Being on the politics desk of a tabloid newspaper means that for at least some of the time, you know you have to support your newspaper’s home ‘team’. Especially when an election is approaching, if your newspaper has endorsed one party, you’re unlikely to run negative stories about them – or say anything too nice about their rivals.
This is just the way of the world, and doesn’t stop tabloids producing some great political journalism (look no further than the Mirror’s coverage of Partygate, for example) – but it does mean part of the art of tabloid journalism is finding a way of doing that without looking either like a tit, or else like a deplorable human being.
Unfortunately for him, it’s an art that the Sun’s political editor Harry Cole is yet to grab, as he is once again trending after an ill-judged swipe at the leader of the Labour Party – this time in a way that has led his newspaper to walk itself into a bizarre and uncomfortable corner.
Cole has form with swinging and missing at Labour’s leaders, having once landed himself in the doghouse with then-editor of the Sun Tony Gallagher by running a splash about Jeremy Corbyn on Gallagher’s very first day in the job that had been publicly disowned by the Sun’s own key source before breakfast was even served.
Cole had claimed, citing a senior Queen’s Council, that Jeremy Corbyn had joined the privy council – acting against his own supposed republican principles – solely so that Labour could claim “short money”, funds the opposition gets to pay for advisors and the like.
The problem was that this was entirely untrue, as short money has nothing to do with whether or not the opposition leader joins the privy council. That story was largely harmless, but did cause Cole to get widely derided on social media, and reportedly caused a fairly hearty private bollocking to boot.
Cole’s latest is much less funny, and follows weeks of dismal reporting on Keir Starmer’s pre-political career as a human rights barrister, which has highlighted that sometimes lawyers act for clients that most of us find less than savoury.
This kind of reporting – most of it lifted from a several-years-old book by Michael Ashcroft – has been met with eye-rolls by anyone with any familiarity with the legal system, all of whom know that barristers use the “cab rank rule”, meaning that if you’re the next available barrister with the experience and time to take on a case, it comes to you – you can’t (in theory at least) pick and choose your clients.
The latest Harry Cole special aimed to circumvent that critique by focusing on Starmer’s pro-bono work to abolish the death penalty in multiple Caribbean nations (for which he was lauded with multiple awards). Eliding this work to end the death penalty for nations as a whole with representing individuals himself, Cole highlighted some particularly grisly cases as if Starmer was personally fighting to save the criminals, rather than to eliminate a draconian justice practice that belongs in another era, and is prone to fatal miscarriages of justice.
It is here that the Sun has tangled itself into knots with its ill-judged sideswipe. In its “The Sun Says” leader column, it stated: “Many oppose the death penalty in the UK. The Sun does. There is a difference between that and flying to Africa or the Caribbean to get baby-killers off the hook.”
There is a disturbing implication in those sentences that while the death penalty is bad in the UK, it is somehow more morally defensible or justifiable in majority Black nations – most people who say they oppose the death penalty (as the Sun claims it does) don’t find the morality of the issue changes from country to country.
Those lines leave a foul taste, but they also spectacularly miss the point of why Keir Starmer – a UK lawyer – had any role in abolishing the death penalty in the nations concerned.
While they made it sound as if Starmer had spontaneously decided to “fly” out to African and Caribbean nations, in reality he was involved because the ultimate courts of multiple African and Caribbean nations at the time were… in the UK (either through the House of Lords or the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council). It was these UK bodies that ended the mandatory death penalties for said offenders.
Cole, then, is attacking a UK lawyer for using the UK legal system to end UK involvement in the death penalty – which The Sun says it also opposes.
It’s a pity the newspaper and reporter confused themselves so much in writing it, as they’ve really only left themselves with the option of following it up with a stinging indictment of themselves, for their opposition to The Sun’s own stated policy.
As The Sun might say: Oops.
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