The Spectator’s Notes | 5 January 2017

‘My deep concern is that because of changed ways that news is now gathered, collated, packaged, delivered and displayed, the country can often find itself in… the tyrannical grip of the massed media… which could seriously threaten the political health of the United Kingdom as a Parliamentary democracy.’ This is from a letter I have received from Field Marshal Lord Bramall. Lord Bramall has reason to complain, since he was recently, in his nineties, the victim of preposterous child abuse allegations, invented by the fantasist ‘Nick’, fanned by the media, and wild-goose-chased by the Metropolitan Police. His complaint, however, goes much wider, including how the British media misread the Arab Spring and thus Syria. He wonders what should be done. When I was an editor, I could never answer such questions well. I said that the media should try to get news out rather than suppress it, but this didn’t justify publishing everything always. Restraint was better applied by professional accuracy and fairness than by the law. I predicted the rise of the internet would help, because no media cartel could any longer control the news agenda. I had not bargained for the way the internet gives newspapers and television deniability. ‘We didn’t produce this story,’ they can say. ‘We’re just following the web.’ So I have no answer to Lord Bramall, except the cold comfort that the fickle media which traduced him have belatedly combined to vindicate him.

As a former student of English at Cambridge, I am sent the faculty magazine, 9 West Road. Its latest issue leads with a long article by Peter de Bolla, chair of the faculty, headlined — with intentionally bitter irony — ‘Now we are in control’. On and on he goes — the shocked perplexity of ‘French locals’ in ‘our holiday village’ that we could be Brexiting, the putative loss of the EU exchange students who ‘amaze and challenge’ him, how you cannot study for the tripos’ famous Tragedy paper ‘from the perspective of a monocultural and inwardly facing society or polis’.