Frustration on Fleet Street

It must be absolute Hell running a right-wing newspaper these days.  With Trump in the White House, the natural instincts of the likes of the Daily Mail, Daily Express, Telegraph, Sun and so on would normally be to revel in his 'achievements'.  Damn it, he's firing civil servants left, right and centre, promising tax cuts to billionaires, trashing diversity and equality initiatives, he's even bashing the EU and being rude to foreigners.  It should be their wet dream.  Except that Trump's unpopularity in Britain, fuelled by him and cronies cosying up to Putin and other dictators, stabbing Ukraine in the back and, worst of all, insulting the UK's military prowess, means that they instead have to keep writing broadly negative pieces about him.  It must be so frustrating.  Indeed, you can tell, reading many of the articles they publish about Trump, that they really, sneakingly, admire what he's doing.  Riding roughshod over democratic and academic institutions, trying to intimidate the judiciary, locking up pesky non-white people who disagree with him, even deporting them in chains without due process - it's what they've been calling for in the UK for years.  Ordinarily, they'd be holding Trump up as an exemplar for British politicians to follow.  But he's just so toxic and destructive, they don't dare.  It's the same for those right-wing British politicians who have, in the past, banged the drum for Trump and courted his attention.  Boris Johnson is desperately trying to spin Trump's approach to ending the war in Ukraine as anything but the betrayal of Kiev that it actually is, while Nigel Farage - Trump's self-styled 'best buddy' - now an MP with ambitions of parliamentary respectability is doing his best to avoid answering questions about the Mango Mussolini.  Openly supporting a foreign leader despised in the UK is a sure way of losing votes rather than expanding your tally of MPs.

You'd think that the right-wing press would find some respite on the domestic front, with a Labour government in power.  There should be lots of scope for lambasting 'loony lefty' policies, outrageous government spending on benefits for one legged black lesbians and the like.  But they find themselves in the unusual position of having to criticise a Labour government for cutting benefits to minority groups, including OAPs, proposing to slash public spending by sacking civil servants and not rolling back Tory devised restrictions on civil liberties.  Once again, it must be extremely frustrating for them.  After all, this is the stuff they used to heap praise on Tory governments for doing, screaming for them to do more of the same.  You'd think they'd be happy that Labour finally seem to have seen it their way.  Instead they are forced to indulge in hypocrisy - not just on matters of government policy, either, but also things like ministers' expenses and hospitality.  After all their years of defending Tory ministers for taking backhanders in all manner of hospitality and freebies, justifying it all as somehow being a necessary part of the process of governing, they are now jumping on even the tiniest hint of an irregularity.  Amazing how they've suddenly become so keen on holding politicians to account.  Obviously, the UK's right-wing press have cornered themselves into these ever greater acts of hypocrisy, because what's their alternative?  Having spent so long painting Labour as irresponsible 'tax and spenders', they can't really admit that this Labour government is fiscally just as right-wing as their Tory heroes.  But to offer a coherent critique of current Labour policies would mean embracing progressivism, both economic and social.  Which would mean aligning themselves with the likes of Jeremy Corbyn who, to them, is the devil.  A real conundrum for them.  But watching their hypocritical convulsions as they try to navigate the current political situation, both at home and globally, is hugely entertaining.