“Trial by media” complained shadow ministers in response to broadcasters and journalists trying to elicit comments on and entrap politicians with the incident branded as “beergate”. Life had been breathed into the lockdown incident of Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner, the Labour leadership, and some 30 Labour activists enjoying each other’s company, having drinks and dinner together in Durham at the end of a day’s canvassing. Such a gathering may have been against Covid rules unless an exemption for a working event applied. Keir Starmer and other representatives have emphasised that they considered the exemption applied and no laws were broken. There is no reason to believe they deliberately flouted the law.
However, those who wished to discredit the Labour leaders tightened the noose, whether opposition politicians or Daily Mail reporters, and finally Durham Police succumbed to media pressure and, having originally said they would not investigate whether Covid laws were broken, announced they would investigate, as new evidence had emerged. Durham Police have a policy of not issuing fines retrospectively. This investigation is a year after the relevant event. There may or may not have been breaches of law. Does it really matter? The public and the police are being forced to focus on this by a scandal-hungry press. It is all politics, and the issues and circumstances facing Keir Starmer and his deputy are remarkably similar to those which faced Boris Johnson in what has been branded “partygate”. Perhaps the critical question in each case is whether the relevant leaders thought they were at a work event.
Even worse, Keir Starmer has now said he will resign if he is fined for breach of the law. He believed, he says, this was a working break in a work setting. It seems some diary entries may work against him. The Police may or not find otherwise. Some people will consider the rules were broken, others will not. What is so wrong is that his reputation has been tarnished by revelations and stirring, the sole purpose of which is to damage the man, for political ends. Having demanded that Boris Johnson resign simply for being under investigation, perhaps Keir Starmer should have resigned but that would be absurd as was his demand. Because he insists, along with all his party members, that Boris Johnson resigns because he was fined, Keir Starmer has no choice if he himself is fined: so his announcement that he will resign in that event is designed to take a virtue opportunity and make some gain out of a mess.
The investigation by Durham Police is a waste of their time. But they have been used and brow beaten to do it. This use by the media of their power is an abuse and morally wrong.
COMPARE PARTYGATE
There is no doubt that wrongly a culture seems to have emerged in Whitehall about gatherings during the pandemic which got out of hand, including perhaps in Downing Street itself, and the senior people in charge of management of Government Departments and Downing Street itself somehow lost the prudence of good judgement in their approach to working events: no doubt the Sue Gray report will demonstrate at least that. The publicity alone has been enough of a humiliation. It is difficult to believe that the Police would have got involved had there not been the incessant statements by opposition politicians and media opponents of Government about the alleged guilt of Boris Johnson, with constant accusations of lies etc. With sufficient repetition of any allegation, it is bound to acquire the veneer of truth – just as for example Putin repeats and repeats his fictions to the Russian people so that inevitably a large proportion of the population believe him. In the words of Lewis Carroll “What I tell you three times is true.”
However, the circumstances of Boris Johnson’s position can be fairly likened to that of Keir Starmer in his beergate gathering. Boris Johnson declares that he believed that his attendance with staff at gatherings in his workplace were legal, just as Keir Starmer in Durham. Assuming that is true, then there will have been no deliberate breach by either of them. Yet the UK has reached the ridiculous state of affairs where both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition may be forced out of office by incidents of complete triviality. Perhaps the most worrying aspect is that the Police, both the Met and Durham, were in both cases driven into investigations which were contrary to their policies, to satisfy political personal attacks designed to create as much trouble as possible for the leaders concerned. The pretence of caring about the British public was perhaps the most hypocritical background. Politicians of every hue seem today to spend so much energy and time engaged in seeking to insult and denigrate other politicians rather than getting on with the job. It is so much easier to conduct smear campaigns than real policy debate, because the media, whether traditional or social, latch on to whatever they can characterise as inappropriate to suit their agendas and spin allegations, to create as much public angst as possible. Trial by media is seriously undermining UK values.
