Dirty tricks in the Telegraph
As I tried to get to sleep last night, the penny dropped about just how calculated today’s Sunday Telegraph front page and accompanying interview really are.
These are no ordinary articles. To call them journalism would be insulting to reporters up and down the country who spend their days trying to get to the truth.
What these articles give is a carefully calculated platform in which to rebut – sometimes subtly, sometimes obviously – all the most serious allegations raised by campaigns like ours at StopBoris.org over the past few weeks and months.
Once you start analysing it, it’s clear that the writing of this article was not approached as an opportunity by a journalist to profile honestly a candidate their newspaper’s readers might have been thinking of voting for. This article was approached with a checklist of points to rebut and suggestions of how to rebut them.
Can this really be true, I hear you cry. Yes, it can: Lynton Crosby leaves no stone unturned in his campaigns and will manipulate every last detail of his candidates’ media coverage, if the media let him. Of course, Boris worked for the Telegraph for 20 years so there’s no doubt he’d be able to call in a favour or two there if he wanted to. On today’s evidence, he wants to.
So let’s have a look at a likely checklist of things the article needed to rebut, and some quotes from the article which by an amazing coincidence address those points perfectly.
| Allegation against Boris | Rebuttal in this article |
|---|---|
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Boris is being nannied/muzzled. |
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Boris’s campaign is trying to focus a negative spotlight on Ken rather than a positive one on Boris’s own policies. |
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Boris has no proper grasp of facts, figures and statistics. |
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Boris has less appeal to ethnic minority candidates. |
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All the countless inappropriate things he has written or said in the past and now wishes to bury, which we (and other opponents of Boris) are highlighting to reveal the truly nasty politician behind the mask. |
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Boris is far less keen on anti-car measures than his rival candidates, having opposed the congestion charge and generally pandered to pro-car feeling. |
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Boris’s campaign is so out of touch with ordinary Londoners it thinks revelations about Ken Livingstone having successfully kept some of his children private from the media are in some way damaging. |
(And of course we all believe that Boris didn’t want them to bring that up.) |
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This week’s Guardian/ICM poll suggests the election is much closer than previously thought so Boris should be worried that it might not be ‘in the bag’. |
(That’s Bexleyheath, in the heart of a borough with 52 Conservative councillors and 9 Labour ones. I wonder why they claim to have met only one person who wouldn’t be voting for Boris.) |
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Finally, just to make sure anything else that might come up against him is pre-emptively rubbished… |
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The right-hand column of the above table contains about 75% of the main interview article.
And of course, don’t overlook how little truth the Telegraph’s lawyers think they have any evidence of there being in these allegations of "dirty tricks" and "lies". Having given the nod to the article being published, in which the clear implication in e.g. the last quote above is that Ken Livingstone is personally involved in lying, they then insisted on the following being tossed into the mix in the summary article on the front page:
There was no suggestion that Mr Livingstone was in any way involved in the dirty tricks campaign.
Apart from the suggestions throughout the rest of their coverage, of course.
As I wrote last night, this article represents a huge step up in the level of media manipulation and cynical electioneering by the Boris campaign. Don’t fall for it. Look for yourself at the things Boris has written in the past, the positions he has consistently held on things like the environment and the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, and the racist articles he paid Taki for and published in the Spectator.
And I have no idea if Ken’s campaigners are lying on the doorstep, but Boris’s were certainly lying on the doorstep of the Time Out hustings. Strangely, the Telegraph have overlooked that.
April 6th, 2008 at 13.19
Ken’s campaign is the cynical one.. hell, it is trying to tell London that the streets are safe whilst people are dying on the streets.
April 6th, 2008 at 13.32
Crime is falling. Murder is falling. Your appalling campaign is trying to scare people into voting Boris based on lies.
April 6th, 2008 at 15.13
It’s not Boris’s campaign trying to scare people- it’s Ken’s. He, and many of his supporters, have repeatedly told the lie that Boris is going to scrap the Freedom Pass. It’s clearly not true and Boris’s pledge to not only keep it, but to work with the local boroughs to extend it to 24 hours, is on his website and in his transport manifesto.
Scaring pensioners- just another underhanded tactic brought to you by Leavingsoon and his cronies.
April 6th, 2008 at 17.53
The Stop Boris campaign is a paid subsidiary of the Ken machine - attempting desperately to maintain the politics of cronyism and will stoop to every low including lying to continue the status quo - sorry Ken it’s time you were leaving along with all the loony left apologists like this blog.
BACK BORIS FOR MAYOR!
April 6th, 2008 at 20.01
Goodness me, we have got the Back Boris team scared now haven’t we. They’re all piling in today. Elisbeth gives her URL as BackBoris.com so we know she’s one of the team.
But I particularly can’t get over the irony of the comment from ‘jeh’. He accuses me of being a paid subsidiary of the Ken machine (which for the umpteenth time I am most definitely not - I’m neither paid for anything to do with Stop Boris, nor in any way part of the Ken campaign team), while over on his own social networking profile he reveals that his job is:
I also learn from the same profile that his “work was featured on page 15 of the Evening Standard”. Interesting to hear that the campaign team are getting things in print in the Evening Standard. I wonder if it was masquerading as news.
April 8th, 2008 at 20.46
Just a slight correction- I’m not ‘one of the team’. I do, however, strongly support Mr Johnson’s candidacy and think he will be a much better mayor than Ken Livingstone. I was simply hoping that you, like some other blogs, linked the poster’s name to the website provided when asked for a URL.
April 8th, 2008 at 21.27
Thanks for the clarification Elisbeth.
I would apologise for the appalling slur against your character that I made by suggesting that you were part of the Back Boris campaign, but since you’re such a keen supporter of it I don’t suppose you thought it was a slur anyway!