The Client Journalist

Never has journalism been so easy. Time was when you had to go out and ask questions. Now you just waited for No. 10 to ring you up and tell you what to print. Time was also when you had to get your facts right. Now you could print any old thing – we are the post-truth self-preservation society. No wonder Harvey looks so smug in his byline pic. Clean-shaven, because his readership regards facial hair as a sure sign of dangerous radicalism, pink-faced and slightly paunchy from being wined and dined by ministers purchasing a favourable spin, Harvey wallows in his proximity to power like a hippo in the Zambezi slime.

Harvey’s output is largely fictional and serves a narrow range of purposes: to make the government look good and the opposition look bad, and to stoke up the culture wars that keep the public outraged enough to read his columns. It goes without saying that he admires Boris Johnson. Not only was the PM once a journalist like him – exactly like him in fact, with the same wholescale disregard for truth – but since landing in No. 10 Boris has been a golden goose, laying one circulation-boosting egg after another. No wonder Harvey’s editor wants him propped up for as long as possible. Happily so do Harvey’s readers, if for rather different reasons. They all Backed Boris and nothing would stop them Backing Boris unless he actually murdered the Queen. All Harvey has to do is write what they want to read: that Boris personally supervised the vaccine roll-out, in fact he administered all 120 million injections himself; that Boris is leading the war against Putin – in fact he is Volodymyr Zelensky in a Mission Impossible mask. Truth, schmuth says Harvey. He can draw a clear distinction between his output and propaganda due to his unwavering belief in British exceptionalism: propaganda is the exclusive reserve of those nasty foreign regimes that we plucky Brits have always stood up to and defeated. What Harvey is doing is supporting the government in the best interests of the nation, which is quite different.

So tomorrow Harry’s readers will learn that crateloads of prosecco with punch-ups and puking in Downing Street are nothing compared to a bottle of beer with constituency work in Durham, and that whenever the moon is full Angela Raynor bites the heads off new-born babies. And they will believe every word. And when the gravity-defying Johnsonian edifice collapses, Harvey will crawl out from under the rubble clutching his little insurance policy: the notebooks he’s been filling for the last three years about the real goings-on in No. 10: the drugs and the drinking, the Russians and the racketeering, the bribery and the law-breaking. And his readers will believe that too and say they never voted for Boris Johnson because they could always tell he was a crook.

© C P Jenkinson 25/05/2022

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