COMPARE PUTIN
The disproportionality of these particular trials by media is brought into sharp relief by Putin and his cronies’ inhuman attempts to wipe a nation off the face of the earth. On a regular basis, the tone of media reporting of this war is less angry at times than the tone as applied to the partygate and beergate trivia. Some Broadcasters and journalists speak with more condemnation and disgust of Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer, depending on their agendas, than of Putin and his announcements which are often characterised as mealy-mouthed “unverified” or “without evidence”, when they are outright deliberate brainwashing with complete fiction. Is it not perversely bizarre that the approach of media such as the BBC and SKY to Putin, so plainly guilty of murderous crime, is almost the opposite of the normal trial by media? Instead of describing him as he is, they go out of their way to avoid judgement often suggesting that he has a right to be heard like anybody else, and so display their virtuous objectivity, which is so often discarded by presenters when addressing domestic politics. Why?
TRIAL BY MEDIA – WRONGFUL AND AVOIDABLE PANDEMIC CONVICTIONS
Trials by media (social and traditional) are normally based on hasty conclusions or knee-jerk reactions with wrong or incomplete or poorly presented information. A rollercoaster of allegations, insults, extreme language, with a lack of serious challenge and true honest debate in public, gets quickly created and feeds off itself. Perhaps misleading or exaggerated sound bites are invented and are repeated over and over until they acquire a life of their own even if wrong – the lesson of Lewis Carroll. They become hard to throw off. When the true facts are established, it is too late, the victims have been convicted, sentence pronounced, and all right of appeal expunged.
Take the media judgements made during the pandemic, often repeated over and over until they were regarded as truth, many based on incomplete or wrong information – as knowledge of Covid and how to deal with it grew, a rapid dynamic. A glaring “truth” at the time, which is now totally debunked, was that the UK had the worst deaths from Covid performance in the world, proven by daily league tables. The blame was laid at the door of Ministers of Government, convicted of not caring, recklessness, incompetence etc. The figures were used for political agendas of all sorts. Those Ministers of course did make mistakes and their defence of doing their best in the interests of the UK public fell to a considerable extent on deaf ears. The response of a few sane experts and of Government itself was to wait until the pandemic was over before passing judgement: “excess deaths” was the right criteria (which was not disputed by anyone serious). However, the vitriolic and critical repetition of the UK as the leader of the worst league table in the world at that time assured the conviction and sentencing of those held responsible.
Yet, at the start of May 2022, the pandemic worst thought to be over, the World Health Organisation published their definitive report which analysed the numbers of excess deaths of numerous countries during the pandemic. The UK was mid-table: and its performance was better than for example Germany, Italy and Spain as well as numerous other European countries and the U.S.A. To compare results published by individual nations as to the Covid deaths in their own countries as was done in the league tables in the media was patently shown to be flawed and misleading given the wide variation in the recording methods and their accuracy and the honesty of governments. In fact, the WHO found the UK to be the most accurate and honest in effect. A great many nations understated their Covid deaths to a considerable degree.
It is a truism to say that governments including the UK were having to make decisions on the hoof, with advisers often guessing, with poor information. But knee-jerk judgements and poor quality public discussion and the desire to find fault on a daily basis, and to denigrate without rational debate and with dramatization and sensationalism at the forefront, completely displaced sensible analysis and reason. Could it be that some, or even all, Ministers in good faith were doing their best in the public interest as they saw it, of course making errors, as Nicola sturgeon would say on numerous occasions, with reference to herself in mind? Those deemed responsible for the worst death performance were wrongly convicted in the kangaroo court of the media, but is it likely that the judge and jury will admit their error? See also “Now we know our ministers did ok against covid, but I hear no apologies” by Matthew Syed in Sunday Times of 8 May 2022.
It is time for politicians to focus on policy not personality. It is time for opinion no longer to be represented as fact. It is time for trials by media to be called out and stopped in their tracks as an affront to UK values and particularly to fairness.
