The UK is different. Every morning in this small island, 12 million of the 45 million adults buy a newspaper, and 20 million read one. That includes 10 million of the people everyone else has given up on?—?the literate working class, and the engaged lower middle class. Tomorrow 8 million people will read The Daily Mail, a paper that despite its reactionary heft, makes such demands on the basic literacy of the reader that it would be literally incomprehensible to two-thirds of the adult UK population.
There’s another element to that?—?and that’s class. There is no cadetship system in the UK to speak of?—?so it’s who you know, with a Cambridge education a good start if you’re after the broadsheets. To get in the tabloids you do your GCSEs (year 11, kinda) start doing court reporting for the Bolsover Evening Argus, get to the Scotsman and then down to London. Suddenly you’re in an environment that is nothing other than pure amphetamine 24/7?—?while the broadsheets drawl out their commentary, the tabloids take the city by the throat.
This is not merely a matter of right-wing beat-ups?—?take a look at the Daily Mirror some time, a populist left red-top where writers such as John Pilger made their name, and that still publishes incisive but unpretentious writers such as Kevin McGuire, if you want to see what an exciting newspaper can be.
But for every McGuire or Pilger, there is a Brooks and a Coulson. Take a look at the most famous picture of Coulson, listening to his post-Murdoch “boss” Dave Cameron, sallow and flappy, sucking on the end of a Biro. This is a puppet-man, animated by the energy of his boss, and so grateful for it, that he has, innocent or guilty, f-cked up the whole middle of his life for it. Take a look at the life of Brooks, nee Wade, the ravenously ambitious secretary who rises to the top to become?—?what? The Cotswold confidante of the Prime Minister, riding a borrowed police horse around the low hills of Chipping Norton.The life Rebekah Brooks and others chose has nothing to do with real ambition or desire?—?endless boring country suppers with a Tory set who despise them. It is the ritual enactment of a Joanna Trollope novel, an Aga saga for the declasse lumpen petit bourgeois who grew up in comprehensive post-Attlee, post-Wilson Britain, where everywhere looks the same, and how you handle a vowel determines your life, unless you get on a?—?tabloid, showbiz, political, s-xual?—?rocket to the big time. Jesus, even Brooksy’s name is a Moe misspelling. The Charleses and Jennifers must laugh behind their hands at that orthographic horse accident.
So, yeah, no real schadenfreude?—?not least because these people became plighted to a man who many Australians had long ago probably judged as a fraud and a fool. No matter how many courtiers will come to kneel at the feet of King Rupert, we will always know him as the astute but inveterately second-rate son of Keith. His passage from Adelaide via the Sydney back rooms ofThe Nation, to that left-liberal progressive nation-building paperThe Australian, of the 1960s and ’70s, to the union-owned paperThe Sun on Fleet Street and beyond. He is a master deal builder?—? and his apparently mildly-Aspergerish skill at that explains the appalling obviousness of his thoughts, now revealed in their mundane anti-glory in his weird staccato Twitter haiku.
He is and has always been, the merchant prince of the obvious thought, left-liberal in his youth, a spry Thatcherite in his middle-age, and now a pseudo-religious conservative, supporting Rick Santorum, in his perhaps forty-year dotage. His passion throughout his life seems to have been not gratitude, but envy?—?envy of his war correspondent up-from-nothing Dad, of his essayist, nation-defining uncle, of his patrician Geelong Grammar headmaster James Darling, of his astute, and still extant, Oxford tutor Asa (Lord) Briggs. Sent to Oxford, he took a bust of Lenin. Briggs tried to talk him out of his infantile disorder, and point out the harvest of British gradualism?—?that over a century, the cradle of capitalism had created a society in which almost everyone had a life worth living, a world historical achievement.
Myriam Robin is a reporter for SmartCompany and its sister site LeadingCompany. She has degrees in economics, international studies and journalism. She likes writing about businesses taking risks and doing new things.
