Liz Gerard’s Notebook

1976 and all that

Did you close the curtains, get the fans whirring and hunker down with your pint mug of water or did you “Keep calm and carry on”, while reminiscing about 1976?

I remember that heatwave; I remember carrying washing-up bowls of dirty water up the garden to water tomatoes in my first attempt at vegetable growing; I remember minister for drought David Howell being urged to do a rain dance to bring relief.

I also remember the heatwave of 2003; I remember buying an over-priced “swimming pool” for my nine-year-old daughter; I remember my husband mocking me for choosing the hottest day in the year to sweep the greenhouse – pretty rich from a man busy laying paving slabs on a new patio; I remember driving through France where every tree was burnt brown, not a green leaf in sight.

I remember these years not because we coped and got on with our lives, but because they were standout events; one 46 years ago, one 19 years ago. But what about the other “hottest days” – in 2006, 2019, 2020, 2021? Nah. Nothing special. They’ve become too frequent.

And that is very much the point of this week’s heatwave; a point that half of our newspapers are choosing to brush aside. It’s much easier to quote Gary the lorry driver and his dinner lady wife Debbie or report on a sitcom actress tweeting a picture of her garden fence than to consider why their properties might have spontaneously combusted.

We started the week with Dominic Raab urging us to “enjoy the sunshine” – as though anyone in this administration should be advocating such activity after that infamous Downing Street emailed invite – while his own government’s agencies were issuing red alerts. We swiftly moved into cliché world, with toddlers clutching ice creams (is there anything less likely than a Mr Whippy to quench your thirst or cool you down?), bikini-clad lovelies lounging on beaches (the Mirror, which should know better, had three and a token bloke on its front on Tuesday), and teenagers diving off cliffs (alongside text telling us about other young people drowning).

Why oh why?

Then came the hand-wringing about how our infrastructure can’t stand the strain. Why aren’t transport companies prepared so that rails don’t buckle and roads don’t melt? Er, for the same reason we don’t have giant snowploughs on hand for 12ft drifts. Yes, Australia can cope with the heat (though even it struggles with bush fires); yes, America can cope with the frost. But we live in a temperate climate (for now) that doesn’t usually bring the extremes seen in those “coping” countries. It would be nice if everything worked all the time, but infrastructure costs money, and the columnists calling for “resilience” and “preparedness” are the same columnists who complain about ambulance response times, the lack of police and too-high taxes. Especially those green energy levies.

Meanwhile, with unheard-of wildfires breaking out across the country, the candidates to be our next prime minister have all come over all equivocal about the net-zero target. Because their microscopic electorate and their press backers want to junk it. (Or rather, they say “We’re not saying we’re going to ditch it, but can we afford it now?” or “We want it, but not if it costs working people money”, which is pretty much the same thing as saying “Leave it to the next generation to sort out.” Like social care.) For once, the incumbent prime minister said the right thing at his last Cabinet on Tuesday when he lauded his government for setting the target, which he described as “essential”.

For some strange reason, certain papers that reported him saying schools should stay open in the heat missed that bit of his parting address to his colleagues.

Heatwave hysteria?

Just as the words “global warming” eluded the Telegraph and Sun in their weather coverage yesterday – although they did appear on page 15 of the Telegraph in a story about Australian mammals dying out. “Climate change” was similarly hard to spot – a brief appearance in the Telegraph splash, and in a quote from a Met Office chief in the Sun, just before a sentence that started “Meanwhile one swimmer was missing last night…” Neither phrase made it to the Mail (*). It did, however, mention a low-emissions initiative in London (in a swipe at mayor Sadiq Khan) and find room to tell readers how much various fans cost to run (1p an hour for a desktop, 2p for a pedestal, which, to be fair, was quite useful to know, given my addiction – even pre-heatwave – to the one by my bed).

Consistency has never been the Mail’s strongest suit. But that was some handbrake turn yesterday from Tuesday’s sneering “Sunny day snowflake Britain had a meltdown” to the apocalyptic “Nightmare of the wildfires”. It was not, however, alone in having to be jolted into realising that this hot weather wasn’t a jolly jape, an excuse for an idle nation to bunk off while the nanny state over-reached itself.

