The discredited television personality Andrew Neil, formerly the laughing launch-face of the seemingly Ofcom-untouchable, fun-packed, fact-averse, rightwing TV station GB News, floats contentedly in a foaming brown bathtub of bubbling human waste, his Weetabix hair matted with muck, and yet considers himself clean, the nutshell king of infinite filth.
On 10 April, Neil told his social media followers: “The hard left throws about ‘Tufton Street’ the way the hard right throws about ‘Globalist’ and ‘Soros’… It’s become a cover for them to avoid thinking/analysing.” Meanwhile, the same Dubai-based Legatum Group that owns half of Neil’s former employer GB News also boasts the Russian oligarch-coddling life peer Matthew Elliott of the Tufton Street thinktank Vote Leave and the Tufton Street thinktank the TaxPayers’ Alliance as a senior fellow of its Legatum Institute. There’s nothing to see here, says Andrew Neil, a gaping Sooty for the fist of Tufton Street’s pullcinelean Harry Corbett.
Within its first week of broadcasting in June 2021, GB News, then fronted and legitimised by Neil, interviewed two commentators – Tory peer Matt Ridley and the chartered accountant Andrew Montford – associated with the climate science denial group Global Warming Policy Foundation, which is based in Tufton Street. There’s nothing to see here, says Andrew Neil, an elongated Emu to Tufton Street’s rampant rabbit Rod Hull.
And Dubai’s GB News backer Legatum also employed the US lobbyist Shanker Singham, before he left to work for the Tufton Street thinktank the Institute of Economic Affairs, the “educational charity” that helped Liz Truss launch the historic economic policies that secured our speedy downward destiny. There’s nothing to see here, says Andrew Neil, a birthday-bouncing Gus Honeybun to Tufton Street’s tentacular Fern Britton.
And the NHS wrecker and BBC bullshit Question Time regular Kate Andrews, who sprouted from the same Tufton Street thinktank as Singham, is now the economics editor of the Spectator, of which Andrew “nothing to see here” Neil is chairman. A fireworks factory explodes next to a nuclear reactor during a volcanic eruption. And there’s nothing to see here, says Andrew Neil, Ed the Duck’s quacking cloaca to Tufton Street’s oil-greased Andy Crane.
Of course the obvious connections between opaquely funded Tufton Street thinktanks, media outlets and nobbled policymakers matter. And larger-than-life TV personalities like Andrew Neil should be using their TV fame to amplify this scandal for the public good. Be more Vorderman, Andrew, and less Voldemort.
Tufty the TV squirrel taught a generation about road safety; Wenlock and Mandeville, the Lycra cyclopses of the 2012 Olympics, warned athletes against getting javelins in their eyes; and Buzby, who was only a yellow bird, used his TV fame to help people of the 70s understand what to say when the phone rang. But what has Andrew Neil ever done? Nothing!
Last month’s attacks on the National Trust, for example, from both the Legatum Institute and the Tufton Street-aligned Restore Trust pressure group, on voting practices and scone recipes respectively, were then amplified by the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and the Daily Telegraph, Britain’s worst newspaper, proving how the Tufton Street groups’ influence works, even if their financial incentives for destroying the heritage charity remain unclear. If there’s an “avoidance of thinking and analysing”, it appears to be in the GB News-addled bisc-bonce of Andrew Neil himself.
But Andrew Neil is not alone in his denials of the depths to which we have sunk, and the tide of Tufton Street turds, corrupt politicians and client journalists engulfing British life has a fabular precedent. The fifth of Hercules’s legendary 12 labours required him to sluice 30 years of manure from the stables where the immortal horses of King Augeas had deposited endless dung. This Hercules did by diverting the rivers Alpheus and Peneus, the twin responsibilities of water supply provision and waste management solutions combining so much more simply in the pre-privatisation era.
(It is fortunate for Hercules that his task took place in ancient Europe rather than in Brexit Britain, as the use of any modern British river to clean a filthy stable would now only contaminate it further. Had Hercules been required to investigate a complex series of shell companies designed to filter British bill payers’ money, and profits extracted by the water companies at the expense of infrastructure maintenance and safe sewage dispersal, into the pockets of shareholders and the coffers of foreign pension funds, the labour of the Augean stables would have been a far less enduring tale. Though doubtless the Sunaks would have read it approvingly to their kids as an example of clever business practice.)
As Britain’s ecosystem chokes in human filth, we see the Shakespearean idea that a mortal “body natural” is wedded to an abstract “body politic” made too too sullied flesh. Every tributary of the infosystem is clogged with sewage. Angela Rayner is hounded for peanuts by a billionaires’ media loyally providing covering fire for the perpetrators of Tory thefts of millions, siphoned from the public purse to Tory donors and friends via dodgy lobbying and unchallenged public contracts; while we listen to the debating-society digs of a prime minister whose non-dom wife may have avoided up to £20m in tax while he was chancellor; while Tory MP Mark Menzies allegedly rang an elderly local party volunteer at 3.15am to help raise £6,500 (or “four Angela Rayners”, as Vorderman would put it) to pay off “bad people” detaining him in a flat, an episode of Yes Minister directed by Quentin Tarantino.
But, like Menzies, we are all hostages. To truth. Rayner’s alleged historical council house error wouldn’t cover even a fifth of the booze bill for one of Boris Johnson’s illegal lockdown parties. Meanwhile, media moguls like Andrew Neil stand by the open sewer, not even holding their noses, high on the stench they create.
• This article was amended on 23 April 2024 to remove an erroneous description of Kate Andrews as a “climate crisis denier”.
Stewart Lee introduces Giant Sand, the Dream Syndicate, Kristin Hersh and Josephine Foster at EartH in London on Saturday 27 April and his new live show, Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf, opens in London in December before a national tour
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk
