…some people, sometimes [DOT 10/4/22]

…look…I know it’s sort of stating the obvious to say that politicians are often hypocrites

In yesterday’s column I highlighted Germany’s infuriating unwillingness to wean itself from Russian gas, something that would be costly but not devastating to the nation’s economy. Part of my point was the hypocrisy: Germany was willing to demand almost inconceivable pain from southern European countries that, the Germans claimed, had borrowed irresponsibly — but is unwilling to accept far smaller penalties for its own feckless policy of relying on Russian energy, despite decades of warnings about the risk this policy created.

The other part of my point, however, was the foolishness of German politicians in attacking economists — including German economists — who say that the costs of a gas embargo would be tolerable, and believing the dire claims of industrialists instead. As I suggested, there’s a strong parallel here with the history of environmental protection. Industry always claims that proposed regulations will have a devastating economic impact. These predictions have never, to my knowledge, been remotely right. So the lesson should be clear: Never trust policy advice from big businesses that are talking their own book.

In today’s newsletter I want to expand on that point, first with a discussion of the history of America’s acid rain policy, then with some broader considerations.

Wonking Out: Russian Gas, Acid Rain and Industrial Scaremongers [NYT]

…but sometimes…sometimes they’re really good at it?

Boris Johnson made a surprise trip to Kyiv yesterday to meet the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, pledging a major new infusion of British arms and financial aid to help counter the expected deadly new phase in Russia’s military offensive.
[…]
“We are stepping up our own military and economic support and convening a global alliance to bring this tragedy to an end, and ensure Ukraine survives and thrives as a free and sovereign nation.”

…sounds good, right?

…& such a photo op…out there in a war zone without so much as a flak jacket…someone will probably bring up churchill any minute

The security situation in Ukraine’s capital has stabilised since Russia withdrew from its positions around the city on 29 March to regroup its forces and consolidate territorial gains in Ukraine’s south and east.

…to be fair he didn’t spend a ton of time in the trenches either…but then…that’s not really the point

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen also visited Ukraine’s capital on Friday, as well as the nearby town of Bucha, where overwhelming evidence suggests that civilians were raped and murdered by Russian troops.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/09/boris-johnson-pledges-to-send-more-arms-during-surprise-visit-to-kyiv

…I’m not saying it’d be better if he hadn’t gone out there…but…about that timing

Boris Johnson faced a renewed threat to his position over the partygate scandal after the police decision to fine 20 people for lockdown breaches appeared to shatter his claim that Covid rules were followed in No 10.

The move by the Metropolitan police was seen as clearcut confirmation of lawbreaking at the heart of government, yet Downing Street provoked fury and derision by refusing to accept that the fixed-penalty notices meant the rules had definitively been broken.
[…]
With the Met making clear this was only the first tranche of referrals – and interviews with certain key figures likely to take place in the coming weeks – there is still a possibility Johnson will be among those asked to pay a fixed-penalty notice.

The threat by some Tory MPs to depose him has lessened in recent weeks amid the crisis in Ukraine, but confirmation of the first penalties on Tuesday reignited talk of a possible challenge.

…& I’m not saying a trip to kyiv wasn’t plan A

Johnson was attempting to shore up his leadership on Tuesday night with a dinner for Tory MPs, but a number declined to attend.
[…]
In a sign of Johnson’s already diminished authority, Conservative whips U-turned on Tuesday and opted to not force Tory MPs to vote against a Labour motion seeking access to the security advice over the decision to give a peerage to Evgeny Lebedev.
[…]
Johnson will also face a critical moment in his premiership if he is revealed to be among those who are included in subsequent tranches of fixed-penalty notices. Senior Tory MPs such as the former attorney general, Jeremy Wright, have said he should face “resignation or removal from office” if he is found to have knowingly attended rule-breaking parties. And former lord chancellor Robert Buckland said on Tuesday: “I think any head of government who has been found to have infringed the law has got some explaining to do.”

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/mar/29/partygate-new-threat-to-boris-johnsons-leadership-as-met-fines-20-over-scandal

…speaking of explaining…you might not be familiar with evgeny

Back in 2009, Johnson was the newly elected mayor of London and Lebedev the son of a billionaire who had just bought the Evening Standard. The Standard was a stalwart supporter of Johnson, endorsing his 2012 reelection campaign. But the relationship between them was unusual for a politician and a newspaper proprietor.

