Piers Morgan – Blood and Porridge

May 19, 2026

The comeback kid

From wikipedia.org / © Scottish Government

I’ve always had an unhealthy obsession with politics. Lately, however, I’ve written less about the subject on this blog because my obsession was becoming literally unhealthy – ruminating on politics and politicians in 2026 was filling my head with dark and depressing thoughts. Nonetheless, I’ll now make some comments about the election for the Scottish Parliament, which happened on May 7^th. That day also saw elections for the Welsh Senedd and for various local authorities in England, but I’ll only mention those in passing.

If you’re not a political anorak, you might want to skip this.

So: the results were 58 seats for the Scottish National Party (down six from the previous election in 2021); 17 for Scottish Labour (down five); 17 for Reform UK (up 17); 15 for the Scottish Greens (up seven); 12 for the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party (down 19); and ten for the Scottish Liberal Democrats (up six).

Despite securing six seats less than their 2021 total, and seven seats short of a parliamentary majority, the result was impressive for the SNP in that this is the fifth election in a row where they’ve ended up as the biggest, government-forming party. Keir Starmer’s Labour government at Westminster, which hasn’t been in power for two years yet and is already as popular as a fart in a spacesuit, would kill for such longevity and durability.

It’s also quite a comeback for SNP leader John Swinney. Originally Swinney served as SNP leader from 2000 to 2004, when his party was in opposition in the Scottish Parliament. It wasn’t a happy experience for him. In the 2003 Scottish election his party dropped from 35 to 28 seats and the following year he resigned. He later described being opposition leader as “the worst, most awful, most sapping, most soul-destroying job in politics…”

Having enjoyed spells as a cabinet minister and Deputy First Minister, Swinney was planning to retire at this year’s election. However, in May 2024, after the affable but hapless Humza Yousaf resigned as First Minister, Swinney surprised everyone by standing unopposed for – with his famous negotiating skills, he managed to sweet-talk the formidable likes of Kate Forbes into not running against him – and winning the leadership again, 20 years after losing it. And this time, he became First Minister of Scotland too. Many assumed he would act as a ‘caretaker’ FM, until someone younger and with more chutzpah came along, but thanks to this election result he’s likely to be around for a while.

While I’d never describe Swinney as someone who sets the heather alight, and if he got a fiver every time someone likened his demeanour to that of a bank manager he’d probably be a billionaire by now, I have to say I think he’s a decent guy and I’d rather have him in charge of Scotland than most other Scottish politicians. I’m biased in this regard. As I wrote on this blog before, I encountered him a couple of times during my youth, via my old schoolmate Roger Small, who was best friends with him at university, and I liked him. But it’s not just me. Most people, political friends and foes alike, seem to like Swinney.

Even the world’s most horrible man, Donald Trump, has a soft spot for him. In 2025, Trump declared, “John Swinney is a terrific guy — and loves golf and loves the people of this country, and we really appreciate it.” Yes, I know that Trump thinks Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un are the bees’ knees, so being liked by him isn’t necessarily a ringing endorsement of your character.

More recently, when Trump announced the removal of US tariffs on Scotch whisky, Swinney claimed this was due in part to a meeting he had with the US president last September. He was criticised for saying this by the UK government’s Secretary of State for Scotland Douglas Alexander, who argued that trade agreements weren’t in the remit of a leader of a devolved administration. But after the election result, Trump messaged, “Congratulations to John Swinney on winning his Re-Election for First Minister of Scotland. He is a good man, who worked very hard along with the King and Queen of the United Kingdom, with respect to Tariff Relief for Great Scottish Whiskey – and deserves this Big Electoral Victory!” So now, Dougie Alexander looks a bit of a chump.

Trump, being a low IQ individual, misspelt ‘Scottish whisky’ as ‘Scottish whiskey’. The stuff spelt with an ‘e’ is actually made in Ireland.

