It was less than half an hour before Gina Miller was due to launch her new political party, True & Fair, in a Westminster conference centre. Other than the bald man, there was one person in the room — me. There is scaling back, and there are bloody massacres. Dutifully, I began eating one of the 50 croissants laid out for journalists. Someone had to.

He was a PR, and said that it was his job to handle the press. Handle: like a dog, or a problem. It promised to be a light day’s work. Man, it was quiet. I heard an empty crisp packet breeze across the road to Parliament Square.

Fifty mugs stayed eerily unfilled with coffee. Oh God I thought, if I’m the only person here I’ll have to ask Gina Miller a question. Only one made sense: Gina, where is everybody? The deserted room, big enough for several Greek weddings, gave me that bad party feeling. How could I escape?

The PR sensed my uncertainty, and attempted to handle it.

“It’s not just an in-person event,” he said. “We also have a livestream.” Phew. He shuffled off, and Quentin Letts shuffled in. Now there were two.

Gina Miller must hate Boris Johnson. This week, like every week, he is the only story in the postcode. When Miller was jihading against Brexit, Boris gave us all the pleasure of his final ascent to the top, recently he’s given us the even greater pleasure of his descent. The scenery crumbles, the set collapses, and a cloud of dust blocks the view of anything else.

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Centrism always fails

By Will Lloyd

Many people think Gina Miller is an egotist. The millionaire lawyer who tried to stop Brexit; the Remainer activist who couldn’t get outside herself. Well, perhaps. There was always something daring and disobedient and adventurously rude about her. In another life she might have been the first contestant on Dragon’s Den to be arrested for punching Peter Jones in his smug face. 

Miller has the gift of not being a nice person. She has the rare courage to be unpleasant. To wreck things. Look at photos of her, triumphant, outside the Supreme Court in 2019. The small, witty mouth and bright, despising eyes. Her chin raised, proud as Benito Mussolini’s. Yes, an egotist. But a worthy player in the drama too. What exactly did she want, now that it was all over?

Quentin and I fought our way through the crowds to the auditorium. There, a few more hacks, heavily outnumbered by Miller’s aides, were finding seats.

Another, hairier, PR toddled up to me. We shook hands. Before I had time to ask him anything, he said: “Oh, no, we’re not worried about the in-person turn out. There’s also a livestream. This is all about introducing Gina — no, sorry — not introducing Gina, but, err…” And then he walked off, handling completed.

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By Will Lloyd

But Miller was introduced anyway. First by a video montage of ordinary people reading scripts about how crap British politics is. Then by a PowerPoint — clicked through in a silence so fantastically profound it felt physical — full of slides from the pollsters Savanta ComRes. These revealed the extraordinary: British people do not trust the established political parties, nor do they like them. Politicians, like robbers, need an opportunity. True & Fair’s was the evidence provided by the montage and the slides. Everyone despises Westminster business as usual.

She arrived. White heels, white suit; as pristine as fresh A4 paper. As blank as a lost memory. Miller looked angry; whether at the state of British politics, or at the sad sight of this unfilled room was hard to say. She scowled. Her arched, fixed eyebrows glowed with a special incandescence. I hoped this would show up on the livestream.

Her speech was a blizzard of pointless adjectives, catastrophic predictions, and mangled metaphors. She talked about roadmaps that set out visions. She talked about “deafening silences” and creating a “government that works for everyone”. Miller wanted to “help real people in the real world”. Overworked words like these have a tainted character. They are hard to trust.

Miller chewed on them. Her tone drifted up nasally. Words were stuck in her sinuses. She tried a joke. “Status quo — Latin, some would say, for the mess we’re in.” It was a lawyer’s ventured joke. The product of a padlocked imagination.

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Moaning about Britain’s low productivity, Miller said we lagged behind the US, France, and Germany. “In fact,” she grimaced, “we only just beat Italy in productivity terms.” Italy! This was British xenophobia so classically proportioned she might have been Roy Chubby Brown. Italy!