…for context…the standard used to be a rare thing…a newspaper that came out, as the name suggests…in the evening…& it still goes to press later in the day…but they give it away these days…& to call it a newspaper is perhaps misleading…it’s a reasonable guide to what’s in the news…but you won’t find much actual news in its pages…though he also acquired the independent…for the nominal sum of a solitary pound…which may or may not strike you as ironic…anyway…boris & evgeny get along pretty good

Beyond the bonhomie, the friendship has touched on Britain’s political destiny. In February 2016, Lebedev went to a private dinner at Johnson’s Islington home. Johnson was wrestling with whether to back Brexit. Other guests included Michael Gove and his wife, Sarah Vine. Oliver Letwin, patched in via iPhone, tried to persuade Johnson to come out for remain. History records what happened next.

…& I won’t go down the aaron banks/cambridge analytica/russian influence brexit rabbithole…but only because it’s a big enough one to be hard to miss…but also because there’s more to this

Nevertheless, his decision to put Lebedev forward for a peerage came as a shock to many in Westminster, provoking cries of cronyism at a time when all parties had committed to reducing the bloated House of Lords. “It’s payback for political support. In my view it’s unprofessional rather than fishy,” said one source.

…imagine…I dunno…imagine mitch mcconnell parachuted deripaska into the senate as a thank you…I mean…you could call that “unprofessional”…if maybe you had a limited vocabulary

…anyway…a little context on that peerage

Behind the scenes in Whitehall, the Guardian can reveal, there had been consternation of a different sort. Two days before Johnson met Lebedev in March, the House of Lords appointments commission (Holac), which scrutinises all nominations, wrote to the prime minister. It is understood to have expressed concerns about Lebedev’s proposed peerage and asked Downing Street to reconsider.

The commission, made up of cross-party peers, carries out “propriety checks” on candidates. It does not have the power of veto. But it can suggest that a party come up with an alternative, which is what is understood to have happened in Lebedev’s case.

Peers were apparently alarmed following a confidential briefing from the UK security services. They told the commission Lebedev was viewed as a potential security risk because of his father, Alexander Lebedev, a one-time Moscow spy. During the late cold war period, Lebedev Sr worked undercover at the Soviet embassy in London. His real employer was KGB foreign intelligence. Subsequently he went into banking and the media.
[…]
The peers reluctantly signed off on his appointment, the Guardian understands. In their confirmation letter, they are said to have called on Johnson to examine Russian influence in the House of Lords, something highlighted by parliament’s intelligence and security committee in its Russia report.

…but then…boris seems willing to make the occasional telling exception for this guy…even when advised not to

That advice has not stopped Johnson from continuing to see Lebedev. In April 2018, he flew to Italy for a weekend at the Lebedevs’ Terranova mansion. His trip came soon after two Russian military assassins poisoned Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury with the nerve agent novichok. Johnson had been meeting Mike Pompeo, the US secretary of state, to discuss the Skripal crisis. He took the unusual step on the Italy trip of leaving his security team behind.

The following day, a member of the public spotted Johnson at the airport. His suit was crumpled and he looked hungover. The [then] foreign secretary was on his own, clutching a book. He boarded an easyJet flight back to London. It is unclear what Johnson discussed with Lebedev or his father, who was also in Terranova, or why he dispensed with his bodyguards for the solo trip.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/oct/21/parties-politics-peerages-boris-johnson-evgeny-lebedev-friendship

…& yes, lebedev has consistently denied that his dad being an avowed spy means there are any conclusions to be drawn about how far the apple fell from the tree…but…have we learned anything lately about taking certain statements from certain people at face value?

