Of dead cats, engagements and babies

Ever since Boris Johnson romped into power with an 80-seat majority last December, he has created a cottage industry of dead cat-dumping. He got into training years before the election when he explained the art of dumping a dead cat on the dining room table to create a distraction when you're losing an argument in a column for The Telegraph in 2013. 

And last June, when he wanted to be the Conservative Party leadership frontrunner without any of the scrutiny, he took the heat off by claiming to paint wooden models of London buses for fun. As a bonus, this weird claim helped drop Google results about dishonest Brexit referendum claims emblazoned on buses, and his shameful waste of public money with the dreadful "Boris buses" when he was mayor of London, way down the list.

So it comes as no surprise that the PM's lust for dropping dead cats continues apace, now he has the job to which he has felt entitled since he was a boy. 

Reviving the ridiculous idea of a bridge between two remote points in Scotland and Northern Ireland a few weeks ago was a classic of the deceased feline genre. Johnson knows full well why it would be an expensive, dangerous engineering nightmare, although this probably won't stop him spending more of our money on a feasibility study even though the outcomes are a foregone conclusion. 

It took a serious brass neck to drop the big bridge dead cat - Johnson does not have a great track with bridges. The Garden Bridge debacle from his time as mayor wasted millions of pounds of public money, raised as-yet-unanswered questions about corruption and conflicts of interest, and the stupid project was ultimately, mercifully abandoned by an exasperated Sadiq Khan, his successor as mayor of London. It was the inevitable result of letting Joanna Lumley dictate urban planning.

But talking up a big, dumb bridge between Scotland and Northern Ireland was an excellent distraction from big issues around that time, such as the Streatham stabbing, which could be directly attributed to the early release of terrorist offenders on the watch of the Conservative governments over the past decade. This dead cat also stalled any proper scrutiny of the UK's Brexit negotiation preparations ahead of talks with the EU, which are due to resume this month. What a handy fictional bridge that was!

And yesterday, we were treated to the news of Boris Johnson's engagement to Carrie Symonds, complete with an early summer baby on the way. But this does not necessarily automatically fall into the category of dead cat, despite Twitter last night exploding with claims of ex-pussies. There were a few appalling commentators urging Carrie to take advantage of Britain's liberal abortion laws - but here's the thing about being pro-choice. It means you do not condemn women for making choices that you wouldn't make for yourself. 

Even with Johnson's notorious virility, it is preposterous to suggest that he and Carrie planned a productive bunk-up late last year that would coincide with an engagement/pregnancy announcement to fall on a weekend where the Sunday papers had plenty of embarrassing front page options. 

Anyone who knows about female biology would realise they have been aware of the pregnancy for a while, and anyone who knows about the Conservative Party's need to appeal to social conservatives would realise the announcement would have to wait until after Johnson finalised his divorce with Marina Wheeler, his second wife. Who knows if they really did get engaged last December and, frankly, who cares? It was just a necessary part of the announcement to appeal to Tory pearl clutchers. And the pregnancy announcement obviously couldn't be delayed forever. 

In any case, if it was a dead cat, it was a pretty unsuccessful one. While the engagement/pregnancy made its way to most front pages - and it is naive to expect otherwise - it was really only The Sunday Telegraph which went for the full-on, Hello!-magazine-style gush-fest. I'm not surprised there was no byline on that story - any journalist with even the tiniest shred of credibility would be embarrassed to have that on their CV.

The Mail on Sunday ran the Instagram photo of a stubbled Johnson kissing the cheek of a beaming Carrie but tempered the soppy, sickly claim to an "exclusive inside story of their love" with a "CRIPES!", which was probably the reaction of plenty of people across the country yesterday. And across the bottom of the front page is a damning story about a leaked government memo that demonstrates that not being content to "fuck business", Boris Johnson may well be tempted to fuck farmers as well in his quest to give Dominic Cummings his wet dream Brexit.

The Independent ran an old photo of the happy couple with a discreet caption but went big, and rightly so, on Sir Philip Rutnam's departure from the Home Office amid claims of bullying, lying and intimidation by Home Secretary, Priti Patel.  Bizarrely, the apologists for this wretched government seem to think Priti Patel's existence as a powerful woman of Asian heritage is some sort of gotcha-headfuck for those who oppose this government. Nope, sorry, Johnson fans, Priti Patel does not get a leave pass from scrutiny because of her gender or ethnicity. How patronising.

The Sunday Times and The Observer also led with the Home Office troubles, with both pieces holding Priti Patel's feet to the fire. The ST added a teaser for an exclusive on the forthcoming budget with news of entrepreneurs losing a big tax break. The engagement/pregnancy headline was a wry "What a good day to announce a No 10 baby", while The Observer went with a picture caption of the happy couple, and a story at the bottom about Matt Hancock's absurd plans to pull NHS doctors out of retirement to deal with the coronavirus. 

The Sunday Mirror made the obvious "Carrie to go into labour" pun and described her salaciously as the "PM's lover" in a splash of barely disguised judgement. But the lead story was still an exclusive on Mo Farah's ongoing drug row.  

And The Daily Star, which exists in its own glorious bubble of madness, had no mention of engagements or babies at all. Instead, it went big with "QUACKERS - Plastic ducks barred from charity race to save the planet", along with some Love Island gossip.

So it was reassuring that, apart from the Sunday Telegraph, the newspapers weren't too badly distracted by the PM's personal announcement, news that was, in all honesty, as predictable as it is banal.

Of course, the ball is now in Johnson and Symonds' court - with wedding plans and a baby due in a few months, there are plenty of dead cats they could gleefully drop, especially if negotiations with the EU go as pear-shaped as many expect. 

