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Priti Patel arrives at 10 Downing Street in London, after she was ordered back to Britain following the disclosure that she held further unauthorised meetings with Israeli politicians (Credit Image: John Stillwell/PA Wire/PA Images)
Among the many oddities of the age of mass information is that it turns everybody into a gossip (as Jonathan Dimbleby explained in his interview for UnHerd). Sometimes the gossip is about celebrities. Sometimes it is about politicians. But it’s gossip nonetheless.
Sometimes the gossip is about salacious matters, such as which Hollywood star has been accused of a knee-touch. Sometimes it has the slightly more highfalutin air that the same discussion gains when it revolves around ministers of state. But sexual misconduct is not the only subject of gossip in western democracies. Often the subject is equally prurient, but devoid of sex. In recent days the British public was able to enjoy the spectacle of the Conservative government’s minister for International Development being sacked (or persuaded to resign) in real time. We got to watch and read a number of corrections of previous statements, apologies and warnings and then the great spectacle of Priti Patel being ordered back from Africa for what was expected to be, and indeed proved to be, her imminent departure from the British Cabinet.
It is worth pausing for a moment on occasions such as this. Rolling news programmes ran progress reports on the flight back to the UK from Kenya, which Patel had been ordered to take. According to one report, “Brits were glued to a map said to be tracking Priti Patel’s flight back to London. At one point more than 22,000 people were following the Kenya Airlines plane on the Flightradar24 website, the live flight tracker said.”
What for? What did anybody hope to gain from this? To be slightly ahead of their friends in the news of the latest developments. To enjoy the spectacle of a politician getting some type of comeuppance. Schadenfreude for the bored, perhaps?
But to consider how strange this gossip-as-news is, consider how unlikely it is that Priti Patel would have hit the news had she not been about to be fired. If she had arrived in Kenya and carried out her duties, would any of that have made the press? Would any of it have been reported at all? What would the coverage have been of UK aid policy in Africa? What analysis of the figures, of the waste and/or benefits of such aid would have been attempted? How many people would have tracked her plane’s return to the UK?
For anyone engaged in or concerned with the world this descent towards gossip – whether higher or lower – is a serious concern. If the world were stable and the situation at home and abroad in a state of higher bliss, then the consummate interest in the sexual habits of celebrities and the career prospects of young cabinet ministers would be understandable. But, given the challenges we face, these preoccupations look not just puerile but almost decadent.
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