But those were the days when Russian money was coursing through London’s veins – supporting the arts, bailing out football clubs, filling hedge funds and keeping Chelsea builders busy excavating mega-basements – and asking where it came from was deemed horribly unsophisticated. Back then, Putin and the endless photographs of him stripped to the waist were treated almost as a joke. So London became the site of a kind of giant cultural exchange, where billionaires could trade money for class, for access, for feeling at the very heart of things. The journalist Camilla Long, who was working for Tatler magazine when it co-hosted a characteristically lavish, star-studded party with Lebedev’s father, Alexander, at the Earl of Spencer’s Althorp estate, remembers his son as “the oligarch it’s OK to be friends with”. Socialising with them might have felt a little risque, but excitingly so. Besides, most other sources of cash around – fossil fuel companies anxious to greenwash their reputations by sponsoring art galleries, or Saudi princes keen to buy football clubs – were morally compromised. If cool Britannia were to keep up appearances then the money had to come from somewhere, didn’t it?

[…] But any institution whose cachet dwarfs its bank balance is potentially in the same boat, a category embracing both main political parties and the media. Newspapers still confer clout, prestige and access to the heart of power but increasingly struggle to turn a profit, leaving titles such as the Standard and the Independent unable to refuse a generous offer. “What I do find extraordinary,” Sasha Swire wrote in her 2020 memoir, Diary of an MP’s Wife, after meeting Lebedev at Chequers during David Cameron’s time in office, “is how he has managed to penetrate the very core of the English political establishment by buying a newspaper.” It was through the Standard that he first got close to Johnson, then mayor of London. The two men had been friends for a decade by the time British intelligence services allegedly warned against giving Lebedev a peerage on security grounds; years of texting, lunching and partying in the Umbrian hills.

Johnson reportedly brushed off warnings about his confidant, just as he habitually rejects anything that sounds killjoy-ish or obstructive of his freedom to do what he likes. When he entered Downing Street, he reportedly insisted on Lebedev getting that peerage – and after further evidence was provided, the security services are said to have “reframed” their advice, allowing it to go through. Duly elevated in November 2020, Lord Lebedev of Hampton and Siberia has not contributed to a debate or cast a vote since. Presumably he could always pick up the phone, if he ever wanted to express a view.
[…]
It’s just that this prime minister of all prime ministers is perhaps the last one you’d trust to take a sensibly precautionary approach to a millionaire – any millionaire – offering a lift on a private jet. According to his former aide Dominic Cummings, this is a man who sought money from private donors for the renovation of his flat, despite warnings that might be illegal, and was allegedly so blase about national security that he left highly classified papers lying around his flat. It’s highly unlikely any passing visitor ever sneaked a look, of course, but that doesn’t make it right. The trouble with men who never seem to think the rules apply to them is that all too often, they turn out to be precisely the men for whom those rules exist.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/14/evgeny-lebedev-boris-johnson-tuscany-peerage-russian-newspaper-owner

…what’s that got to do with the price of bread, you might be asking…or at least you might if you used the kind of expressions my grandparents did

Despite the police having now concluded the first stage of the investigations and found the law had repeatedly been broken at No 10, Boris is still adamant that he had only ever attended work events. […] What happened in No 10, stayed in No 10. And that also went for the fixed-penalty notices. Anyone who got fined would not be obliged to resign or even admit they had broken the law. This was government as the wild west.

No wonder then that Labour have become ever more inclined not to take the prime minister at his word. If the police don’t feel they can trust him, why should anyone else? Either the Suspect is a lying, narcissistic sociopath who has no idea of the boundaries between right or wrong, or he’s out of his head on psychotropic drugs and is living in a parallel, hallucinatory universe. Or both possibly. So Angela Rayner turned an opposition day debate into a humble address to force the government into releasing information about the appointment of Evgeny Lebedev to the Lords. Just to make sure there was no wrongdoing.

…speaking of parallel universes…now might be a good time to mention that you’re literally not allowed to stand up in parliament & call a liar a liar

You could sense that Rayner would rather have been letting rip about the FPNs and Johnson having lied to parliament than debating Lebedev, but the Commons had been warned not to stray off topic – even to join the dots about the prime minister’s lack of judgment – so Labour’s deputy leader stuck to her brief. Her request was simple. The Guardian and Sunday Times reported that the intelligence services had originally recommended Lebedev as unsuitable for a peerage. Indeed the head of MI6 had even refused to have lunch with the oligarch.

So Rayner just wanted to check whether their concerns were genuine and the Suspect had doctored their recommendations in forcing the Lords’ appointments committee to change its mind. Or whether Johnson was just shallow, venal and corrupt and wanted to reward someone who invited him to flash parties – the lengths he might have gone to drop his security detail after the Nato meeting to get trashed in Lebedev’s castle in Italy – and gave him good coverage in the Evening Standard. As for Lebedev, was he in hock to Putin like his dad or was he just a spoilt airhead?

…& this might be one of those times when I could have just linked to the piece instead of blockquoting most of the thing…but john crace does have a way with words…& of being funnier than I feel about this shit

As so often, it fell to paymaster general, Michael Ellis, to defend the indefensible in the Commons. Fortunately, Ellis has no sense of self-worth and will say almost anything to advance his own career. Though this time he was almost on his own as many of the rest of the Tory backbenchers had decided – after the Owen Paterson lobbying fiasco – that it wasn’t a good look to be seen to be trying to cover up possible wrongdoing and had said they would vote with Labour. If there was dirt on Lebedev, then so be it. And if there wasn’t, then there was no harm in making the details of his appointment public. Weirdly, there are some Tories who feel the probity of the prime minister still matters.

Ellis tried to make the case that even the Suspect had given up on. There was nothing remotely abnormal about Lebedev becoming a peer, he said sotto voce. If the prime minister’s brother and Zac Goldsmith could become Lords then anyone could. Perhaps one day, even Ellis himself might reach such heights. He could dream.

Lebedev had just been your everyday billionaire who had taken pity on a down-on-his-luck London mayor and backed him through thick and thin. The intelligence services were just guilty of Russophobia in turning him down. It didn’t help that Lebedev was busy tweeting that it was an outrage the Commons was debating his peerage. You can take the boy out of the Kremlin but you can’t take the Kremlin out of the boy.

Only two Tory MPs bothered to speak up for Ellis and for the rest of the debate he cut a lone figure. Just waiting for the moment his own party chose not to vote with him at the division. Like so much of his life, his contribution had been entirely pointless.

Though Ellis wan’t the only one to stick up for the Suspect’s inherent honesty and magnificence. Over on the BBC, Matt Hancock, whose skin-crawling neediness is in a league of its own, was saying that he didn’t care if Boris had lied or broken the rules. Johnson was the right person to be leading the country regardless. Just gizza job. Or a peerage.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/mar/29/prime-suspect-pm-takes-partygate-delusion-to-hallucinatory-new-levels

…so…while boris was bravely showing his face (one of them, anyway) in the company of the man of the hour…back at downing street another bit of business was taking up a lot of space in the headlines

After the many tawdry episodes associated with Boris Johnson, the idea that his next-door neighbour was scandal-free recommended Mr Sunak to Tory MPs as their next leader. The contrast between the two men – a cash-grubbing prime minister splattered with sleaze versus a chancellor advertising himself as the squeaky-clean, family man – also made Mr Sunak the more attractive figure to voters.

…friends like these & all that sort of thing

Although that was only a short time ago, it seems like ancient history. That was before the public was outraged to learn that his wife, Akshata Murty, the daughter of an Indian billionaire, has been using non-domicile status to avoid paying UK taxes on her massive overseas earnings. It transpires that the chancellor is truly a believer in lower taxes – so long as they are for his own family.

The first response to the uproar from Mr Sunak, his wife and their apologists was to protest that she was breaking no laws by exploiting this tax break for the mega-rich. That was revealing about them in itself, because it so spectacularly failed to understand why people would be angry even if the arrangement was legal. […]

The chancellor’s family’s fortune being shielded from his tax collectors would smell rotten in any circumstances. The current context made it absolutely toxic. He is ratcheting up the taxes on tens of millions of Britons with modest incomes who have no choice but to pay up. He responded to criticism of his recent spring statement by arguing that the Treasury did not have the funds to do much to alleviate the cost of living crunch on poorer households. Only for everyone to learn that there would be more money in the kitty if the chancellor’s wife paid tax in the way most people do. It was the morality, stupid. It was the inequity. It was the unfairness.

For an Instagram politician who is an obsessive curator of his personal image, it took the chancellor a remarkably long time to grasp how untenable this was. The Sunaks initially even tried to persuade us that they deserved not to be the target of fury, but objects of sympathy. You needed your smallest violin to accompany his lament that the couple were the victims of a “political hit job”. In one notably self-pitying interview, the chancellor went so far as to claim that his opponents were attempting “to smear my wife” in order to “get at me”. It is true that he has enemies, the biggest of whom is not sitting in a newspaper office or on the opposition benches, but living next door at Number 10. Regardless of the origins of the leak and the motives of the leaker, there is no “smear” in discussing whether it is right for the chancellor’s wife to take advantage of a tax scheme unavailable to the vast majority of Britons.

The storm had been raging for 48 hours before Mr Sunak fully grasped how career-endangering this had become. The couple issued a statement in the name of his wife that made a nonsense of their previous assertions about why she has not been paying UK taxes on her overseas earnings. […]

The chancellor will be hoping that they have retreated to a position that is more sustainable, but there are still outstanding questions about the family’s tax affairs which the media and the opposition will continue to press. There has been no promise to pay the very large sums, which some estimates put at £20m, she has saved from the arrangement over the past decade. It will be legitimately asked: if it is right and fair that she pays UK tax on her overseas income in future, isn’t it right and fair that she makes good on the tax swerved in the past?

Questions will also persist about Mr Sunak’s character and judgment. It will be even more of an issue whether a super-rich chancellor can be the man to persuade less affluent Britons that they will have to endure hard times. […] Asked recently to name the price of a loaf, he channelled Marie Antoinette when he answered: “We all have different breads in our house.”

…see…grandparents know a thing or two

Houses would have been a more accurate answer, because they own at least four properties in the UK and abroad as well as having the use of two government residences, the Downing Street flat and Dorneywood in Buckinghamshire. Colleagues have boggled that the Sunaks judged this to be the right time to be spending loads of money on a swimming pool, tennis court and gym complex at their manor house in his Yorkshire constituency. It’s maybe not the best look for a chancellor jacking up taxes amid the most severe squeeze on real incomes in decades.

There’s much debate among Tories about why the chancellor failed to appreciate that his wife’s tax position was bound to cause uproar. Is it because he is so rich or because his political instincts are so poor that he could not see how this would look through the eyes of the electorate? Did he understand that it would look terrible, but foolishly assumed that it could be kept hidden? Did he expect it to be revealed one day, but gambled that it wouldn’t trigger an outcry? Did he anticipate an outcry, but reckoned he could brazen it out? Was he naive, idiotic, complacent, cavalier or arrogant?
[…]
There’s a pattern to the behaviour of this government. Its leaders demand painful sacrifices of everyone else while claiming special privileges for themselves. There’s one rule for them. There’s another for the little people. That’s how they act because that’s how they think.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/apr/10/stench-entitlement-now-oozing-from-rishi-sunaks-home-as-well-as-boris-johnsons

Senior Conservatives have written off Rishi Sunak as a potential prime minister – and now believe Boris Johnson will have to remove him as chancellor in his next reshuffle […]

“He has shown colossal naivety and the way he has arranged his affairs does not suggest he is even committed to the UK, but that he is keeping open the option of a career in finance in the United States.”

On Friday it also emerged that the chancellor and Murty had both held US green cards, meaning they had registered themselves as permanent residents in the US. In a development that shocked many Tories, it was confirmed that Sunak held the green card for a period of 19 months when he was chancellor and in charge of UK finances. The issue was even raised at a White House briefing on Friday evening.

…so as it happens you might say that the green card thing was pretty much round two

Meanwhile it was reported on Saturday night that a Whitehall leak inquiry has been launched in an attempt to find out who passed details of Murty’s tax status to the media. Sunak’s team is said to believe it was a Labour-supporting official dubbed “red throat”, according to the Sunday Times.

The paper quoted a senior government official as saying: “There’s going to be a full Cabinet Office and HM Treasury investigation into who had that information and if anyone has requested that information. Divulging the tax status of a private individual is a criminal offence.”

A former Tory cabinet minister said Sunak was clearly damaged and would not stand any chance in a leadership contest if one was held in the coming months. The way he had arranged his family’s affairs had shown his political judgment to be badly flawed and raised questions about whether his leadership chances could ever be revived, he said.

