Not so long ago the spectrum of our mainstream press shone brightly enough to be clearly visible.
The Mail stood for the Thatcher brand of oxymoronic conservative radicalism, with a slight American accent overlaid on its lower-middleclass lilt.
The Telegraph enunciated the traditional God, king and country Toryism, and its accent was born in top public schools, only to be flattened out in later life.
The Times was a residually Tory paper, however one whose allegiance was not so much to the Tory philosophy as to the Tory party. Speaking in the accents of minor public schools, it would vote for Fidel Castro, if only he agreed to sport a blue rosette.
The Independent belied its name by being a committed Labour, which is to say socialist, paper. It was nostalgic for the 1970s, when Britain was ‘the sick man of Europe’. The paper’s accent was similar to that of The Times, but straining to move into the phonetic area signposted by glottal stops and dropped aitches.
The Guardian was The Independent with cultural pretensions. Hence no glottal stops or dropped aitches. No commitment specifically to socialism either – the paper was ready to tout any ideology hostile to what Tony Blair called ‘the forces of conservatism’, which is to say traditional England.
Then the world went topsy-turvy: Labour under Tony and later the Tories under Dave converged in the middle.
This convergence went by the name of modernisation, which, in common with most words in the modern political lexicon, meant something other than what its name suggests.
As wielded by Tony and ‘the heir to Blair’ Dave, the word really stands for replacing the two parties’ core principles with unadulterated powerlust.
Labour ‘modernisers’ were prepared to compromise their socialist superstitions for the sake of acquiring power. Tory ‘modernisers’ worshiped the same deity and hence were ready to sacrifice their party’s erstwhile convictions at the same altar.
However, Tony and later Dave didn’t have a free ride.
The parties’ leaders were ready to devour their principles, but the principles proved too big to swallow whole. Their leftovers survived at the grassroots and on the back benches – and they began to bite back.
As a result, Tony’s ‘New Labour’ was supplanted by Miliband’s old-fashioned Marxists in hock to the unions.
But Marxism, which is to say the urgent desire to destroy the West, had never disappeared from the modern Labour party. Tony had just dressed it up to look good to the country.
That’s why Labour’s reversion to radical socialism hasn’t destroyed the party’s unity any more than changing from a blazer into a T-shirt would destroy a man.
The Labour cause was bolstered by Zeitgeist, the spirit emanating from Britain’s largely corrupted populace. The country seems to have reached the critical mass of corruption, with sufficient numbers dependent on a socialist state ready to vote Labour as an election-swinging bloc.
The Tory party, on the other hand, has chucked its heritage altogether, with the ardour of a neophyte.
Under Dave’s subversive leadership, people with traditional Tory views have lost their pride of place within the Tory party.
Unlike old-fashioned Marxists who still sit at the left elbow of the leader, old-fashioned conservatives, those unwilling to betray everything they hold dear, have to get up and leave.
Hence the rapid rise of Ukip, a party positioning itself as a haven for real conservatives betrayed by the Tories. After the recent defection of Tory MP Douglas Carswell, Ukip is about to become a parliamentary party, and it’s certain to acquire a few more MPs in the next election.
Hence also the brewing insurgency on the Tory back benches, where some 100 younger MPs don’t really believe that homosexual marriage is as good as any other, or that Britain would be better off as a province of the EU.
Unlike the purely tactical divergences between the socialists and the ‘modernisers’ within Labour ranks, the fundamental conflict among the real and ‘modernising’ Tories is tearing the party apart – to a point where it’s likely to lose the next election.
This on-going game of musical chairs has confused the papers on the right of the political spectrum. They no longer know whom – or what – to support.
The Times, which has for years put party allegiance before any principles, seems to be convinced that the Tories must become like Labour if they want to win an election in the name of conservatism.
To that end the paper is running the kind of stories that 20 years ago Guardian editors would have spiked for being too leftwing. The Times has left its cherished centrist position to become downright sinister – or gauche, if you’d rather (notice how foreign words for ‘left’ all have pejorative connotations in English).
The Mail sympathises with Ukip, and only its well-justified dread of the catastrophe, which the Milibandits will surely wreak when in power, prevents the paper from endorsing Nigel Farage in so many words.
That leaves The Telegraph, and it’s hard not to feel its pain. Caught between the Scylla of Tory ‘modernisation’ and the Charybdis of its traditionally conservative readership, the paper is trying to feed both animals, leaving both hungry.
This explains the presence of someone like Dan Hodges among its columnists. The son of Glenda Jackson, Britain’s answer to ‘Hanoi’ Jane Fonda, Hodges vindicates the old proverb about an apple and the tree.
In a recent article this career Labour apparatchik bemoans the less than dominant position of Tory ‘modernisers’, positively gloating about the impending demise of the party.
“Who are the Tory equivalents [of Labour ‘modernisers’]?” he asks. “The people who understand that 21st century Conservatism cannot be built upon isolationism, Fifties-style social puritanism and reheated Thatcherism? …Where are the articles… arguing not that Carswell is an electoral and tactical nuisance, but that he and his Ukip colleagues are fundamentally, ideologically wrong?”
“There is still hope for the Left,” rejoices The Telegraph through Hodges. Indeed there is. I’m less sure there’s hope for England.
Carswell ‘and his Ukip colleagues’ are real conservatives, something that’s anathema to Hodges and Dave, who openly admits that Glenda’s boy is his favourite columnist.
That’s the Tory PM openly admiring a professional and not very bright leftie, on the staff of a traditionally Tory newspaper. No wonder I’m confused and disgusted at the same time.