Great Britain’s Conservative Party went down to a huge defeat this summer, with Labour’s Keir Starmer taking the reins as prime minister in July. The New York Times Sunday Magazine of August 29 celebrated with a 4,000-plus-word story by Mark Landler, “The Conservative Crack-Up.” The equally blunt online headline: “How the Tories Lost Britain.”
A gleeful, vengeful tone permeated the piece, reflecting Landler’s five years of hostile reporting on the U.K. Conservative Party while serving as the paper’s London bureau chief. Over that time he managed to say virtually nothing positive about a party that nevertheless somehow managed to stay in office for 14 years.
He opened with an interview with Conservative politician Liz Truss, who had a “calamitous, 49-day stint as prime minister,” in which Truss criticized mass migration and the aggressive push for transgender rights for the state of the country that day.
Landler didn’t appreciate her criticism of the left:
Never mind that Truss was ultimately undone by her own policies: an ill-judged foray into Ronald Reagan-style, trickle-down tax cuts that frightened the financial markets, sent the British pound into a tailspin and provoked the kinds of warnings about financial instability from the International Monetary Fund normally issued to rogue regimes in Latin America.
After references to “Tory sleaze” and “the self-sabotaging referendum on Brexit,” Landler blamed Brexit, again, for It “pulling [Conservative] leaders to the right and forcing successive governments into ever-more-extreme policies.”
That lingering disappointment acted as an accelerant for the anti-immigrant riots that convulsed Britain for several days this summer. Four weeks after voters threw out the government, gangs of far-right thugs stormed mosques and torched the hotels used to house asylum seekers. The spark was a brutal knife attack on a dance studio by a 17-year-old Welsh-born man whose parents immigrated from Rwanda; he was charged with killing three children and injuring 10 others.
A nytimes.com search indicates no Times writer has ever used the phrase “far-left thugs.” By contrast, “far-right thugs” popped up 6 times. It's a partisan paper.
Then Landler really hurt Conservative feelings by comparing the party to Trumpism.
In their embrace of radicalism, the Conservatives bear an obvious resemblance to their American cousins in the Republican Party. Both have ridden the whirlwind of populism. Both have discarded decades of orthodoxy on core economic and social issues….
Landler quoted author Samuel Earle on “The strange dissonance between the Conservative Party’s ability to win elections and its destructive record in government stands as one of the defining riddles of British politics.” The reporter didn’t mention Earle wrote something called “Tory Nation -- The Dark Legacy of the World's Most Successful Political Party.” But surely he’s an objective source on the “Tory” party (aka the Conservative Party), right?
Never has that riddle been more mystifying than in the eight years since the Brexit referendum. The party cycled through no fewer than five prime ministers, a spectacle of corruption, hubris, folly and misrule.
One particularly galling sentence talked of “The media ecosystem that surrounds and props up the Conservatives -- from The Daily Telegraph and other pro-Tory papers to the noisy right-wing TV news channel, GB News -- keeps hammering the message that the party’s problem is that it is not sufficiently right-wing.”
As if the left-wing (and tax-funded) BBC, the left-wing Guardian, and of course the New York Times didn’t help tear down the Tories.
Landler and his UK team, including reporters Benjamin Mueller and Stephen Castle, have traditionally been particularly feverish in their attacks on Brexit and former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who made “get Brexit done” a rallying cry. The paper blamed the Brexit push for, among other things, shorter life spans; racist and Islamophobic attacks, even “Talibanization.” NewsBusters recounted the Times’ long failure to fight Brexit and Johnson after he won re-election in lopsided fashion in 2019: “Three-Year New York Times Smear Against Boris, Brexit Flopped on Election Day.”