A third senior figure in the party said the controversy of recent days had demonstrated how quickly a once-stellar career could go into reverse, to a point from which it would be difficult to recover. “The timing is terrible. I think his problem is that taxes have gone up a lot in his period as chancellor, which is not popular in the party or country. And we have a cost-of-living crisis. None of this looks good.”
[…]
Johnson is believed to be considering a ministerial reshuffle in the summer or autumn. There are known to have been tensions between No 10 and No 11 after the chancellor offered only lukewarm support to Johnson at the height of the scandal over lockdown-busting parties, before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A government source said: “I don’t see the PM resisting this opportunity to move Rishi now.”

The latest Opinium poll for the Observer finds that Sunak’s approval rating has dropped to a new low of -15, making him only slightly less unpopular than Johnson himself.

Only four months ago, when he was firm favourite to succeed Johnson if the PM was toppled over parties at No 10, the chancellor’s approval rating stood at a very healthy plus 11.

All opposition parties are now determined to keep up pressure on Sunak over in the coming weeks. Labour and the Liberal Democrats called on Murty, who remains an Indian citizen, not just to begin paying tax on her overseas earnings but also to pay back what she had saved over recent years.

Shadow transport secretary Louise Haigh said that while her “non-dom” status had been legal, Sunak, who claimed last week that she was victim of a smear campaign, had failed to be transparent about his family’s tax status at a time when he was raising taxes for millions of people. “He has come out on a number of occasions to try and muddy the waters around this and to obfuscate,” she said.

In a statement on Friday, Murty, who is to keep India as her “place of domicile”, said she had done nothing wrong but acknowledged some people did not see her tax status as being compatible with her husband’s position. “I understand and appreciate the British sense of fairness and I do not wish my tax status to be a distraction for my husband or to affect my family,” she said. “I do this because I want to, not because the rules require me to.”

By retaining her non-domicile status she will in future be able to save huge sums in inheritance tax. Murty has assets of at least £690m in her father’s company, Infosys.
[…]
Daniel Beizsley, a researcher with the charity Spotlight on Corruption, said the fact that Sunak had a blind trust through which his financial interests were handed over to an independent trustee raised issues over potential conflicts of interest. “By having this arrangement in place, Sunak is preventing any proper scrutiny of his financial interests and is the only current member of the cabinet taking this approach. The system of blind trusts needs to be rethought to include at least a summary of their contents if they are relevant to a minister’s brief to give the public a better understanding of any potential conflicts.”

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/apr/09/rishi-sunaks-hopes-of-becoming-prime-minister-are-over-say-top-tories

…for a minute there…if maybe you hadn’t had coffee yet or something…you might get the impression that conflicts of interest were somehow disqualifying

Lachlan Murdoch’s first major media moment was also his first public humiliation.

It was 2005, and the oldest son of Rupert Murdoch was on the cover of New York magazine as “The Boy Who Wouldn’t Be King.” The dishy piece outlined how the elder media mogul had undercut his anticipated successor by siding instead with a beloved top executive, Fox News co-founder Roger Ailes, on key programming decisions. Licking his wounds, Lachlan, then 34, abruptly resigned his role in the family-controlled news empire and fled New York with his wife and child for their native Australia, which he referred to as their “spiritual home.”

It was a move that cemented a public image of the tanned, tattooed surfer as an ambivalent heir. And even as he made his way back to family business, nearly a decade later, and rose again through the ranks, the image remained of a passive Gen-Xer who kept his politics quiet and his ambitions subservient to those of the swaggering conservative billionaire dad who aspired to influence power at the highest global levels.

Until last week.

In a speech in Sydney celebrating a new initiative at a conservative think tank, Lachlan Murdoch — now 50 and the co-chairman of the family’s News Corp., which owns the Wall Street Journal and New York Post, and chairman and CEO of Fox Corporation — took swipes at the “elites” whom he believes disdain traditional values. He also blasted governments for imposing mandates and business shutdowns to control the pandemic and alleged conspiratorially that “practically all the media suppressed the discovery of Hunter Biden’s laptop.”

It was a monologue that could have fit in seamlessly with the lineup of right-wing commentary served up every night by Fox News’s prime time opinion hosts — including an obscure jab at the “1619 Project.”
[…]
The speech was something of a tipping point for longtime watchers of the Murdoch empire, who once assumed that the children of the 91-year-old Rupert — notably Lachlan and his younger brother James — might be a moderating influence on the media properties that promoted the rise of former president Donald Trump.