From wikipedia.org / © Scottish Parliament / youtube.com

Elsewhere, Scottish Labour and the Scottish Conservatives had their worst ever performances in a Scottish parliamentary election. Labour leader Anas Sawar hit the headlines back in February when he demanded that Keir Starmer resign as British Prime Minister: “The situation in Downing Street is not good enough. There have been too many mistakes.” Sarwar’s resignation-call distanced him and his branch of the Labour party from the wildly unpopular Starmer and it generated a lot of publicity at the time. But when Starmer said no, he wouldn’t be resigning, it looked less like a political earthquake and more like a mild political bowel-movement. It highlighted Sarwar’s place as Scottish party leader in the great scheme of things – not high. It also meant Starmer was embarrassingly conspicuous by his absence in Scotland when Labour started campaigning for the election there.

The Scottish Tories have been reduced to a rump, their number of Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs) barely in double figures. Their leader Russell Findlay has tried to talk them up in the Tory-friendly pages of the Scottish Daily Mail, describing them as the ‘Dynamic Dozen’. I wouldn’t describe any dozen that includes such numpties as Murdo Fraser, the man who once asked Donald Trump if he’d consider buying Glasgow Rangers Football Club, as ‘dynamic’. Maybe ‘dysfunctional’ or ‘dystopian’.

Following a near-extinction event caused by their coalition with the Conservatives in Westminster in the early 2010s, the Liberal Democrats have enjoyed something of a revival. The passing of time has clearly detoxified their reputation a little in folk’s memories. That said, I don’t know how anyone can stomach their Scottish leader Alexander Cole-Hamilton, who to me comes across as being insufferably arrogant.

And the Scottish Greens have almost doubled their representation in the parliament. Without wishing to downplay this achievement, I suspect they enjoyed the best of both worlds in relation to the English and Welsh Greens – a separate party – south of the border. They benefited from the wave of enthusiasm, and publicity, that their southern counterparts experienced earlier this year. Simultaneously, as a separate party, they were distant enough from them to escape the more recent backlash against the English / Welsh party’s leader Zack Polanski, who stupidly retweeted something about the attack on two Jewish men in Golders Green and then suffered an all-out assault from the right-wing media determined to portray him as an antisemite. (This despite Polanski being Jewish himself and despite some of the media’s caricatures of him being… hideously antisemitic.)

The Scottish Greens are co-led by Gillian Mackay and the chirpy Ross Greer. I know Greer is a ‘Marmite’ politician for many, but I like how he puts the wind up gammons like Piers Morgan.

From youtube.com / © ITV

With the SNP on 58 MSPs, and the pro-Scottish-independence Greens on 15, 73 MSPs now support Scotland leaving the United Kingdom, as opposed to 56 unionist MSPs who don’t. It’s the parliament’s biggest ever pro-independence majority. Of course, you won’t have heard much about that fact from Scotland’s (unionist-owned) mainstream media, who instead have obsessed on a different fact – that the parliament suddenly has 17 far-right Reform MPs. Nigel Farage’s extremist party had representation there before, thanks to one MSP defecting to them from the Conservatives. But today, with Labour, they’re the joint-second biggest party.

This has prompted journalists like the Times’s Kenny Farquharson to declare ‘the death of Scottish exceptionalism’ – Scottish exceptionalism being the idea that Scottish voters are more community-orientated, more considerate of their fellow citizens, more leftwing and, generally, nicer than voters than those elsewhere in the UK, especially in England. Reform’s showing proves that, no, the Scots are just as right-wing and awful as everyone else.

Well, I find it nauseating that the parliament contains 17 MSPs who, if their party ever came to power, would enact Trump-style authoritarian and racist policies. One of them, Senga Beresford, representing the South Scotland region, has already caused controversy by expressing admiration for fascist lout Stephen Yaxley-Lennon on social media. But I derive some comfort from the fact that none of those MSPs were elected through the parliament’s first-past-the-post, constituency-based voting system, responsible for deciding 73 of the 129 MSPs. Reform’s 17 sneaked in afterwards, via the additional, regional-based ‘list’ system. Also, the Conservatives won 31 seats at the previous election, but have been culled to 12, and that number plus Reform’s 17 puts the total number of right-wingers at 29 – two less than before.

I certainly don’t see Scotland as being exceptional, i.e., better than anywhere else. I’ve met plenty of Scots who’ve been arseholes as much as arsehole-y people from other places. But Scotland is still different from other parts of the UK. If it wasn’t different, it wouldn’t have its own languages, literature, music, sports teams, legal system, educational system, etc. It wouldn’t have been scunnered by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s while people elsewhere were proclaiming her the new, handbag-wielding messiah. It wouldn’t have voted heavily against Brexit when people in England and Wales voted for it. It wouldn’t have its own independence movement with, now, a 57% majority in the Scottish parliament. I know that sticks in the craws of unionist politicians and journalists who’d have you believe that Scotland is absolutely indistinguishable from the rest of the UK, that a punter from Elgin is identical to a punter from Ely.

Talking of journalists, the coverage of the election in the Scottish mainstream media was woeful. The unionist newspapers (i.e., nearly all of them) spent half the time wailing “Everything in Scotland is shite!” and the other half wailing, “How dare anyone suggest doing anything even vaguely radical to improve things!” Swinney’s proposal that, in an emergency, the Scottish government should put a cap on the price of essential food products so that poor people could still buy them, was met with hoots of derision – and the sneering observation that the UK government would never allow it. (A Labour government – “For the many, not the few” – denying someone the right to keep essential foodstuffs affordable for the nation’s poorest people? Not a great look.)

I thought the recent opinion-piece by Scottish journalist Stephen Daisley in the Spectator, calling on the Labour and Conservative parties to get rid of the UK’s devolved parliaments (“Dr. Frankenstein would understand that it was his duty to put down the hideous creature his foolishness and vanity unleashed on the world”), was bad enough. But the articles that his fellow Scottish journo Chris Deerin penned about Scottish Reform leader Malcolm Offord, for the supposedly left-wing New Statesman, went to arse-licking extremes where no article has gone before.

And now, with Plaid Cymru’s Rhun ap Iorwerth the First Minister in Cardiff, and Sinn Fein’s Michelle O’Neill the First Minister in Belfast, all three devolved governments in the United Kingdom are helmed by people who see their nations’ futures as being outside that supposedly united kingdom. Interesting times indeed…

But you won’t ever read about that in the newspapers.

From wikipedia.org / © User Colin

January 4, 2023January 10, 2023

Mad-lands

From wikipedia.com / © gov.uk

The last time I gazed into the abyss of British politics and wrote about what I saw there, it was September 2022 and Liz Truss had just been crowned leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, taking over from that unrepentant, lawbreaking blond blob Boris Johnson. That was a mere four months ago. What’s happened since then seems a cavalcade of chaos and insanity. To contemplate it again, and attempt to make sense of it all, feels like a risk to my own sanity. As Fredrich Nietzsche warned, “…when you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

But oh well. Here goes.

So, Prime Minister Liz Truss. What could go wrong? Everything, basically, at top speed. On September 23^rd, she and her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng unveiled a plan to cut tax on the largest scale for 50 years and pay for it all by increasing government borrowing. This spooked the world’s markets in the abrupt and dramatic manner that uttering the name ‘Dracula’ would spook an inn-ful of 19^th century Carpathian peasants. The pound plummeted, banks and building societies yanked 40% of their mortgage products off the market, the Bank of England started buying UK government bonds to re-establish calm and save pension funds, and 30 billion pounds were added to the British Treasury’s fiscal hole, which effectively doubled it.

Acting on a comment in the Economist that Truss’s grip on power was likely to be as long as ‘the shelf-life of a lettuce’, the Daily Star – a tabloid newspaper not normally known for its political acumen – set up a live stream where a picture of Liz Truss sat beside a limp, green and gradually decaying leaf-vegetable and viewers were asked, “Which wet lettuce will last longer?” On October 20^th, by which time Truss’s live-stream opponent had evolved to acquire googly eyes and a wig, she threw in the towel and resigned as PM and the lettuce won. It was a fittingly farcical denouement to a premiership of industrial-scale incompetence and self-delusion and of embarrassing brevity. Managing just 44 days in office, she easily beat the previous record set by George Canning in 1827 (and Canning at least had the excuse of dying after 119 days as PM).

Still, Truss’s disastrous tenure provided much hilarity as the country’s many right-wing newspapers had to contort themselves in the style of a circus rubber-man. Almost in the blink of an eye, they went from praising Truss, for being as loopily right-wing in her politics as they were, to lambasting her. AT LAST! A TRUE TORY BUDGET! trumpeted the Daily Mail headline on September 24^th. HOW MUCH MORE CAN SHE (AND THE REST OF US) TAKE? despaired the Daily Mail headline on October 15^th. LIZ PUTS HER FOOT ON THE GAS gushed The Sun’s Harry Cole one moment. The next moment, he was writing: HOW LIZ LOST IT: INSIDE STORY OF LIZ TRUSS’ FIRST 40 DAYS IN POWER THAT ENDED IN BIGGEST POLITICAL MELTDOWN IN YEARS. The Daily Telegraph’s Tim Stanley swerved from crowing LIZ TRUSS HAS RESURRECTED THE IDEA OF CONSERVATISM, AND THE LEFT WILL HATE HER FOR IT to lamenting TRUSS OFFERED US RISK AND AMBITION, BUT IS NOW LEFT FLOGGING AN UTTERLY DEAD HORSE.

It was also gratifying to see the policies advocated for years by those dodgy, mysteriously-funded ultra-right thinktanks and pressure groups congregated in or around No 55, Tufton Street get their moment in the sun, via their adherents Truss and Kwarteng, and immediately be shown to be utter bollocks. After this shitshow, it would nice to think that the likes of the Institute for Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies, the TaxPayers’ Alliance, etc., would, out of shame, shut up about unfettering the rich, about deregulating everything, about letting the environment, workers’ rights and workers’ quality of life get ground to a pulp in the rush for profits. But probably they won’t.

From wikipedia.com / © Tim Hammond, PM’s Office

By an uncanny coincidence, Truss’s departure occurred at the same time as another blond female departed from a vital role in British society – for Jodie Whittaker ended her tenure as the title character of the BBC’s long-running and much-loved science fiction series Doctor Who (1963-present). There was almost another uncanny coincidence here for in a shock twist Whitaker regenerated not into a new Doctor, but back into a predecessor, the hunky and wildly popular 10^th Doctor, David Tennant. Whereas it looked for a while like Truss might regenerate into a predecessor too – the hunky and wildly popular in his own mind, though un-hunky and wildly unpopular to everyone else, 55^th Prime Minister, Boris Johnson.

Since his resignation as PM in July, Johnson had been soaking up the sun and flashing his bronzed abs during seemingly non-stop holidays in Slovenia, Greece and the Dominican Republic. Very occasionally, he stirred to attend to matters pertaining to his 84,000 pound-a-year job (plus perks) as a Member of Parliament. Well, twice – he made a statement in the House of Commons about Ukraine and made another statement about the death of the Queen. Great work if you can get it. Following Truss’s demise, Johnson started sounding out support for him having another run at getting elected PM. And for a surreal few days in October, it looked like he might be back in No 10, Downing Street just months after he’d left it amid a merry shambles of sleaze, lawbreaking and mass ministerial resignations. However, he then announced – presumably realising that the human memory isn’t as short as he thought it was – that he wouldn’t run again after all, which left the field clear for his former chancellor Rishi Sunak.

Sunak became Prime Minister on October 25^th. This was after a rushed leadership contest designed to restrict the decision to Conservative parliamentarians, and keep it away from the party’s membership who last time, apparently stricken with dementia, had elected Truss and seemed capable this time of electing someone really stupid, like Jacob Rees-Mogg, or Rolf Harris, or Thomas the Tank Engine, or Vladimir Putin. Despite his Indian heritage, Sunak is hardly a symbol of egalitarianism and fairness. He seems more symbolic of Britain in the 19^th century rather than the 21^st. He’s minted. He and his wife Akshata Murty – believed, due to her non-domiciled status, to have avoided paying up to 20 million pounds in British tax – are worth a supposed fortune of 730 million pounds. And during the previous leadership race, when he unsuccessfully ran against Truss, a 2011 video surfaced wherein the young Rishi bragged about having friends from all walks of life: “…friends who are aristocrats… friends who are upper-class… friends who are, you know, working class…”

Really, Rishi? Working class?

“Well, not working class.”

From wikipedia.com / © Simon Walker, HM Treasury

In fact, Sunak was soon performing feats of contortion worthy of those right-wing newspaper commentators who’d first applauded, then reviled Liz Truss. He became expert in the art of the political U-turn. He announced he wasn’t going to attend the COP27 climate summit in Egypt in November, apparently feeling he had better things to do than join other world leaders in their attempts to figure out a way of preventing the planet burning. Soon after – screech! Sunak announced he would attend it after all. (This change of heart came after Boris Johnson had announced he was going to pop along to COP27, presumably hoping there’d be someone there who hadn’t heard he’d stopped being British Prime Minister.) Mandatory housing targets? Screech! No mandatory housing targets – Home Counties Tory MPs didn’t fancy suddenly being in earshot of construction work in their leafy back gardens. A ban on onshore windfarms? Screech! “Yes,” Rishi decreed, “let there be onshore windfarms.” Frakking, the proposed Schools Bill, fines if you missed a GP appointment? Screech, screech, screech!

However, no U-turns yet from Sunak’s Home Secretary Sue-Ellen Braverman, who apparently likes to call herself ‘Suella’ because she hates being called ‘Sue-Ellen’ – her folks named her after Sue Ellen Ewing, the hard-boozing wife of Stetson-wearing villain J.R. Ewing in TV soap opera Dallas (1978-91). Sue-Ellen is still pushing ahead with plans to stick newly-arrived asylum seekers on planes and fly them out to Rwanda for ‘processing’, in defiance of the European Convention on Human Rights (whose founders in 1948 included that pathetic, woke, lefty snowflake Winston Churchill). At the Tory Party conference in early October, she told an audience: “I would love to have a front page of the Telegraph with a plane taking off to Rwanda, that’s my dream, it’s my obsession.” Her dream? She might have the name Sue-Ellen, but at heart she’s pure J.R.

To round off the year with a final dose of misery, the cost-of-living crisis that’s deeply troubling households the length and breadth of Britain, and that Sunak’s government seems unable and / or unwilling to do anything about, prompted everyone and their dog to go on strike or threaten to go on strike: rail workers, postal workers, teachers, driving examiners, highway workers, Border Force staff, G4S workers and, while the National Health Service is allowed to fall apart and hospitals start to resemble war zones, nurses and ambulance staff.

From wikipedia.org / © Steve Eason

Incidentally, I’m sure there are even some right-wingers out there who’ve felt the urge to join a trade union after hearing the admirably straightforward, no-nonsense tones of Rail, Maritime and Transport Union general secretary Mick Lynch. After years of being subjected to the same old waffling, prevaricating, patronising, meaningless bollocks spouted by countless politicians and media pundits, Lynch’s ability to speak Human has been a breath of fresh air.

