There’s a hard, hard mood out there among the public and I don’t think our newspapers get it at all. Could it be that the general populace are now more cynical than their journalists?
At Tim Farron’s closing speech to his Liberal Democrat conference in Bournemouth last week, I sat through nearly an hour of one of the biggest cartloads of sanctimonious tosh it’s been my fate to endure in decades. And who do you suppose was lapping this up as avidly as any misty-eyed Lib Dem conference-goer? The hardened hacks, the sketchwriters, analysts and reporters. The press are old-fashioned: they love this emotional stuff. But the 21st-century public have been immunised against it.
‘No,’ I inwardly groaned, ‘not Tim’s single mother upbringing again’ — but on we ground through a string of decidedly first-world problems caused by his parents’ decision to separate.
‘No,’ I sighed, ‘not — please not — Cathy Come Home’ (Ken Loach’s half-century-old film about a very different Britain) — but on he squelched, all but wiping away a tear as he confessed how that film had moved him as a boy. J.D. Salinger’s character Holden Caulfield, in Catcher in the Rye, has delivered the last word on people who weep in the cinema: ‘You take somebody who cries their goddamn eyes out over phony stuff in the movies, and nine times out of ten they’re mean bastards at heart.’
In a winking, sniggering, handkerchief-to-the-eye speech he contrived to insinuate that he and his party’s welfare policies arise from the fact that Lib Dems like him care, whereas politicians in other parties don’t. It’s all a matter of how much you care. That two citizens might disagree in good faith about how best to help the poor was not admitted.
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