Instead, James ended up leaving the company, as he made his discomfort with the rightward tack of the family business increasingly public, donating substantial funds to battle climate change, promote scientific understanding and underwrite pro-democracy initiatives.

Lachlan, meanwhile, sent another powerful signal about his leanings even before his March 29 speech when he attended a book party last month celebrating former Trump attorney general William P. Barr.
[…]
And despite Trump’s occasional derision of Fox over election grievances — and his fleeting attempts to boost smaller upstart conservative channels — Murdoch’s network remains a crucial part of the GOP firmament.

“Fox is still the most important space for Republican members of Congress to be, and that’s true whether you are talking about 10 a.m. with Bill Hemmer, or Dana Perino, or the evening opinion shows,” said Doug Heye, a Republican strategist. “That’s where their voters are.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/04/09/fox-news-lachlan-murdoch-attacks-1619-project-covid-measures/

The problem with Fox “News,” the cable TV channel, isn’t just what it is — it’s also what it isn’t.

It is often a purveyor of propaganda and misinformation. What it’s not is a source of “news” — at least not by any normal definition.

That’s one of the conclusions I drew from a fascinating new study in which arch-conservative Fox TV viewers were paid to watch CNN for a month. The study, titled “The manifold effects of partisan media on viewers’ beliefs and attitudes: A field experiment with Fox News viewers,” was performed by a pair of political scientists: David Broockman, who teaches at UC-Berkeley, and Joshua Kalla, who teaches at Yale.
[…]
The study authors differentiated between “traditionally emphasized forms of media influence,” like agenda setting and framing, and what they call “partisan coverage filtering”: the choice to selectively report information about selective topics, based on what’s favorable to the network’s partisan side, and ignore everything else.
[…]
But the biggest takeaway for me is the realization that Fox viewers aren’t just manipulated and misinformed — they are literally being made ignorant by their consumption habits. Watching Fox, they hear a lot of “news-like” things, but they don’t learn about what’s really happening.

And here’s where we in the mainstream media can do something useful: We can stop talking about Fox like it’s a different form of news — and start talking about how it isn’t news at all. It’s the opposite of news. It’s instead of news. It’s the absence of news.

We can explain more clearly that real news organizations present viewers with the information they need regardless of whether it hurts or helps a specific cause or political party.

[…] it’s time to firmly declare that Fox is not news.
[…]
You could certainly argue — and I do — that corporate news does its own kind of coverage filtering. There are all sorts of things the corporate media decides not to cover that independent journalists do, like poverty, mass incarceration, U.S.-caused civilian casualties, how the Washington agenda is skewed by money, and these days, pretty much anything that is good news for Biden.

But mainstream media still bases its reports on evidence, not on whim. It doesn’t hide key elements of an ongoing story, under any circumstance. Fox cannot say the same.

A new study suggests Fox News viewers aren’t just manipulated and misinformed — they are literally being made ignorant by their consumption habits. [NBC]

…& yes…I am very much aware that a great many people…including more than a few of you folks…have been saying that for a long time…but…well…the part I maybe should have mentioned earlier when I brought up the evening standard…that’s a london paper…you know…the home of westminster & all that…& that not-news thing?

…let’s just say you don’t find a lot of coverage about this sort of thing in its pages

It was a strongly worded warning from British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to Russian President Vladimir Putin: Invade Ukraine and there will be “significant consequences.”

Three days after that phone call last Dec. 13, Johnson’s Conservative Party received a donation of 66,500 pounds (nearly $88,000) from Lubov Chernukhin, the wife of one of Putin’s former deputy ministers.

In all, Chernukhin has donated more than 2 million pounds to the Conservative Party since 2012, making her one of the largest female donors in British political history, public records from the British Electoral Commission show.

“You do have to ask yourself what the motivation is for these donations,” Britain’s former attorney general said. [NBC]

…in fact…based on a rudimentary google for “evening standard chernukhin”…there was this back on march 2nd…which in fairness did include this tweet

We’ve published the donations and loans that political parties reported to us from October to December 2021.

24 parties reported a total of £11,206,757 of donations and loans for this period.