To Good Morning Britain’s Richard Madeley: “Richard, you do come up with the most remarkable twaddle sometimes.” To Sky News’ Kay Burley: “Picketing is standing outside the workplace to try and encourage people who want to go to work, not to go to work. What else do you think it involves?” To knuckle-dragging Tory MP Jonathan Gullis: “I think Jonathan should apologise for talking nonsense… (He’s a) backbench MP who’s just learnt it off a script.” To professional bawbag Piers Morgan, after Morgan had pointed out that his Facebook page featured a picture of the Hood, the villain in TV puppet show Thunderbirds (1965-66): “Is that the level journalism’s at these days?”

Talking of journalism again, don’t expect the UK’s predominantly right-wing press to do much just now to hold Sunak’s government to account. When they aren’t castigating strikers – see the Daily Mail’s headline about ambulance crews: HOW WILL THEY LIVE WITH THEMSELVES IF PEOPLE DIE TODAY? – they’re happily employing smoke and mirrors to distract readers from the big issues of the moment and hide the fact that, under the Tories, the country has turned into a basket case. Mainly, of course, they’re obsessing over the Royal Family – the latter-day British equivalent of Karl Marx’s ‘opiate of the masses’ – and promoting the current spat between Prince Harry and his spouse Meghan Markle and the rest of the so-called ‘Firm’.

Honestly, who cares? Yes, it was hideous of Jeremy Clarkson to fantasise, in his column in the Sun, about having Markle paraded naked through every town in the land while people jeer and pelt her with shit. But I don’t think the current shenanigans in the Royal Family, and the reactions to it in the media by beer-bellied, boob-chested, saggy-jowled manbabies like Clarkson, are of much importance to families panicking as inflation runs rampant, energy bills sky-rocket, and health and transport services disintegrate around them.

Still, after 2022 saw the UK become an absolute mad-lands… Surely things are so bad now that at least they can’t get any worse?

The sound you hear is 2023 saying, “Hold my beer…”

June 13, 2021June 18, 2021

The kraken’s un-woke

Are you one of those many British people who feels ‘underserved and unheard by their media’ because your politics are a wee bit to the right? Are you hostile towards that trendy left-wing phenomenon called ‘wokeness’ and convinced that ‘the direction of news debate in Britain is increasingly woke and out of touch with the majority of its people’?

Yes, life must be horrible for you in 2021 Britain. There’s absolutely nobody in the British media to defend your views because it’s all so hideously lefty and woke. Well, except for the Daily Express. And the Daily Mail, of course. But aside from those two newspapers, there’s nobody… Oh, and the Sun. And the Daily Telegraph. And the Spectator. And a good chunk of the opinion pages of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Times. But that’s it.

Meanwhile, with so many volleys of lefty, woke bullets whizzing around nowadays, there aren’t any right-wing commentators at all who’re bold enough to stick their heads above the parapet. Apart from Toby Young, bless his baldy little socks. And that feisty Julie Burchill. And Jeremy Clarkson, James Delingpole, Darren Grimes, Daniel Hannon, Julia Hartley-Brewer, Katie Hopkins, Quentin Letts, Rod Liddle, Richard Littlejohn, Kelvin Mackenzie, Jan Moir, Tim Montgomerie, Charles Moore, Douglas Murray, Fraser Nelson, Brendan O’Neill, Alison Pearson, Melanie Phillips, Andrew Pierce and Sarah Vine. And that plucky actor chappie, what’s his name? Lawrence Fox? Anyway, there’s only a tiny handful of brave right-wing holdouts against wokeness. You can’t even include Piers Morgan among them. Poor Piers used to be good on Good Morning Britain, but he’s been off the telly since his crusade against Meghan Markle, Woke Evil Personified, made him so angry that his head burst in a geyser of liquified gammon.

Thus, there’s hardly any media outlets or media people in Britain to defend your honest, decent, patriotic, right-wing sensibilities against the predations of the horrible, lefty, woke establishment. That’s an establishment headed by Prime Minister Boris Johnson. That’s right, the shamelessly woke Boris ‘tank-topped bumboys’, ‘piccaninnies with watermelon smiles’, ‘Muslim-women-look-like-letterboxes’ Johnson. An establishment run by a cadre of Marxist provocateurs like Priti Patel, Matt Hancock, Michael Gove and Dominic Raab, who’re forever up to no-good, lefty, woke activities such as imprisoning asylum seekers in pestilent hellholes, protecting statues of mass-murdering slave traders, wallpapering the rooms where they do Zoom calls with Union Jacks, and doing anything up to and including eating live cockroaches and hammering rusty nails into their eyeballs to prove their loyalty to Her Majesty the Queen.