The tiny group of hacks began to look at their phones. Online someone had described True & Fair’s colourful circular logo as a “buffering rainbow sphincter of doom”. The internet learned what the rest of us knew: attendance was poor. It was awkward.

Miller crashed on about the empty rhetoric of politicians, while contributing nothing more than that herself. There were no ideas, not a single policy. She would later say that they were available on True & Fair’s website. The more she tried to flesh her party out, the thinner it seemed.

Finally, she mentioned it. “Brexit — yes, I’m daring to use the word apparently banned in Whitehall — is on course to cause a 5% contraction of Britain’s economy over the long term.” After all Miller’s boilerplate, hearing the word was sweeter than the sound of mandolins: something she cared about at last.

Forgetfulness is an essential part of survival. In one sarcastic aside, Miller revealed that she couldn’t let it go. Normal people do. They age, they forgive each other. Brexit is gone. In the long-run, technical arrangements will be made between groups of civil servants, who, although on opposite negotiating tables, believe the same things. The economic impact of the pandemic will make it impossible to tell if Brexit was “good” or “bad”. Lord Frost will publish his autobiography. FPBE Dads will continue to simp Marina Hyde on Twitter. Nothing will change that much — unless you’re Irish, and therefore invisible to the rest of Britain. 

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Power is corrupting the Tories

By Will Lloyd

Miller can’t forget. The deep, banging conflicts of Brexit still jangle in her mind. So she’s launched a doomed political party, for herself. If she had wanted a loser’s revenge, she would have been better off starting a Substack, like Dom.

Instead she was here, lobbing vague slogans — “real solutions rather than empty rhetoric” — to a centre ground that ceased to exist years ago.  “It’s time to demand change,” she said, caught in the delusion that the British voter crosses their ballot hopefully. The British voter usually turns out to release complex, resigned forms of disgust, not to change the country. If it were any different, new parties might be more successful. 

So, she is a tragic figure. A Brexit leftover, surrounded by uneaten croissants. In the Long 2016 period she offered Britain a narrative, a high concept. The woman who never finished law school turning over May and Boris in the Supreme Court. She abseiled into the hearts of Remainers like an SAS soldier into an endangered embassy. Or, she was the elitist, doggedly thwarting the will of the people with her fancy lawyers. These were false stories imposed on the random and ambiguous truths of the era.

Still, back then Miller took her opportunities for performance well, and the press found a use for her. Yesterday, outside of Brexit’s high dramas, facing rows of unfilled chairs, she floundered. Miller sounded exactly like what she was railing against — a Status Quo politician. She tried to present herself as a prophet of change, but she looked like a familiar symptom of the times she wanted to transform. Out of touch and toothless, mouthing the same old platitudes about education and the economy you’ve heard a hundred times before. Shouldn’t she just be a Liberal Democrat? 

The press were done with her now. Three journalists bothered to ask questions, before Gina Miller stormed off into a side room. Her speech was an end, not a beginning.

But a noble aspiration is one thing. The emerging reality looks worryingly like one of those “How It Started/How It’s Going” memes. Take, for instance, his latest gig. He’s to be “Commissioner on Information Disorder” at the nonprofit Aspen Foundation, sitting on a panel holding a six-month inquiry into the spread of misinformation online.

And this is how he announced it:

“As I’ve said, the experience of today’s digital world has us inundated with an avalanche of misinformation, affecting our ability as individuals as well as societies to think clearly and truly understand the world we live in. It’s my belief that this is a humanitarian issue and as such, it demands a multi-stakeholder response from advocacy voices, members of the media, academic researchers, and both government and civil society leaders. I’m eager to join this new Aspen commission and look forward to working on a solution-oriented approach to the information disorder crisis.”

Just cherish every word of that: “multi-stakeholder response”, “advocacy voices”, “civil society leaders”, “solution-oriented approach”. Leaving aside the questionable metaphor in that clunking first sentence (can you be inundated by an avalanche?), here is a full card of Bullshit Bingo. These are expressions that no ordinary English-speaking human being has ever uttered spontaneously aloud or written without irony; they are the zombie catchphrases of a corporate PR department.

I have no way of knowing for sure that this is not how Prince Harry naturally expresses himself. But I hope it won’t be considered lèse-majesté to say, I hae ma doots. And in a way it doesn’t matter. It is a sign of how far in the shit we are that many, if not most, people will assume it was written for him, and won’t think anything much of it.

Not only do we consume misinformation but we expect to, and correct for it, and blithely wave through what looks like misinformation even when it’s contained in the announcement of someone “eager” to embark on a new job waging war on misinformation.

Corporate, comms-style bullshit presented as personal from-the-heart statements is so normalised that it looks like nitpicking to even raise the question. Of course you’re not actually supposed to think that Prince Harry thinks anything of the sort, or that if he did, this is how he’d tell you about it. Don’t be so naive!

You could compare the idiom of Prince Harry’s statement, as quoted last week in the announcement of his last new gig — as Chief Impact Officer (whatever that is) for a billionaire wellbeing startup called BetterUp:

“As BetterUp’s first Chief Impact Officer, my goal is to lift up critical dialogues around mental health, build supportive and compassionate communities, and foster an environment for honest and vulnerable conversations. And my hope is to help people develop their inner strength, resilience, and confidence.”

Italics – my hope; my goal — thus. The statement goes on for ages, so I won’t quote it all, but in addition to “lift up critical dialogues around”, we can tick off “driving advocacy”, “peak performance”, “thought leadership”, “outreach and strategic planning”, “self-optimisation” and many more on the bingo card.

More buzzphrases — but tailored in this case to mental wellbeing corporate nonsense rather than tech-bro civil-society corporate nonsense. This statement was introduced, incidentally, by one from BetterUp’s CEO which ended: “I could go on, but I think he can say it better himself.” It seems to me quite possible that the same person drafted both those statements. But let’s suppose it was not, and that Prince Harry not only spoke from the heart about the Aspen Foundation, but that he spoke likewise from the heart about BetterUp, and that he deftly altered his style on each occasion. In some ways, that would be worse: it would suggest that, rather than just letting these organisations put words in his mouth, he has allowed their empty idioms to soak into his very soul.

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By Will Lloyd

Some years ago, I was hosting a series of book events sponsored by a hotel chain. When they were being announced, the very nice and amiable PR for the hotel let me have a look at the press release. It contained a substantial quote from me, which he had invented (and which sounded not unlike the sort of thing attributed here to the Prince). He was genuinely surprised, and seemed not a little put out, when I insisted that anything I was quoted as saying or writing should be stuff I myself said or wrote. It was, he said, standard practice to do things the way he did them.

Perhaps it is. But look: the Duke of Sussex is a person who has staked his career and the second half of his life on being his own man. He has made authenticity — “speaking your truth”, as Oprah puts it — his big thing. He and his wife have spoken eloquently of refusing to be part of a system where the image of the Firm trumps the authentic needs and feelings of individuals. And yet here he is, within months, meekly offering himself as a human meatpuppet: his name and image, his personal beliefs and feelings, are available to be presented to the world in the hackneyed corporate cliches of a press release.

Even if you haven’t made a performance of how important it is to you to be your own man, parroting the sort of balderdash that comms departments churn out isn’t a trivial thing. It sells the pass.

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Of course Prince Harry would say — and no doubt truthfully — that he’s only taking jobs that align with his existing beliefs and support the causes he cares about. And perhaps he really does believe that he has a unique set of skills that make his executive role in these organisations worth every penny — that he’s a mental health professional and a shrewd analyst of the information ecosystem. Perhaps he believes that he can meaningfully do multiple senior executive jobs at once, and that his name on the masthead is no more than the cherry on the Bakewell tart.

But the application of Occam’s razor here suggests that it’s the right to have their language issue from Prince Harry’s mouth and have him glad-hand donors or shareholders that these companies are really paying for. They’re using him as… how would you put it? A figurehead. Imagine finding yourself in a job where your only role was to sprinkle celebrity fairy-dust on good causes and mouth strings of empty formal phrases. It sounds pretty soul-destroying to me. It sounds, in fact, a bit like being a member of the Royal Family.

