Ctrl Alt Delete by Tom Baldwin
Ctrl Alt Delete By Tom Baldwin C Hurst & Co £20 Oldie price £18.01 inc p&p
Tom Baldwin’s starting point in this earnest book is that something in Western society has gone horribly wrong. It is not a very original contention, especially in Left-wing circles. But as Baldwin was the spin doctor of Ed Miliband, the gauche Labour leader, between 2011 and 2015, we are liable to sit up and pay some attention to what he has to say.
In his view, the most obvious manifestations of the West’s malaise were the outcome of the 2016 referendum and the election of Trump. He is ‘ashamed’ of Brexit and ‘disgusted’ by Trump. Ctrl Alt Delete is Baldwin’s attempt to find out how these aberrations (as he sees them) could have happened.
His chief explanation is the transformation of the media over the past two decades. On the one hand, he blames – literally – Boris Johnson, whom he accuses of becoming a lie factory when he was the Brussels correspondent of the Daily Telegraph in the 1990s, inventing scurrilous fantasies about Brussels which were emulated by an increasingly Eurosceptic press, and lapped up by a credulous public.
In America, Baldwin credits the breathtaking disregard for truth of radio shock jocks such as Rush Limbaugh for paving the way for Trump.
The difficulty with the thesis, so far as newspapers are concerned, is that it contains a contradiction which Baldwin never confronts. For he describes very vividly how the printed press, and the once influential tabloids in particular, lost circulation by the bucketload during the period when Euroscepticism was on the rise in Britain. He never asks himself how a progressively weaker press could have been as powerful as he contends it was.
The other revolution which Baldwin discusses, more persuasively in my view, is that of social media. There are knowledgeable passages about the rise of the toxic, mendacious blogosphere, and the lies (or ‘fake news’) circulated on Facebook, some of them propagated by the Russian state, which Baldwin believes helped propel Trump to the presidency in 2016.
But there is a problem here too in Baldwin’s analysis. He sees ‘ordinary people’ as being very easily misled by Facebook lies, just as in his view they are effortlessly manipulated by declining tabloids. It seems never to occur to him that they may sometimes have made up their minds for their own perfectly sound reasons to vote Brexit or support Trump. He thinks they can have only behaved in what seems to him such an idiotic fashion because they were hoodwinked by dishonest tabloids and shock jocks, or deceived by fake news.
Unsurprisingly, the thought does not enter Baldwin’s mind that Brexit supporters might have had legitimate fears about uncontrolled immigration. He writes about ‘a virulent new strain of nationalistic, nativist policies – surfacing like skin lesions across both old and social media’.
This book certainly provides
some interesting insights into the rather detached and supercilious attitudes of some on the soft Left, and New Labour in particular. Baldwin was an acolyte of that movement, whose assumptions he has not abandoned. He insists that a series of reports has not convicted Tony Blair of lying over the Iraq War. Baldwin’s old mate, the spin doctor Alastair Campbell, is given sympathetic treatment. Needless to say, Campbell’s darker acts – for example, his duplicitous ‘dodgy dossier’ in February 2003 – are not mentioned.
The book’s title is a reference to a keyboard manoeuvre Microsoft users in the 1990s were enjoined to employ to reboot their computers. Baldwin believes democracy is in jeopardy (or does he mean it is not producing the outcomes he wants?) and thinks a rebooted media could revive it. But he doesn’t appear to have any better ideas than the motherhood-and-apple-pie one of tighter regulation of social media. If newspapers are worth saving, he doesn’t tell us how they might be.
I suspect Tom Baldwin’s deepest wish would be to turn back the clock to the heyday of New Labour.