The “what’s all the fuss about?” sentiment was all over the place. In the leaders – “Heatwave hysteria” from the Telegraph – in the opeds – “Time to get a grip on heat hysteria” in the Express – and in the letters pages, all those 1976 memories. I lost count of columnists moaning about the Met Office and the BBC, among others, for telling us to avoid excessive exertion and to keep the fluids flowing. It seemed particularly rich for The Times’s Matthew Parris to rail against being told to wear loose clothes in the same column in which he said how he hated to see public space trees suffering in too-small containers. Quite. It was a fair observation on something that might not have occurred to many people before. Just as it still doesn’t occur to some (by which I mean “me”, until I was shown the hack) that a bottle of frozen water wrapped in a towel might help to keep a cat cool. In a country where even yesterday people were leaving dogs in cars with all windows shut, can we honestly say that no one needs a bit of advice? What harm does it do?

A wake-up call?

Naturally, the “right on”, “woke” press has been taking, shall we say, a different approach. Yesterday’s Guardian splash saw the record temperatures as a “wake-up call” on climate change – having itself been half asleep the day before when it treated the heatwave as another excuse to attack Boris Johnson for “checking out while Britain swelters”. The i was much more on the case with its Tuesday lead “Earth sends a warning”, while in the Times, Hugo Rifkind and cartoonist Peter Schrank tried to yank readers away to more far-reaching concerns than sweltering guards in bearskins. By yesterday the message was sinking in, with the paper’s leader talking about the “urgent task” of cutting emissions and cartoonist Peter Brookes showing Sunak, Truss and Mordaunt pouring petrol on the flames threatening a green Conservative tree logo. But still readers were writing that people in Gulf countries work in the heat and what’s the matter with us all?

The Mail, Telegraph and Express letters pages all had more of the same. Whatever happened to Gary Jones’s big green initiative at the Express? Surely the past week has demonstrated more vividly than ever why it is needed?

Never mind the planet, let’s see a cute picture of a polar bear with an ice lolly.

Out of this world

If we don’t treasure our own planet, I guess it’s not surprising that there is less interest in the rest of the universe. But I was still dismayed by the underwhelming treatment of those fabulous space pictures from the James Webb telescope last week.

First the hurrahs, for the Guardian and The Times, which both used them as their main front page image, backed up with spreads inside – right forward on 4 and 5 in the Times.

The Mail, as you’d expect, also gave the pictures an inside spread and the i had one of the images in the puff. The Star, Sun and Telegraph all treated them as just another inside page picture. This was particularly disappointing from the Telegraph, which did use it big on page 11 – but big only in the sense that all its page-holding pix are big these days; this one was no grander than one of William and Kate on another day. As the only surviving broadsheet, this was the paper that had the space to make a really big show. But no, it was just another world page picture, while Rishi at a lectern claimed page one.

Still, that was better than the Mirror and Express. They both ignored the pictures altogether. Can you imagine that? Did they think they were fake or CGI or something? This was true scientific wonder. Ah, there’s the clue. Science. Unless it involves Professor Brian Cox (and, in this case, even if it does involve Professor Brian Cox - who was wheeled out for other titles), science remains a closed book for most of Fleet Street for most of the time.

Pity. If we took more notice or interest, maybe we wouldn’t have wildfires in Essex.

The race for No 10

So Paul Dacre got his way, as he is wont to do; Liz Truss will likely be installed in No 10 by the next time we meet*. And I wish I’d had that bet last year.

The Conservative leadership contest has been an interesting journalistic conundrum. There is clearly an abiding public interest in who would / should be our next prime minister, but so few people have a say in the matter that it begs the question how much air time / newsprint should be devoted to the subject. Even Tory MPs seem irrelevant this time round, since their preferred candidate was slated to lose against just about anyone who stood against him. The fate of the country lies squarely in the hands of the largely ERG-sympathetic party membership – the people who keep the faith and keep paying their subscriptions. It is their reward for loyalty.

One Nation Toryism is dead, centrism is dead, the moderate Remain-supporting wing of the party has been expunged. Never mind anything remotely to the left of Margaret Thatcher. For the vast majority of the country looking across the entire political landscape, there is nothing. For anyone who thinks sending desperate people to Rwanda is questionable, for anyone concerned about the country adhering to treaties it has signed, for anyone wanting action on climate rather than tax cuts, for anyone who thinks paying an electricity bill is a bigger concern than defining a woman or protecting a statue, there is nothing. All they can do is wait until 2024 when they can have their say.

The Mail line

But in the eyes of Mr (Lord?) Dacre, Ted Verity and their Mail titles, the prize is there for all to enjoy. They urged MPs (several times) to give Conservative members “a real choice” – the choice between a mega-rich man who doesn’t dare cut taxes yet and a not-so-rich woman who promised to slash them immediately. Some commentators speak of Truss as representing “the right” in this showdown with Rishi Sunak, as being the true torch-bearer for Brexit. Even though she voted Remain. (The Mail seems to like a repenting sinner – Theresa May also voted Remain and it was loyal to her to the bitter end.) Where does that, then, leave Sunak? He’s not what most voters would call a “moderate” or a “leftie”. For some reason, Ms Truss’s Brexit credentials, her promises to be tough on the Northern Ireland protocol, are seen as key. This is perplexing, given that in the Mail’s world, Boris Johnson is a hero for having “got Brexit done”. Surely then, the candidates’ attitudes to Brexit are as relevant as who they supported in the 2020 Cup Final? It’s supposed to have been done and dusted.

Of course it isn’t. Any more than 40 new hospitals have been built or social care has been fixed. But Ms Truss has two years to sort all that and it will have Mr Dacre and his team right behind her. So long as she sticks to his agenda. If she’s in any doubt about that proviso, she should have a riffle through the back numbers and see all the nice things the paper wrote about David Cameron and George Osborne – and, indeed, Rishi Sunak – back in the day. He’s a fickle master, is Mr Dacre.

The question is, how much influence does he really wield? Would Truss have made the final two without his campaign against Penny Mordaunt? And be in no doubt, it was a campaign. It wasn’t reporting. When the entire country and the rest of Fleet Street was focused on the weather, the Mail was focused on discrediting Mordaunt. Yesterday, when MPs were deciding who should feature on the members’ ballot paper, it was busy getting its retaliation in first, with Truss allies “warning” Sunak against “dirty backroom deals” that would see “part-time Penny” through and deny members a candidate from the right. Because Mordaunt, too, is apparently a leftie. Well, she’s too “woke” anyway. In the end, Truss came through with just eight votes more than the former defence secretary. Did ultimately unsuccessful “dirty backroom deals” deflate the Truss vote or did the Mail’s antagonism steal the prize from the woman who looked favourite to win only last week?

Target Mordaunt

We’ll probably never know. But what we can see is how the Mail’s talent for turning people into villains and heroes was put into play.

First target was the front-runner, with Rishi caught in a “toxic smears” storm and being “blasted” for “socialist taxes”. By contrast, it was all guns blazing for Truss. She is portrayed as wooing the right – “Back me or it’ll be Rishi”; “Unite or we’ll lose” – and as the true blue tax-cutter: “I’ll spike Sunak’s tax hike” (which was, of course, the Mail’s slogan); “Liz tax boost for families”.

But Mordaunt threatened to get in the way, so she had to be brought down. She made her first front-page appearance last Thursday as the double-column picture with the headline “New favourite Penny under fire for ‘lies’ on trans views”. Inside, there was a spread on the “backlash” at her shift in “trans storm”. Because, of course, the issue that most concerns everyone when thinking about who should be prime minister is their attitude to gender politics. The next spread was another attack on Sunak and the next Liz Truss “vowing” to hit the ground running.

With Mordaunt’s stock rising, the Mail stepped up a gear on Friday, splashing on “Mordaunt under the microscope”. This homed in on a piece Lord Frost wrote for the Telegraph saying he had “grave reservations” about her fitness to be prime minister and her general work ethic – an article that also made the splash for the Telegraph, but which highlighted him calling on Kemi Badenoch to stand down to clear the way for Truss. Inside, the Mail was true to its promise of putting her “under the microscope”: she had “failed to fight for women”; the person who wrote a book with her once posted a disobliging tweet about Tory “bigots”; officers “questioned” her navy record.

A troubling dossier

Then, on the next spread, came Andrew Pierce’s “exposé”, menacingly headlined “Her career to date has come under little scrutiny. So Tory MPs should read this troubling dossier before putting a cross next to her name again”. (Her career had, in fact, previously come under scrutiny from Mr Pierce, but more of that later.) The following spread had a “booster for Liz” and the leader celebrated the “hard Frost” descending on the Mordaunt campaign.

By this point, Sunak merits little attention. The Mail is pretty confident that whoever he faces will beat him and its main concern is to make sure that it’s Truss – to represent the “traditional” wing of the party.

But come Saturday, after the first TV debate, in which Truss was widely regarded as having come last (but obviously not by the Mail), he was back under fire with “Liz lays into Rishi on tax rises” and, two spreads further on, “Rishi’s petro bombshell: he wanted green tax on fuel (but No 10 blocked it)”. In between was a fresh attack on Mordaunt: “She couldn’t run a tea party in Holland Park” and another trans row (because the issue most voters care about is…) And then in piled Amanda Platell telling us how much she liked Penny, but the thought of her as PM filled her with horror.

Next day, the Mail on Sunday returned to the trans row and a leak that might (or might not) show that she did back self-ID. There’s more inside, and how her “trans ally” compared a feminist writer to the Nazis. Because not only do we know what is the most important issue for voters, but we also know that if we have a friend who says something others might not care for, then we are forever tarred with their brush. And, just in case readers weren’t clear where we’re going with this, the next page lead headline concludes – in capital letters – VOTE FOR LIZ. The leader column a few pages on agrees – and also has a tilt at Sunak with “Rishi’s whiff of Partygate hypocrisy”.

Monday saw the daily open a new front: “Mordaunt flouted No 10 ban to meet boycotted group” (the Muslim Council of Britain), with more inside and a return, yet again, to the most important question in British politics today: “Penny on trans U-turn row: I’m a victim of smears”. The ill-tempered televised debate that saw Truss and Sunak locking horns is relegated to the next spread, followed by another attack on Sunak.

With soaring temperatures deflecting almost everyone else (*), the Mail refused to take its eye off the ball, rejoicing on Tuesday as Mordaunt’s No 10 bid “hits the buffers”, and “Another boss blasts part-time Penny”, while another (my underscore) leader urged the right to coalesce behind Truss.

But back to the Mail and the run-up to the final vote yesterday. After the dirty deals warning in the splash, it served up a spread on “Penny’s trade storm”, an opinion piece on “I KNOW she’s trying to rewrite history on trans views”, a Stephen Glover page headlined “Part-time Penny is so obviously unfit to be PM, it beggars belief 92 MPs voted for her…”, and yet another leader saying the Tory grassroots must get a proper choice and “given serious concerns about Mordaunt’s work ethic…”, that meant Liz must triumph over Penny.

It’s hardly surprising that the paper is cock-a-hoop today, splashing on Truss promising an emergency tax-cutting budget and giving her its first two news pages to set out her stall – all the things the Mail wants: tax cuts, an end to wokery and cancel culture, a bonfire of EU regulations, and a promise to “stand up to those who talk down our country”. Where have we heard that phrase before? It’s almost as though the piece were dictated from the editors’ suite in Derry Street.

Never has a Mail leader had a more honest opening sentence: “Well, that’s a relief!”

Whoever wins, it continues, we know we’ll have a serious, heavyweight PM (a modest downpayment on future exhortations to vote for Sunak in 2024 if the Mail’s woman falls at the final hurdle). But that eight-vote defeat of the trans rights flip-flopping, Muslim-meeting Mordaunt had been a “darned close-run thing”. “Thank heavens her former bosses and the free press – led by the Daily Mail – scrutinised her and sounded the alarm.”

Yes, the leader really does say that.

Few would argue against the principle of scrutinising those seeking the highest office. But this is the paper that has for the past three years defended a man sacked at least three times for lying, a man who agreed to help have a journalist beaten up, a man who has not been notable for his diligence in office, a man who broke his own laws, the laws of the country and is willing to break international law, a man brought down by the ministers he himself appointed because of their concerns about his lack of integrity.

If Mordaunt is, indeed, a lazy liar who broke the rules (it’s not for me to say), then, yes, she might well be unfit for office. But it’s a bit late for the Mail to discover that these are fatal flaws in a prime minister. Even as Dominic Lawson continues to fight in its pages today for Johnson to be “written in” to the ballot paper and continue in office.