Was there a nadir? Was it the WAG parade at the World Cup in 2006, when Victoria Beckham drank bottles of Veuve Clicquot through a straw? (“We became a bit of a circus,” one player sagely reminisced a few years later.) Was it Ashley Cole’s admission, in 2006, that he nearly “swerved off the road” with anger when Arsenal offered him a new contract with a £55,000 weekly wage? Perhaps it was Wayne Rooney’s “romp with a granny” — or was it a naked Frank Lampard, jeering at grieving Americans in a Heathrow hotel bar on September 13, 2001? England expected that most footballers would try and sleep with their teammate’s wife.

That was off the pitch. On the field, if you can endure the recollection, they were even worse. England played like a scratch team dredged from the remedial unit of a Victorian institution. They burned up at tournaments in 2004, 2006 and 2010. They didn’t even qualify for Euro 2008. The game, through the Premier League, had never been more lucrative. The reputation of its players had never been lower. In a strange way it was appropriate. If England’s footballers were hideous in the 2000s, it was because England was. If they were trashily materialistic, it was because England was too. They were no better, and not much worse, than anyone else in public life at the time. That was the tragedy. “Morally corrupt” was how a group of bishops described the New Labour years in 2008. God only knows what the Right Reverends would have thought if they’d seen Footballers’ Wives.

Now the face of football is changing. England’s players are a source of pride rather than embarrassment. In 2018, led by Gareth Southgate, their impeccable manager, they reached the semi-finals of the World Cup — a moment of full-spectrum, flags-out, boozy national unity that most fans, inured to washout after washout, never thought they’d experience. Success brought English players an earned prestige, even an authority, that they hadn’t enjoyed since Italia ‘90. No more tragedy. They were just heroes. What would they do with it?

The answer, at least partially, lies in an office on Great Titchfield Street, Fitzrovia. That’s where Roc Nation Sports International’s headquarters is based. Founded in 2008 by Jay Z, Roc Nation has since washed into every cove in the modern entertainment industry. They manage artists and athletes, produce TV shows and films, and run a music label. Team Roc, a division within the company, is dedicated to efforts around social justice: bailing out BLM protestors in America this summer, offering pro-bono legal support for their families, creating buzzy media campaigns, and leveraging Roc Nation’s impressive celebrity roster to boost stories.

Their work blurs the lines between politics and sport, entertainment and activism. “We don’t consider ourselves a traditional agency — we really are a movement,” Roc Nation Sports International’s president Michael Yormark told the Telegraph in June.

The movement found a standard bearer in Manchester United’s Marcus Rashford, who became one of Roc Nation’s European clients earlier this year. An icon of the 2018 World Cup, and a courageous high-pressure penalty taker, Rashford grew up in a single-parent family in Wythenshawe. When he heard that schools would be closing as part of the wider national lockdown in March, Rashford, who’d relied on free lunch programmes as a child, turned to Kelly Hogarth, his personal publicist, and VP of strategic communications at Roc Nation Sports International — what could they do to help poor children secure vital meals?

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Even hermits know what happened next. Rashford’s — and Hogarth’s — free school meals campaign, mammothly popular and relentlessly sincere, forced the Government into two U-turns. ‘RASHERS FOR PM’, screamed the Daily Star, one of dozens of headlines he made over the summer, then the autumn. Old media was full of sympathetic interviews with Rashford, or commentators, such as Matthew Parris, who were scared of criticising the campaign, for fear of sounding mean. Who, after all, wanted children to go hungry in a plague year?

Only monsters: when the Daily Mail tried to peg Rashford as a hypocrite for owning multiple homes, it was like watching a giraffe try to ride a bicycle. When you own new media as much as Rashford does — with 900,000 more followers than Boris Johnson on Twitter — attacks from mere newspapers don’t work. Alongside Manchester City’s Raheem Sterling and Aston Villa’s Tyrone Mings, who both campaigned for BLM after the death of George Floyd, Rashford was suddenly leading a generation of politically self-aware England players. The normally sedate New Statesman editor, Jason Cowley, called them — without mentioning the squadrons of PR flacks writing their tweets — “activist super players”.

