General Election 2024

Labour benefited from a pliable media, which spent the final week of the campaign running adulatory guff on Starmer’s ‘no drama’ style or ‘quiet radicalism’. His political mutations and embrace of plutocrats went unmentioned. Diminished in influence, the Murdoch papers half-heartedly half-endorsed Labour, partly hoping to forestall any resumption of the aborted second part of the Leveson Inquiry, but mostly just accepting the inevitable. The backgrounds of Labour candidates were hardly probed, yet alongside the strong representation of charities and NGOs, the lobbying industry practically has its own party grouping; it would be canny to bet on lobbying as the focus of the first scandal of the Starmer years.

from james butler in the LRB. feels like this could be a ticking time bomb waiting to explode egg in the face of the cravenly servile grifters journalists (like ian dunt and co) currently cooing about ‘serious grown up government’ and ‘a return to competence’. fully expect the press to become less accommodating than they have been very very quickly