist Matthew Parris described how Britain has become, if not ungovernable, at the very least a depressingly awful populace to imagine yourself governing. “A nation that has become obese, uncompetitive, underskilled, stay-at-home, health-obsessed, celebrity-obsessed, rights-obsessed, blame-obsessed, sex-obsessed, woke-obsessed, house-price-obsessed,” he wrote. There was more on the same theme. I shouldn’t really quote it in full, otherwise I would come over as Parris-obsessed, and then where would I be? Totally ungovernable.
The problem is, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone like this. OK, maybe some of us could lose a few pounds. Certainly, a lot of us believe in universal human rights, but I don’t know that you’d call it “obsession”, nor that you could lump it in with a sex obsession, and while we’re here, I don’t even know what a blame obsession is.
Yet, even while I’ve never observed it in the wild, this thumbnail – let’s, for brevity, call it the worst society on earth – is ringing a bell. I’ve definitely seen it around – on the pages of the Daily Mail, the Sun and the Express. The fulminating is ceaseless: women “flaunt their curves”, but “sexist slurs” are what other people do; “wokies” and “snowflakes” have capsized education and only know how to complain; renters scavenge off decent people by not being able to buy their own home, because they have spent all their money on coffee then call their landlords because they can’t change a lightbulb; immigrants have 12 children, then selfishly demand that all of them get to go to school. These newspapers burrow around, looking for the most egregious examples of “rights-obsession” Facebook has to offer, and when they can’t find anything, grab a video of the heartwarming moment a puppy sees a mirror for the very first time.
The rightwing press has gone not-that-quietly bananas, and we’re all supposed to pretend not to notice. To complain about bias is seen as special pleading. Certain sections of the media have always been openly partisan; only boring people thump on about it. Likewise, to point out the more alarming flirtations with the far right – maybe a columnist wondering about “the Muslim problem” or a political editor pitting the people against the judiciary – would be very old hat. Sweetie, if you think that’s bad, you should have lived through the good old days, when the leader pages openly supported Hitler!
But, underneath this same old story, something has changed. The agenda remains the same – the rightwing press supports the right, it’s hardly a mystery – but the standards are different. Consistency has been jettisoned. One day’s headline will be: “As the Left howls for resignations over Met’s £50 Covid fines … Don’t they know there’s a war on?”, and the next seven days will be Keir Starmer drinking a beer. One day, they run a tawdry and sexist smear of Angela Rayner, the next they are asking: “Why is Westminster so tawdry and sexist?”
I originally thought the relationship with this part of the print media was like going out with an addict: they might not mean to be hurtful, but they fog you with their own confusion, can’t follow through, can’t keep their story straight. In fact, it’s more like going out with Mr Benn. Which time zone will he be sporting his charming bowler hat in today? Will he have any recollection of where he was yesterday or how it relates to now? Will he have the values of the 1950s (women! Does ambition give you breast cancer?), or the 1890s (bow down before your royal overlords – how much they spent on a legal defence against sexual abuse allegations is none of your concern)?
Allied to the inconsistency is maddening projection: they can’t remember what happened 24 hours ago, so neither can you. They’re obsessed with “woke”, therefore you are. They’re constantly questing after superfoods, therefore you’re health-obsessed. They create a public in their own image, and then viscerally hate it. They use their own distortions and excesses to prove how distorted and excessive we’ve all become.
And some kind of back-to-front notion of stoicism requires us not to mention it. See something embarrassing, avert your eyes. Look, over there, a cat in a funny place!
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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