Luckily, salvation is now at hand. Today sees the launch of a new TV channel called GB News, which promises to push a right-wing agenda that all sensible, salt-of-the-earth Britons will agree with and promises to call out this woke nonsense that possesses our lefty British media and government. Needless to say, just by existing, GB News has gone against the grain of the British establishment, and its creation is thanks to the efforts of several, heroic, anti-establishment figures. These include financial backers like the anti-establishment American TV company Discovery; and the anti-establishment investment fund Legatum, which is based in that hotbed of punk rock, Dubai; and the anti-establishment hedge-fund boss Sir Paul Marshall, whose son Winston plays the banjo in Mumford & Sons, a band so hardcore anti-establishment it makes Rage Against the Machine look like wimps.

And the chair and main presenter of GB News is the most awesomely anti-establishment figure you can imagine: Andrew Neil. Well, he’s anti-establishment if you look at his CV with one eye closed and the other eye half-open and manage somehow to miss his 11 years as editor of the Sunday Times; his involvement in the founding of Sky TV; his decade as editor-in-chief with the Barclay Brothers’ Press Holdings group, overseeing the Scotsman, the Business and the European; his 15 years as chairman of the publishing company ITP Media Group (also based in Dubai, home of the Sex Pistols and the Clash); and his 17 years with the BBC. And that villa he owns in the South of France.

Anyway, setting the sarcasm aside for a moment… I was aware of Neil’s malign influence in the British media from an early age. At school at the start of the 1980s, I did a Scottish Higher course in Modern Studies and I remember being advised by the teacher, Sandy Bowick, to read a ‘quality Sunday newspaper like the Observer or the Sunday Times’ every weekend to keep abreast of what was happening politically in the world. Accordingly, I got into the habit of reading the Sunday Times, which was still under the stewardship of the much-respected Harold Evans. But tragically, the gimlet-eyed Rupert Murdoch acquired the Sunday Times in 1981 and by 1983 had installed Andrew Neil as its editor. Neil wasted no time in transforming this once laudable newspaper into the snide, shrill, right-wing shout-sheet that it remains to this day.

The Sunday Times wasn’t the only example of a newspaper being subjected to Andrew Neil’s reverse-Midas touch, i.e., instantly turning to shit in his hands. Hired by the Barclay Brothers in the mid-1990s, newspapers he supervised like the European and the Business suffered declining sales and eventually folded. Worst of all, he became editor-in-chief of Edinburgh’s one-time quality daily, the Scotsman. It’s hard to believe today but the Scotsman was a newspaper that once was widely read, made its points intelligently and carried some influence – as much as any newspaper published 400 miles from London could. Among other things, up until the 1990s, the Scotsman was a keen supporter, in its cautious and genteel way, of constitutional change in Scotland to allow the country more say in running its affairs.

In the late 1990s, after spending most of the decade in Japan, I found myself living in Edinburgh and I assumed I’d get into the habit of reading the Scotsman again. I bought a few issues and gave up. It’d suddenly acquired an unpleasantly right-wing editorial tone. It was scathing about the idea that Scotland should get any degree of home-rule from London, even though the Scottish population had just voted for the creation of a devolved Scottish parliament in a referendum in 1997. Hold on, I thought. Hadn’t the Scotsman, the old Scotsman, been in favour of Scottish devolution? Then one night I saw Neil’s visage on a Scottish current affairs programme, where he was introduced as ‘editor-in-chief at the Scotsman’. Horribly, it all fell into place for me. Oh no, he’s back, I despaired. Returned to wreck yet another, once perfectly-good newspaper.

