To the astonishment of many, the main scourge of Keir Starmer and the Labour Party, The Guardian, has gone very quiet this week in its relentless criticism of the governing party. For months, the paper, and particularly its opinion pages, have been attacking Labour. From the absurd Owen Jones to the normally reliable Polly Toynbee, its hacks have unanimous in joining the rest of the gutter press, albeit coming at Labour from the left. Many of us are pissed off because we see, or rather saw, The Guardian as perhaps the only place us left of centre woke snowflakes could read stuff that was broadly along the lines of how we saw the world. No more. Until this week, that is.
At first, I wondered if the paper was reacting to the threats of many readers to cancel their subscriptions. I certainly am cancelling mine. Maybe, I wondered, they were pissing off too many of their own customers? It could be, but I wonder if it’s something else?
There’s a by-election this week in the safe Labour seat of Gorton and Denton and the governing party is under attack from the 21st century’s version of Oswald Mosley, leader of the pre-war British Union of Fascists, one Nigel Farage. Many expect Farage’s far right candidate Matt Goodwin to take the seat. My feeling is that The Guardian may have taken a tactical decision to row back, probably temporarily, on its hostility to Labour in this critical week in order to avoid criticism if Farage’s private company Reform UK Ltd take the seat.
I have no idea just how many Guardian readers live in Gorton and Denton, but the paper’s vicious and often personal attacks on the Prime Minister and his party have only added to the perception, a false one in my view, that Labour is not doing a good job sorting out the mess left by 14 years of Conservative misrule. If anything, The Guardian has been a prime mover in trying to unsettle the government and unseat its leader. Not one of its comment hacks has called for him to be supported. All of them, including Toynbee, have called for the PM to go.
Reading The Guardian, as I have done for 50 years, has become a trial. I can of course accept that there has been criticism for the government’s cock-ups, but the nature of the attacks has been completely OTT. While the Mail, Sun, Express, Times and Telegraph come after Labour from the right, The Guardian has come from the far left.
I am hopeful that Labour will retain Gorton and Denton and use it as a building block to get on with the urgent work of repairing a country that was almost broken by the Tories and the Lib Dems. If they do lose, it just makes things just that bit harder. I suspect that given the way The Guardian has behaved lately, they would prefer a victory for the luvvies of the Green Party or perhaps, even though they would never admit it, Farage’s fascists, because it would give their more colourful writers more to get excited about.
Whatever happens, with the by-election out of the way I fully expect the paper to resume its attacks on Labour. It’s been a very obvious change of direction for The Guardian and the unanimity of the journalists has not come about by accident. It’s been good to see a pause in hostilities and finally see some objective and constructive writing in the paper. If I thought they had changed their tune permanently, I might stick with it, but I am not going pay the wages Owen Jones, Aditya Chakrabortty, Andy Beckett and all the other Toytown revolutionaries as they fight to bring down a Labour government and potentially install Farage in Number 10.
I feel very let down by my newspaper of choice. But if they really want to be the home of the far left, I’ll leave them to it. They’re the ones who moved, not me.
