I used to take abuse in print and dish it out, but now I’ve become more squeamish
A few weeks ago I appeared on the Today programme opposite David Denby, the veteran American film critic. He is the author of a book called Snark in which he takes issue with the nasty, personal tone that characterises a lot of contemporary political discourse, and I had been wheeled out to defend the hacks and bloggers who trade in this tittle-tattle. I cannot complain about being cast in this role, not least because I wrote a very snarky review of Denby’s book for the Wall Street Journal, but I am beginning to think he may have a point.
My change of heart occurred when I opened the Guardian on 27 August. A journalist called John Crace had been given almost a full page in which to launch a bilious attack on me in connection with my plans to start a free school in Acton. He referred to me as a ‘metropolitan Tory squire’, regurgitated some of the sophomoric antics I wrote about in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, and suggested that the girls at my school would be taught ‘lapdancing’, while the boys would specialise in ‘getting pissed and insulting people’. ‘It’s the kiss of death for Michael Gove,’ he concluded.
I’m no stranger to this sort of abuse, and can dish it out with the best of them, but it still came as a shock. I naively imagined that trying to start a school would be met with approval. True, one of my motives is to provide my own children with a classical education, but the plan is to provide places for 72 pupils a year. Once the school is operating at full capacity, it should be able to accommodate 504 children at any one time, benefiting thousands in the long run. Why the snarky response?
The answer, obviously, is that education is a political hot potato and anyone proposing to take advantage of the Conservatives’ new policy is going to come in for some stick. I later discovered that John Crace used to be the Guardian’s education correspondent, so it’s not surprising he doesn’t approve of free schools. He even sent me an email in which he set out his reasons for being sceptical, some of them quite well thought out. I told him I wished he’d included these arguments in his article instead of focusing on my personal shortcomings.
Another word for ‘snark’ is ‘smear’, and one of the shortcomings of Denby’s book is that he thinks this political tactic is largely confined to conservatives. In fact, it is at least as widespread on the left as it is on the right, if not more so. Gordon Brown’s moral authority suffered a terrible blow when Guido Fawkes exposed Damian McBride’s plans to smear the shadow cabinet and, so far, David Cameron’s efforts to cast himself as a straight shooter in comparison have been quite successful.
My reason for turning against snark isn’t just because I’ve been on the receiving end of it. It’s also because I’ve become interested in politics now that I’m involved in a project that will be affected by the outcome of the next election. The audience for this brand of attack journalism is not the political class, but the general reader, people who are bored by the minutiae of things like education policy. Personally, I would have been riveted if John Crace had set out his case against free schools, point by point, but most readers would not have got beyond the first paragraph.
In his book, Denby claims that this lack of seriousness is a relatively new phenomenon and links it to the decline of Western civilisation. But surely it was ever thus. In Ancient Rome, senators frequently resorted to smear tactics to destroy their opponents, and the history of Britain is littered with Damian McBrides lurking in the shadows.
What’s new, perhaps, is that this poison is now dispensed out in the open, with the spinmeisters making no attempt to conceal their handiwork. Politics has always been a dirty business, but its practitioners used to feel obliged to preserve a certain decorum. Not any more. These days, the gap between what’s said in private and what’s publicly acceptable is virtually nonexistent. In the course of his attack, Crace invented various stories about me that, ten or 15 years ago, would have been spread anonymously. What was so shocking, ultimately, is that these were paraded under his photo byline in a national newspaper.
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