BY STEWART SLATER

This year marks the 35th anniversary of Dangerous Liaisons, Stephen Frears’ classic film of French sexual skulduggery (is there any other sort?). In one of cinema’s great final shots, the movie ends with Glenn Close’s Marquise de Merteuil removing her make-up alone in front of a mirror, her reputation and place in society forever ruined by the release of her scheming letters.

There was obviously something in the water back then, for a few years later, Louis Malle closed Damage with a shot of even more breath-takingly brilliant brutality, Jeremy Irons’ ruined politician torturing himself by gazing at a blown-up, wall-sized picture of himself, his son and the son’s fiancée with whom he had an affair leading to his offspring’s accidental death.

Both Close and Irons’ characters are forced to live with the destruction of their reputations, but they arrive there by different routes. The Marquise, she tells the audience quite openly, has been scheming since her introduction to society at the age of fifteen. Her reputation as a paragon was never justified and her ruin comes when appearance finally catches up to reality. Irons’ character by contrast is, we have no reason to doubt, what he is thought to be. It is when – after a lifetime of  behaving as he was expected to – he stops that he invites destruction.

It is not, of course, just fictional characters who can witness the decline of their reputations. As those who had the fortitude to plough through my last piece (thank you!) will remember, our view of a sportsman at the end of his career, may be rather different to that we held in his pomp. The same is true of politicians.

Often, the decline may be similar to Jeremy Irons – their reputation is justified until they behave in a way which is out of keeping with it. It was reasonable to see the Brexit Spartans as the hard-men of the Parliamentary Estate when they were willing to collapse the government over Theresa May’s deal. It is less so when they meekly vote for the Rwanda bill.

Sometimes, however, something happens which prompts a re-appraisal. The release of her letters tells the Parisian beau monde that the Marquise de Merteuil was not who they thought she was. In the real world, the invasion of Ukraine suggested that Angela Merkel had not been the titanic figure she had appeared when she shuffled off stage just months earlier to the lamentation of the liberal classes.

Retirement and the steady drip of allegations about money, document retention and politicking have been rather less kind to Nicola Sturgeon than office was. Her government, which was hailed as a shining example of hyper-competence in comparison to the feckless bunch down South who were doing their best to kill everyone, is now revealed by the Covid Inquiry to have been every bit as prone to making up policy on the hoof, spinning for advantage and baroque language (Sturgeon appears to rival Dominic Cummings in the range of words to which she is willing to append the adjective “f***ing”) as its Sassenach rival.

Going out at the top is all well and good but, as those ladies have discovered, when you are at the top, the only way is down.

That the Marquise’s reputation should suddenly decline when her activities were made public (don’t keep written records is a lesson from the film seemingly well learned North of the border) is no surprise as she operated in secret. Valmont is the only character who knows what she is truly like and thus, the only character who can destroy her.

Politicians, however, generally operate in public. Angela Merkel was not conducting secret diplomacy with Vladimir Putin, she was openly meeting him in front of the television cameras. Her decision to open the borders to refugees was announced at the party conference. The phasing out of Germany’s nuclear power plants was made public during an election campaign. All of the mistakes for which history now condemns Frau Merkel were widely known when they were made.

Equally, Ms Sturgeon’s departure from Bute House may have brought teary tributes from the chattering classes who doubted they would see her like again, but she left office with Scotland’s drugs problem, declining educational standards and inability to buy a couple of ships or run a census already matters of public record.

So, if we can forgive Dangerous Liaisons’ Parisian for not knowing what the Marquise de Merteuil was really like, what excuse can we find for the legions of commentators who so glaringly failed to connect the dots over their heroines?

Towards any discussion of the media, the word “bias” marches with the inevitability of rain on a bank holiday. If the media fails, it is because it intends to fail. It has its preferred outcome and places its finger on the scale to ensure it eventuates, even if that means its coverage of events must suffer. Pro-indy journalists conspired to cover up the SNP’s woeful performance, Remainiac EU-lovers ensured that only the most flattering coverage of the bloc’s de facto if not de iure leader was allowed.

But it is usually a mistake to ascribe to conspiracy what can equally be blamed on cock-up. There may, for all I know (I haven’t been invited to join), be some global conspiracy of Davos-attendees/Bilderberg-groupies/shape-shifting lizards orchestrating world affairs in pursuit of their Luciferian aims, or there may be a bunch of unconnected, flawed human beings operating in the way flawed human beings operate.

For, the “halo effect” is well documented in psychology. When we first come across someone, if we perceive them to have one positive characteristic, we assume that they have a host of others too. At its most extreme, this manifests itself in “pretty privilege”, whereby people who are attractive are thought to be both more moral and more competent, leading to an increased likelihood of being hired and promoted and higher earnings.

With 56% of journalists describing themselves as “left-wing”, we can reasonably assume that, to the journalist on the Clapham omnibus, Nicola Sturgeon’s brand of tartan progressivism was a “good thing”, particularly since she came to power during the reign of the austerity-loving posh-boy, David Cameron. Angela Merkel rose to the Chancellorship during the rootin’-tootin’ presidency of George W Bush, Donald Trump’s predecessor as the world’s greatest threat to humanity. Not being their obvious rivals was probably, to the journalistic mind, enough in itself to make them good.

From this, all else follows. Because they were good, either absolutely or relative to others, the halo effect meant that their policies and their performance had to be good too. There was no need to investigate this, it was obviously true. Any twinges of doubt could be assuaged by their electoral performance, for the electorate is a shrewd judge of policies and politicians (except Brexit and Boris, obviously – something went wrong there).

It is, then, not so much that the media are biased but that they, like the rest of us, have cognitive biases which inform what they see as important and worthy of scrutiny, and what they are willing to assume. Keir Starmer’s left-leaning Remainerism is in the sweet spot for left-leaning Remainer journalists. A right-wing politician who had been DPP would, no doubt see his cases pored over, because it would be assumed that he was malign and incompetent. That Sir Keir did a bang up job is something the media can happily take on his word because believing in the same policies they do, it follows that he is obviously a competent man of integrity. Rachel Reeves is female, feminist and well educated, so her career at the Bank of England is treated as evidence that she should be Chancellor rather than, given the institution’s track record of missing the Financial Crisis and the recent bout of inflation, evidence that she should not.

But, as Samuel L. Jackson sagely opines in the unjustly neglected classic The Long Kiss Goodnight, “When you assume, you make an ass out of u and me”. If you would “speak truth to power”, “hold politicians to account” or any other of the self-congratulatory mantras journalists deploy to flatter their egos, you cannot make any assumptions, save, perhaps, from classic quoted by Jeremy Paxman “Why is this lying bastard lying to me?”. To do otherwise is a disservice to the audience and risks, as in the cases of Sturgeon and Merkel, not revealing the truth but concealing it and elevating the unworthy.

Neither Dangerous Liaisons or Damage had a sequel, so there are no successors to Close or Irons. But Sturgeon and Merkel will have them, politicians whose reputations are immune to reality until that sudden, sickening moment when they are not. For, as Harper Lee said, “people always see what they are looking for.”

Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.