Learn more and see a full breakdown of donations https://t.co/EtxAIn4vWB

— Electoral Commission (@ElectoralCommUK) March 2, 2022

…but really…how many people click through on those?

…in the interests of “contextualizing” the donations labour was taking a dim view of, though…the standard helpfully drew its readers’ attention to some other ones

Other major donors to the Conservative Party listed in Wednesday’s release from the Electoral Commission, which covers the final three months of 2021, include West End producer John Gore, who donated £350,000 over the period.

Mr Gore has donated more than £6 million to the Conservative Party since 2017, making him one of the party’s leading donors in recent years.

…see…that’s much more money than the russian lady with the minimal degrees of separation from vlad…nothing to see here

In total, the party received almost £5 million in donations during the last three months of 2021, an increase of more than £800,000 on the previous three months.

…well, except for the queue of people lining up to give the tories entirely respectable gobs of cash for which they doubtless expect absolutely no instances of grace or favor

The Conservatives received £3.2 million from individual donors and another £950,000 from companies.

…perish the thought…oh…& apropos of nothing…that would be a bigger queue than the one forming in front of the opposition

The Labour Party raised just £3.9 million in the same period, a decrease of £125,000 compared with the previous three months.

…see…they’re obviously just being sore losers & trying to score cheap political points…on account of they can’t afford the other sort

Compared with the last three months of 2020, Unite donated £255,000 less to the Labour Party in the final quarter of 2021.

Give Russian-linked donations to Ukrainian charities, Labour MP tells PM [evening standard]

…see…even the unions are bailing on them…need we say more?

…who’d a thunk that’d be where that headline wound up…wonder if they ever went back to the story…why yes…yes, they did…about a week later, in fact

Former prime minister David Cameron has said it is a “giant red herring” to suggest Russian money influenced policy against Vladimir Putin in any way when he was in power.

He said there was a “very careful system for vetting who could and who could not give money to the Conservative Party”, and “crucially” Britain had “the strongest anti-Putin policy of any country in Europe”.

Speaking to LBC’s Tonight With Andrew Marr, Mr Cameron was asked about reports Lubov Chernukhin, the wife of Mr Putin’s former deputy finance minister, paid £160,000 to play tennis with him and then-London mayor Boris Johnson in 2014.

He said: “I do, I remember. There was absolutely no conversation about Russia, or about finance, or about Putin, or anything else.”

Put to him that “Russians with really close Kremlin links were still very, very close to the top of the Conservative Party” during his premiership, he said: “I don’t accept that.”

…some would call that denial…but davey boy’s never even heard of a river in egypt…quite the contrary

He said that when he hosted the Russian president in No 10 in 2013, Mr Putin “let his guard down and said, ‘Fundamentally I’m not a democrat and I don’t share your interests’.”

He added: “He was also a phenomenal liar.

…they do after all say it takes one to know one

“I remember confronting him with evidence that Russian troops were in the Donbas, he flat out lied, I remember confronting him with evidence about the shooting down of a Malaysia Airline, there was no naivety.”

…on putin’s part, at least…dave’s still game to overlook just about anything in service of the party line

He declined to criticise Home Secretary Priti Patel, adding: “I’m not here to pick apart different people in the Government, I’m trying to avoid that in my post-office life.

“But we’ve got to get this done, the Prime Minister wants it done and I’m sure it will be.”

‘Giant red herring’ to suggest Russian cash shaped our policy, says Cameron [evening standard]

…as it happens that bit about the poster child for tokenism in the tory ranks would be in reference to the somehow-not-at-all-surprising disparity between the rhetoric about welcoming ukrainian refugees to the shores of that green & pleasant land…& the dismally small number of examples of that actually happening on account of the administrative blockade that they have to negotiate to have any hope…but that…along with a great many things…I’ve rather run out of time to get into today…on account of sometimes you can get distracted by…say…a self-interested asshole doing something audaciously self-interested?

In the week after April Fool’s day, I am usually still reeling from the terrible pranks my family play on me. But this year, it feels like my relatives have been outdone by the pranksters who run the country and the daily satire that is British politics.

Boris Johnson will survive partygate but this is not governing [Financial Times]

…anyway…let me see if I can rustle up some tunes