Making a splash

But the Mail hasn’t always been so Penny-averse. As we’ve been endlessly reminded, she once appeared in the reality series Splash. After that, if her photograph appeared in the Mail, it was generally in the blue swimming costume she wore for the programme. In early 2016, she came to the attention of the aforementioned Andrew Pierce, who compiled a spread on MPs who “flaunted their agendas”. The piece was inspired by a Commons appearance by then Home Secretary Theresa May showing a little too much décolleté. But come the referendum campaign, the swimsuit shots were left in the files and Mordaunt was pictured in business suit as she claimed that Turkey would soon join the EU and that millions of Turks would be freed to move here.

The paper was pleased, too, the following year when May promoted “the ardent Brexiteer” to be international development secretary after Priti Patel was dismissed for that unauthorised meeting in Israel. A spread picturing Mordaunt in both swimming costume and trouser suit was headlined “In at the deep end” and featured a sympathetic profile by one Andrew Pierce labelled “Bawdy, bold and sure to make a splash”. It concluded: “With her flair for publicity and her impeccable Brexit credentials, Penny Mordaunt will hope to be able to navigate her way through the choppy waters of Cabinet life.

But she will be well aware of the fate of her namesake, HMS Penelope ... which was sunk in 1944 by German torpedoes.”

And guess who fired the torpedoes that sunk her hopes of moving into No 10?

PS: Looking back to the more recent Pierce “dossier”, the second headline on the spread asked: “After all this vitriol, who’ll put Humpty Dumpty Tory party back together again?” Vitriol? Surely not.

But you can bet that Sunak will be on the receiving end of something very much like it throughout this summer. Especially if polls suggest he has any chance of winning.

The build-her-up, knock-him-down campaign is well under way and one weapon of choice is already in evidence: a price tag on every item in Sunak’s wardrobe. Today it’s his “£3,500 bespoke suit”. I hate to spoil the Mail’s fun, but, despite his deliberately dishevelled persona, I rather suspect that Mr Johnson’s better-cut suits come with a similar price tag.

Having fun with headlines

When is a cliché not a cliché? We saw a lot of “tinderbox Britain” yesterday, which was a bit unimaginative, not entirely accurate, but probably not a cliché. What would the Mirror’s master of words Keith Waterhouse have thought? I am drawn to quote from his bible On Newspaper Style: “Cliches should be avoided by writers in general because reach-me-down phraseology has no place in original prose. They should be avoided by journalists in particular because it is the tendency of clichés to generalise, approximate or distort. Having said that, let us now hear Fowler quoting J. A. Spender: ‘the hardest-worked cliché is better than the phrase that fails…’”

The ultimate heatwave cliché is, of course, “Phew! What a scorcher!” No one would write that now, but what about variations? Waterhouse was unimpressed by subs who would labour what he called “catchwords” to death. Heaven knows what he would think of all the Great British Bake Off / Fake Off / Take Off / Bunk Off headlines that have disgraced the tabs over the past ten years, but I think he might have smiled on the Sun subs who had a bit of fun with the old favourite over the past couple of days.

And, after last time’s Beatles compendium, how about this effort in The Times on Bob Dylan banning mobiles from his upcoming concerts? Maybe not a complete zinger, but pleasing nonetheless.

Front page of the fortnight

The Guardian goes in for quite a bit of collaborative journalism, often with the Washington Post and the International Consortium for Investigative Journalism. It generally involves whistle-blowers and leaked documents numbering in the tens of thousands. In this case, the target was the Uber taxi business and the way it lobbied people in power. Quite a dry, but worthy subject. As the issues at the heart of these Guardian enterprises are.

In the past, we have seen the Panama Papers, the Pandora Papers and, of course the Edward Snowden and Julian Assange leaks. They have all produced some sensational and alarming stories that Fleet Street rivals have been curiously restrained in following up. There certainly has been none of the “grab the first edition” enthusiasm that came with the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses exposé.

Uber trying to persuade governments to pass helpful legislation is hardly in the same league – it’s not exactly unusual, for a start. Businesses – including media companies - and special interest groups do it all the time. But it was still surprising to see the lukewarm response from the rest of our newspapers: five pars in the Mirror, a single column in the Times, a few pars about the naming of the whistle-blower in the Telegraph. There wasn’t even much celebration of an uncomfortable moment for Emmanuel Macron.

Maybe the Guardian’s coverage was overblown – when you’ve put that much investment into a project, you have to give it as much wellie as you can – but I think it should still be applauded.

If only for reminding us that there should still be room for real journalism as well as soap opera.