Footballers, not poets, became England’s unacknowledged legislators. Rashford received an MBE, and millions of school children received lunch.

Traditional broadcast and print media never did more than boost Rashford’s signal. The narrative was too sexy — star footballer routs out of touch toffs at the top — for them to attempt anything else. To understand what was interesting about Rashford, and by extension Roc Nation, you had to go to the trade press, and media companies which focused on sports PR. The Rashford campaign was the subject of huge features in AdWeek and SportsPro, and he won PR Week’s “Communicator of The Year” award. What earned Rashford praise from them wasn’t feeding children. It was the exciting way Roc Nation has fused social justice and sport in order to boost Rashford’s profile, the better for him to serve as a conduit for digital marketing operations, the spread of branded content, and the sale of boxfresh trainers.

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The bottom line wasn’t doing good; the bottom line, as SportsPro noted, was that during the campaign, Rashford’s Twitter following had grown by 65%, whereas the total social following of Manchester United — which hasn’t run any political campaigns this summer — had grown a sluggish 8% in the same period. Simon Oliveira, a long-term advisor to David Beckham, labelled Roc Nation’s efforts “genius”.

For experienced sports marketeers like Oliveira, Rashford’s campaign set a new precedent. During Beckham’s glory days, the most social justice a player would indulge in might involve being chauffeured, blatantly hungover, to a children’s hospital to sign autographs, or to a community centre to cut a ribbon. Nobody cared what Gary Neville thought about child tax credits. Complicated policy matters were for Oliver Letwin or David Laws or Ed Balls to work out. Roc Nation and Rashford changed all that. “The barriers have been well and truly broken,” Oliveira wrote over the summer. “Top-athletes, and the organisations they represent, can collectively reach more people than almost any politician and connect.”

The next horizon stretches beyond Rashford. His authenticity, precisely calibrated by the 20 “subject-matter experts” who work for Roc Nation in that Fitzrovia office, is rare. As the first “activist super player” to cut through with the public, Rashford was able to give the impression of spontaneity, relatability and unfilteredness prized by PR world, whatever the contrary reality. Other PR firms will go further than Roc Nation, and take stands on issues with far less room for consensus than feeding hungry children during a pandemic.

This represents an enormous shift away from sport as it was traditionally understood in England. It would be wrong to say that sport was apolitical, but it has rarely been a space for activism. According to the historian Derek Birely in Sport and The Making of Britain, sport had a “chauvinistic” side, but its role lay in “providing a safety valve, escape, sublimation, [and] socially acceptable outlets” for aggression. For Robert Colls, in This Sporting Life: Sport & Liberty in England 1760-1960, sport was defined by “knowing that not everyone is political”.

That knowledge is being replaced with the more contentious model of player-activism found in American sports. English football is already embroiled in a domestic culture war over the practice of “taking the knee” in support of BLM, and an international culture war over the Premier League’s “Rainbow Laces” campaign against homophobia. Perennial plans — looking ever more likely to come to fruition — for a European Super League will cement the game’s money-making capabilities, while severing the connection between England’s biggest clubs and their localities.

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The four divisions of English football were always a parody of the class system; if the top clubs jet off, it will mirror the growth of our own transnational elite, who, like Manchester United, would rather play in Milan than Middlesbrough. Look on the bright side: United will be able, finally, to compete with the Dallas Cowboys for overseas markets on a more equal footing.

Top players in such a system will be like the American celebrities repped by Roc Nation. Extraordinarily wealthy and influential, but blandly removed from the audiences they sell their apparel and their opinions too. Maybe it will be then, when Jack Grealish is co-hosting a podcast with Greta Thunberg, or Mason Greenwood is co-authoring a popular book about antiracism with Reni-Eddo Lodge, that fans will feel a touch — just a breath — of nostalgia for Wayne Rooney and Ashley Cole. They were not good men, but at least their cynicism was genuine.