BY STEWART SLATER
“You’re a winner” we can easily imagine the Prime Minister, Y-fronts freshly starched, telling himself in the mirror of the Washington embassy. And for a time, it appeared he was. Adopting the perhaps oleaginous mien of a lawyer pitching for a new client, he seemed to have the President eating out of his hand, apparently surprised by the (in no way pre-arranged) Royal invitation. No less an organ than the Telegraph (far from the Prime Minister’s greatest fan) declared the visit a triumph.
A few days later America levied tariffs on British steel and aluminium (aluminum too no doubt), having temporarily cut off weapons and intelligence to Ukraine, before going on to attempt a deal with Russia over the heads of the other parties to the conflict. If the Prime Minister’s trip to Washington was a triumph, what would a disaster have looked like?
One can, famously, smile and smiling be a villain. Was the President playing nice purely so the Prime Minister’s humiliation would be all the greater when the rug was pulled and he did what he was always planning to do? Was it all just a plot to show who the big dog is? Or was the President, a famously mercurial businessman, merely following what he thought was in his best interests at the time, before changing his mind? It would not be the first such episode. We did, after all, spend his first term debating whether to take him literally but not seriously or seriously but not literally.
The Telegraph was not the only outlet to find itself on the wrong side of subsequent events. Sky’s Beth Rigby, after the meeting, tweeted, “The PM came with two asks – Ukraine & trade – and came out with a win.” To misquote Pyrrhus of Epirus, “If we win in one more meeting with the Americans, we shall be utterly ruined.”
We could continue in this vein for days – the podcast host who was adamant that Kamala Harris (remember her?) would win the election, the commentators who thought Angela Merkel was the leader of the free world, the journalist who published a book about Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan entitled Maestro: Greenspan’s Fed and the American Boom just before the internet bubble burst. It would be entertaining for us and embarrassing for them. But we will not. To err is, after all, human and, if you go through my own back catalogue, you will certainly find predictions which have, let us say, yet to eventuate.
None of these events was nailed-on. The President is hardly constant as the North Star. The polls never moved outside the margin of error. There were plenty of questionable decisions during the Merkel Chancellorship. And so on. But at every turn, people chose to ignore the uncertainty and jump in feet first and say, “This is what it all means.”
In part, this reflects the modern news cycle. Twenty-four hour rolling news channels have a lot of air to fill, too much for the news alone. Analysis is a cheap way to take up some time. And a good way to capture eyeballs. Nor does it even have to be particularly accurate. We may come to learn what has happened, but we stay to have our prejudices tickled. If we were truly interested in finding out what had happened and what it really meant, we would behave as I used to in the City and cut off those who got it wrong. But we don’t. We continue to lap up their every word. This is not journalism as we used to know it, but entertainment, subject to the same pressures as a soap opera.
Given this, it is not hard to see why pundits rush to the commentary booth. It is what the audience wants, it keeps them engaged and the ad money flowing. It also has the effect of positioning the pontificator as prophet, for no little analysis takes the form of a clever person explaining events to those who, if they are clever enough to tune in to their channel (never insult the audience), are not quite as clever as the commentator himself. Which of us would not like the idea of the nation waiting expectantly for us to tell it what to think? I certainly do…
In a way this works for us too. For very little news is actually relevant to us. The Prime Minister has a good meeting or a bad meeting? The sun will still rise and the trains will still be late. Harris wins or Trump wins? The world will still turn and the bins still won’t have been emptied. Angela Merkel could have been the greatest political leader since Augustus, or the worst since Nero but as long as she kept the BMWs flowing and didn’t invade Poland, there was little need for anyone in Britain to care. We would change doctor if his diagnosis of indigestion turned out to be a heart attack, but because the stakes of the news are generally so low, we let failure slide.
It is not, then, truth we are really after, it is confirmation. Confirmation that we understand what happened and confirmation that we were right all along. To Channel 4 and The Guardian Trump’s election was proof positive that America was the sexist, racist hellhole their audience always suspected it was, to GBNews, it confirmed that Nigel Farage is the Prime Minister in-waiting their viewers hope he is.
“Thinking is hard, that’s why most people judge” said Carl Jung, presciently capturing the purpose of modern media. Our commentators rush to judgement so their audiences have no need to think. A well-educated talking head considers events and ties them up in a bow of our ideological priors. We know what happened, we know what we think about it and, surprise, surprise, we were right all along. We can safely turn over to Eastenders content that all is right with the world.
Or we can start to think. Start to ask how often pundits get it right and start to ignore those who fail. Start to realise that there are more things in heaven and this messy Earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies so events are unlikely to fit tidily into our mental pigeonholes. Start to realise that sometimes we just don’t know enough to judge. And start to realise that, most of the time, it doesn’t really matter. The world is going to do what the world is going to do, whether we predict it or not. And whether we like it or not.
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.