How can you tell a political movement is well and truly dead? Easy – the Times newspaper finally drops said movement’s advocates from its opinion pages. It’s a process that can take time, as we’ve witnessed with the painfully slow demise of Britain’s media Blairites. RIP.
Steerpike was as sad as anyone to learn last month that David Aaronovitch has left the Times, having spent almost two decades farting out his centrist dad radicalism from the paper of record. We can all take comfort in that fact he will have a new Substack, natch, and he continues to be a voice for the voiceless on Twitter. Just yesterday, for instance, he did the important public service of rebuking the media for calling Epsom College ‘prestigious’ after the private school’s headmistress, husband and child were all found shot dead. Where would we be without you, David?
Aaronovitch was arguably the last Blairite standing in mainstream media. Philip Collins, former chief speech writer for His Tonyness, left the Times almost three years ago while his ideological comrade Oliver Kamm, the nation’s least favourite pedant, quit the Times late last year.
Steerpike intuits that the editor of the Times, Tony Gallagher, might have had enough of writers who haven’t updated their mental software since 1997. The advent of The Remainers – following the ferocious pro-European backlash to Brexit – gave the addled Blairites a new lease of life. But that argument has been exhausted, at least as far as the public is concerned.
Blairism should have perished as a political force in the mid 2000s, along with ‘Britpop’ and the idea that the Iraq war was anything other than an abject disaster.
But the British political and media class are slow to catch on and mind-numbingly unoriginal. Blairism has therefore been recycled and reheated all over SW1 for decades. Cameron was of course the self-styled ‘heir to Blair’ and Keir Starmer now believes his path to election victory is to repackage New Labour policies and make them sound less old. Plus ca change, and so on. But the Blairites have finally moved on from their perch at the Times, and that’s something.
Next up, the Cameroons.
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