There are golden opportunities for pictures of an engagement ring to be sent out into the ether, wedding dress design speculation is compulsory, maybe some hints will be dropped about the decor of a Downing Street nursery, and because every pregnant woman in the public eye must have her private choices exposed, there is plenty of scope for the "Will Carrie give birth naturally to whale music?" genre of intrusive journalism. 

Will they opt for privacy or will they happily let fluffy wedding-and-baby stories take on a life of their own next time Johnson cuts his own throat, fucks up, or would rather not face hard questions about the path on which he and Classic Dom are dragging the country?  

Photography by rawdonfox/Flickr

Douchebags dancing on the grave of the Independent

It was announced this week that the Independent will shut down its print edition next month and be the first daily newspaper in the UK to be 100% online.

Inevitably, there were cloth-eared dullards who celebrated this downsizing of the Indy's operations because it was all a bit too lefty for their liking. Yeah, because the newspaper landscape in Britain is currently dominated by extreme left-wing journalism and opinion pieces...

Up to 100 jobs are under threat. Again, assorted buffoons will be delighted at the prospect of journalists being out of work. Amol Rajan has been placed in the unenviable position as editor of the Indy of having to defend the move to 100% online and put a positive spin on it all in TV interviews.

But dancing on the grave of unemployed journalists and a defunct newspaper is a dick move. And I say this in regard to the demise of the printed Independent and the News of the World, even though these newspapers ended in very different circumstances.

Obviously, as a journalist myself I get no joy out of seeing fellow journalists lose their jobs, whether I liked the paper or not. Obviously, anything that makes the market harder for both staff jobs and freelance work potentially has an impact on me and my husband, who is also a journalist. That is my vested interest declared.

But on a wider level, when we end up with a smaller media, with a smaller number of journalists reporting the news, with a tighter circle of opinion columnists, with fewer sources of information, everyone loses. We lose diversity, we lose journalism that tells stories from multiple angles, from angles that might not have occurred to many, we have media outlets running on the smell of an oily rag, we have editors having to determine which story gets the airplay and which one doesn't, because of a lack of staff and resources.

And we are all to blame for this sorry state of affairs. All of us, myself included.

I am not about to declare myself Saint Georgia of the Printed Page. While my day job involves editing a magazine for the African market, where print is still king, as a consumer of media, I get vast swathes of my information online now. Sure, I pick up a copy of Metro to read on my commute to work and pick up a copy of the Evening Standard for the ride home, and both newspapers are important in the media landscape, but it'd be daft to get all my information from just those two sources. I am not Sarah Palin. I can actually name multiple newspapers.

The Metro and the Evening Standard rely on advertising sales rather than copy sales and that presents its own editorial challenges for the editorial teams.

And I have fallen out of the habit of buying newspapers, as I suspect many of us have. I fondly remember a time, more than a decade ago, when I shared a house with my best friend in Sydney. Every Sunday, we'd buy both Sunday papers, divvy them up into the sections and line them up on the living room floor. I liked to start with the hard news, business and sport and then read the lighter sections, and my friend preferred to start with the lighter stuff and finish with the news. It was a magnificent system whereby we'd wile away the afternoon, each of us starting at one end of the line of sections, passing each other somewhere in the middle, and finishing at the other end.

The last time I bought a newspaper, it was the i, the Independent's condensed baby brother newspaper. I had an hour to kill between appointments at my local hospital and I fancied reading something that wouldn't make me want to punch a wall and would fit nicely in my handbag, because I was getting the bus home. That was almost two months ago. The paper cost me all of 20p. Twenty of my British pence has been my sole contribution to this country's newspaper industry this year.

And in the end, it is all about economics.

When print sales started to decline and newspapers wised up to the fact that they needed to go online, the conundrum of how to make money out of the internet affected every outlet. Some newspapers are trying paywalls for all their online content, some are offering a limited number of free articles before you have to put your hand in your pocket, and some are hoping that advertising revenue will be enough to fund the operation while keeping the web content free to access.

It is particularly pathetic when someone uses the comments section of an online article to complain about the advertising. It takes all my self-control not to reply to their comment by saying: "THE ADVERTISEMENTS ARE THERE SO YOU DON'T HAVE TO PAY FOR ONLINE CONTENT AND SO THAT THE JOURNALISTS WHO WRITE THE ARTICLES ACTUALLY GET PAID, YOU INTELLECTUALLY MILD COCKWOMBLE!".

I have no time for fools who refuse to understand that someone has to be paid for writing and researching material for the internet. We journalists generally love our jobs and couldn't imagine doing anything else for a living but, just like everyone else, we have bills to pay. Doing something for the sheer love is only an option for the independently wealthy. And do you want a media where only the fabulously wealthy can afford to work in it?

So, we as media consumers, need to take responsibility. If we want good quality journalism but don't want to pay for it, we have to accept that the media outlets will need to find other ways to pay their staff and keep the office lights on, even if that means you have to sit through a 30-second advertisement or having to close an annoying pop-up. That really is the ultimate first world pain.

If you don't like ads with your news, you'll have to pay for your news.

Few of us are prepared to go back to the pre-internet days. After all, it is now so much easier not only to read an article but to share it as well. A few clicks and you can post a story on your Facebook page, tweet it, or email it to your entire address book. Gone are the days when my mother would cut out a newspaper article and post it to me. These days, she will email me the link. It is so much easier and more efficient to share an article online than it is to call everyone you know and tell them to go out and buy a newspaper and turn to a certain page.

This is how we get our information now. And nobody wants to give that up. But before you get excited about unemployed journalists or whine about advertising or paywalls, at least try to understand the simple economics.