I suspect Neil’s tenure at the Scotsman alienated the Scottish demographic that it needed to survive as a healthy business concern. I knew plenty of folk in Edinburgh who were around my age and, like me, were centre or left politically and interested in current affairs. They weren’t young enough to be into new-fangled digital media and would have happily bought a traditional, physical newspaper if they thought it was worth reading. But whenever its name came up in conversation, such people would shrug and say dismissively, “The Scotsman? Never read it now.”

Although Neil had nothing to do with the Scotsman after it was acquired by the London-based Johnston Press in 2005, the newspaper remained on the right, where he’d dragged it, and never recovered from the dose of journalistic syphilis it’d contracted from him during his regime. By 2018, it was in the hands of JPIMedia and had a daily circulation figure – the one currently quoted on its Wikipedia page – of under 16,400 copies. It’d had to lay off staff-members, reduce its numbers of pages and supplements, and flit from its old headquarters on Holyrood Road to a new one on Queensferry Road that was less than half the size and a third of the rent. The last time I looked at it, much of what it printed was either shallow and vacuous, or hysterical, kneejerk, Daily Mail / Daily Express-style crap.

You’d think that with his antipathy to all things mild-mannered, lily-livered, pussyfooting and, well, woke, Andrew Neil would have given the BBC a body-swerve. And yet during the past two decades he’s done very nicely out of the venerable corporation. Most prominently, he hosted the BBC’s This Week programme (2003-2019), in which Michael Portillo, Diane Abbott and him would sit in a studio and discuss the week’s current affairs whilst indulging in a gruesome three-way mutual-admiration / flirtation fest. Indeed, at the time, I thought it was the most fascinatingly dreadful thing on British television. Not only did Neil and co. believe they were offering cutting insights into the nation’s politics, but they also seemed to think they were cool. Funny, even. And nothing is worse than people who think they’re funny, but aren’t funny, trying to be funny.

For example, I can think of few things more ludicrous than the sight of Neil and Portillo prancing around in the style of the video for Peter Kay’s chart-topping Is This the Way to Amarillo, as they did during the title sequence of one episode in 2005. At least in 2018, when they got Bobby Gillespie from the impeccable post-punk, alternative-rock band Primal Scream onto This Week to talk about Brexit – yes, this is a strange sentence I find myself writing – Gillespie summed up the viewers’ feelings at the episode’s end. By this point, Neil, Michael Portillo and Caroline Flint (drafted in as a replacement for Diane Abbott) had jumped up and starting cavorting around the studio in the manner of the briefly popular, crap Internet dance craze the Skibidi Challenge. Not only did Gillespie refuse to take part in this cringe-inducing farrago, but he sported the stony countenance of a man who’d just discovered a giant dog turd on the end of his shoes. (Mind you, having Michael Portillo dad-dancing beyond the ends of your shoes wouldn’t be much better.)

I’ve written scornfully about Andrew Neil and GB News and the guff they’ve tried to peddle about being some courageous, anti-establishment bulwark against a supposed tidal wave of wokeness. It’s complete disingenuous garbage. However, I have no doubt that they’ll find an audience. One thing about right-wingers is their unswayable belief that they’re the victims, even when a mountain-range of evidence proves they’re actually the victors. Britain has been in thrall to right-wing doctrines since the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher proclaimed there was ‘no such thing as society’, till today, when those in power claim to belong to the Conservative Party but are basically Nigel Farage’s reactionary, xenophobic United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) in all but name. For a few years in the middle, Tony Blair might have constituted a blip, but he was hardly a left-wing blip. Yet in the paranoid minds of right-wing Britons in 2021, the nonsensical belief that everything they hold dear is threatened by Marxists and social justice warriors is probably more intense than ever.

He might be an utter chancer, but there’ll always be plenty of deluded souls willing to lap up Andrew Neil’s brand of bullshit.