Welcome to the era of Daily Mail socialism

Morgan McSweeney’s relationship with Britain’s most important tabloid is as ideological as it is strategic.

Photo by Medicimage Education / Alamy Stock Photo

On the staff of the Morning Lark, the fictional tabloid that crops up in a few Martin Amis novels, readers of the paper are known as its “wankers”. Editors ask, “Is this of genuine interest to our wankers?” The political positions of the Lark are weighed up, “out of deference to the deepest personal considerations of our wankers”. Any drop in readership is described as “losing wankers”. The readers aren’t seen simply as a vulgar blob either, but a genuine social stratum. Clint Smoker, one of the Lark’s senior reporters, explains: “The quality broadsheets are aimed at the establishment and the intelligentsia. The downmarket tabloids are aimed at the proletariat.” The Lark – aimed at “the unemployed” – is a second cousin to the Daily Star, dealing in royal news, football news and pornography (ideally all three at once).

Couched between solidarity and contempt, this language would surely not be found in a real newsroom. But the truth in this satire is that newspapers have types. Where Mondeo Man is a psephological fantasy, newspapers have what we might call imagined communities, vast numbers of readers who otherwise know nothing about each other, yet breathe the same cultural snorkel of information, opinion and sudoku. And in an age of low circulations, as newspapers fall back on their core constituencies, these communities are only more pronounced. This makes them a vital subject for political study. Where else can strategists find herds of voters who form one inky silhouette?

You don’t have to turn to satire to find the Sun’s type, at least you didn’t during the 1980s when its readership rallied to the side of Margaret Thatcher. According to Chris Horrie and Peter Chippindale’s history of the paper, Stick It Up Your Punter!, its greatest and most terrible editor, Kelvin MacKenzie, summarised it during an office argument over an article on the legalisation of marijuana: “You don’t understand the readers, do you, eh? He’s the bloke you see in the pub – a right old fascist, wants to send the w*** back, buy his poxy council house, he’s afraid of the unions, afraid of the Russians, hates the queers and weirdos and drug dealers. He doesn’t want to hear about that stuff!”

In so far as the Daily Mail imagines its community, Morgan McSweeney, Labour’s chief of staff, very much wants it for his own. “If I could marry a front page, it would be this one,” McSweeney said last year, after the Mail splashed “Starmer: UK nuclear deterrent is safe in my hands”. The quote is from Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund’s book Get In, and the echo of Thatcher’s declaring the NHS “safe in our hands” to ward off fears of privatisation was unmissable.

If McSweeney did marry that front page, his head might have recently been turned by: “Finally! Patients to be put before NHS bureaucrats” (this represented the Mail ’s enthusiastic response to the abolition of NHS England). Things have been tougher between Labour and the Mail since late March: Rachel Reeves’ Spring Statement has been pilloried harder than Prince Harry’s charity shenanigans in its pages. But when the PM contributes a Mail op-ed telling its readers they “are RIGHT to be angry about illegal immigration”, as he did recently, we know who McSweeney’s talking to.

For some of Labour’s modern constituency, the McSweeney turn is viewed as betrayal. The public sector is their people; institutions are there to be preserved, not flattened. And when it comes to Starmer’s welfare reforms and maintenance of the two-child benefit cap – that’s not Labour behaviour. There’s a reason they’re called “Tory cuts”.

But viewed from the bloody crossroads where Fleet Street and Whitehall meet, British political history isn’t that straightforward. Sneering at Michael Foot’s advocacy for the Falklands War in Iron Britannia, Anthony Barnett spoke of “Daily Express socialism”. Linking Foot’s invective against Leopoldo Galtieri to his days on the Express during the Second World War, Barnett’s aside captures a tradition that is vivid in Labour Party history. It is patriotic yet unafraid of class warfare; it’s redistributive, but cheerful about defence spending; and it interprets public opinion instead of trying to patronise it. McSweeney, for instance, is mindful of polling showing the two-child benefit cap, loathed by Labour MPs, is popular among voters.

With the ascendancy of McSweeney’s Labour Party, we are seeing this Labour tradition in its 21st-century form. This is the age of Daily Mail socialism. And its enemies are as easily personified as its Middle England constituents. McSweeney again: “Why should Labour be the party of the judges? Why should we be the party of the BBC?” For the parts of the left that turned Brenda Hale into an anti-Brexit hero, for the public-sector workers who reliably vote Labour, such talk will seem heretical.

This is the most potentially transformative part of what was once called the Starmer project. McSweeney accepts the criticisms of progressives as his premises. The left, he believes, has abandoned “its people”; it no longer speaks the national demotic; it must accept the ambient social conservatism in British culture if it is to achieve its goals. Reorienting Labour around these axioms might be seen as McSweeney’s historic mission – copy of the Mail folded under his arm. But in a Labour Party of declining popularity, the question for its strategist remains (in the unreconstructed language of the Morning Lark): who are the Labour Party’s true wankers? And can one bunch be so easily exchanged for another?

[See also: Putin’s endgame]