If you want to see the decay of the British news media, look no further than The Daily Telegraph. Once a half-decent newspaper that tried at least to sound conservative, it is now a waste of dead trees, its pages mainly filled up by the children of past writers who plainly think their inherited positions make them guardians of taste and wit. As an example of the soporific drivel filling up space between the advertisements for stairlifts and rubber knickers, look at the linked article that tries to “satirise” Rachel Reeves as “Rachel from Accounts.”
What’s the joke here? That accounts managers are boring? That Reeves isn’t a firebrand politician? It’s a commentary so lifeless, so devoid of thought, that it doesn’t even manage to be offensive. You can almost picture Mr Deacon, its “writer,” hunched over his laptop, sniggering at his own ingenuity. His article, even so, fails to entertain. It fails to matter.
Real Satire: Peter Simple’s Masterclass
Compare the present revival of The Way of the World with Peter Simple’s original. Here is one of his comments from 1999, on the defeat of “fascism” in Serbia:
‘WHAT has happened,’ crows an exultant writer in the Observer, ‘is a decisive and perhaps terminal defeat for an older Europe, a place of tribal hatreds, double-headed eagles, flaming swords and obscure martyrs. A better world order survives . . .’
Everyone to his taste. Along with those ancient, long revered but now execrated symbols of local allegiances, national pride, glory, honour, nobility and beauty, the last of our European civilisation is perishing with all its treasures, giving way to a new world order, a place of internationalism, scientism, heartless accountancy, rationalism, egalitarianism, false humanity-mongering and everything that belongs to the legions of the dull.
But no one should think this new world order will be without powerful symbols and methods of persuasion of its own. High above the clouds, as the state-organised pop festivals and democratic sports rallies proceed amid universal rejoicing, the continual murmur and drone of bombers can be heard.
They are double-headed eagles and flaming swords brought up to date for a prosaic people. They are the symbols of the new order, the means by which obedience will be ruthlessly enforced.
Now this is satire. With an economy of words, Simple tears into the priggish triumphalism of modernity, exposing its empty promise and its thinly disguised barbarism. Every sentence is a lash applied to the back of the managerial class and its cheerleaders in the media. Compare that to the Telegraph’s dreary effort, which says nothing at all.
A Paper Run by Nepotism
The Telegraph’s descent into mediocrity is no accident. It is the natural result of employing mediocrities. Its writers are selected not for their intellect skill with a pen—they are mainly selected because their fathers and grandfathers wrote for the paper before they did. Like the titled aristocracy, they have inherited their roles without earning them. The only difference is that the old aristocracy, at least in its prime, gave us art, architecture, and a political barrier against the speedy triumph of the left. Mr Deacon, to be fair, does not seem to have inherited his job: he had to go through the motions of swotting at Sheffield University for an arts degree. But he has joined this new nobility of the mediocre, and given us “Rachel from Accounts.”
Allister Heath, the editor of this farcical operation, is the perfect front man for the paper’s decline. A man so unremarkable that he could disappear tomorrow and no one would notice, he presides over a team of writers whose primary quality is an unshakable belief in their own importance. I once met him, and it was like speaking to a malfunctioning chatbot. Nervous, humourless, and with an accent that seemed unsure of its national origin, he is the perfect summary of his newspaper’s cheap and plastic attempt at relevance.
The Broader Problem
The Telegraph’s failings are not just an embarrassment to its readers of the old and dying—they are a symptom of a deeper cultural decay. British journalism, like British politics and British life in general at the top, is now the place of second-rate minds. Wit and intellectual courage have been replaced by nepotism, leftism, and a desperate chase for clicks.
The Rachel Reeves article is not an outlier; it is the rule. It is the product of a journalism that has forgotten how to write and how to entertain. It is the product of a culture that rewards caution and punishes originality.
The Daily Telegraph is no longer a newspaper in the true sense of the word. It is a crèche for the children of journalists past, a place where dull minds produce dull articles for an audience from which all but the dull have resigned. Its attempts at satire are embarrassing. Its commentary is toothless, its relevance non-existent.
If Peter Simple were alive today, he would mock the Telegraph with all the ferocity it deserves. But even he might pause to wonder if it was worth the effort. After all, how do you parody something that has already become a parody of itself?
