THE NEW YORK TIMES ran a video ad in the Washington region, showing a young black girl by the window of a commuter train: she is “Imagining Harry Potter without its creator.” This was a remarkable move for a supposedly liberal newspaper, which regards “cancel culture” as an invention of the the malevolent Right. Naturally, this obscure advertising campaign got coverage in the British right-wing press. Even the mild-mannered Tom Holland denounced it as “a Two Minutes Hate”. But, apart from showing the polarising nastiness of the United States at the moment, the advertisement most vividly illuminated the competitive pressure on all newspapers, now that they can no longer deliver the classified advertisements that readers actually need.
In our present ubiquitous capitalism, there are only two things that the market cannot deliver: belief and belonging. Both depend on covenants, not contracts. So these are the two things for which there is a huge, pent-up demand, and for which the market must offer substitutes. In the case of newspapers, this means offering a coherent world-view in which nothing too surprising or unexpected can happen and being always on the right side of history. The idea of telling truth to power has very little purchase when the powerful are your customers.
The cost of believing that J. K. Rowling is a vile hag is negligible to any individual American who likes to believe that they are young and fashionable, and the benefits, in terms of social affirmation, are considerable. The catchline of The New York Times is “Independent journalism for an independent life,” with unmissable echoes of the scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian in which the whole crowd shouts as one that they are all individuals.
A paper that does not pander to fashion is leaving money on the table. But a liberal paper that panders too much is abandoning one of its load-bearing principles. The unwillingness to offend the prejudices of a committed section of the readership leads to a kind of Corbynisation — an increasingly determined retreat into a fantasy world in which every setback is explained as the result of insufficient faith. In this country, it is most obvious at the moment on the Right, among the cheerleaders of Brexit. But it is a temptation against which no ideology is immune.
THAT is enough of my being grumpy and despairing. Time to bring on the Revd Fergus Butler-Gallie, writing in the magazine The Fence’s weekly newsletter about managerialism in the context of the Horizon scandal, in which postmasters were ruined, imprisoned, and driven to suicide when they were blamed for errors actually made by the software imposed on them: “The former CEO of the Post Office, Paula Vennells, oversaw a ruthless prosecution campaign of those postmasters accused of fraud. Accused, it turns out, wrongly, due to catastrophic errors in the Horizon computer system. Vennells was no ordinary CEO, but also an Anglican priest, tipped for leadership from the start, and regularly rubbing shoulders with bishops and senior managers of church institutions.
“It isn’t so much that Vennells learned this leadership style in one institution — and then imposed it on the other — rather she is a perfect embodiment of the symbiotic relationships that exist between managerial castes across both institutions.
“The very worst thing of all is that these effects rarely proceed from actual malice, but rather a blind devotion to hierarchical managerialism. Recently, the bishops even suggested that administrative reform was what ‘God was calling the Church to’. It’s a particularly bizarre form of spiritual gaslighting — the sort that might emerge if Pastor Fred Phelps was branch manager of a Rymans.”
For all the horrors and injustices of the Clergy Discipline Measure system, I don’t think that it can possibly compare with the Horizon scandal yet. None the less, Fr Butler-Gallie is an interesting example of just how alienating some clergy find their own hierarchy at the moment.
THE side of his character that the Archbishop of Canterbury displayed in a letter to The Times was not the ruthless manager but the still more sinister figure of a prefect attempting a joke. After The Times ran a remarkably silly piece defending The Great British Bake Off from a throwaway remark that he had made in a Radio Times interview (News, 18 February), the Archbishop wrote in as follows: “Sir, I wish to report the following: Lost: a sense of humour. Condition: hardly used. Last seen: near The Great British Bake-Off and other wonderful TV programmes. If found please return to owner with instructions on use. The Most Rev Justin Welby.”
No, if an Evangelical clergyman has to make jokes in public, he should imitate the Revd Andrew Wingfield Digby, who dropped into the outrage bubbling in the Times letters column over the MCC’s decision to end the Eton v. Harrow match at Lord’s. “Sir, I only went to Sherborne so had no chance to play in the Eton v Harrow match. But imagine my delight at being selected to play for Oxford against Cambridge in 1971. How proudly I strode through the Long Room and out to bat, only to be clean bowled first ball. How sad that future arrogant young undergraduates will be denied this formative experience.”