Media going mad will help Boris win the Tory leadership

Only Boris can stop Boris becoming Prime Minister, goes the saying in medialand. Following a carefully managed campaign, constructed by advisors aware of his flaws, in which he won the support of more than half the Tory party in the Commons, he goes forward for confirmation hearings in front of a party membership that for the most part loves him. Only a slip by Boris can upend the stately coronation procession. His is a Ming vase candidacy, meaning the idea of Boris is so fragile that it must be carried carefully across the floor from one end of the highly-polished ballroom to the other.

Unfortunately for Boris, this weekend it is no longer true that only Boris can stop Boris becoming Prime Minister. There is another human being involved, his girlfriend Carrie Symonds. If she chooses, she can stop Boris becoming Tory leader and Prime Minister.

On Friday evening, news broke in the Guardian of a late-night domestic incident at a flat in Camberwell, a notorious hotbed of London lefties.

A neighbour told the Guardian they heard a woman screaming followed by “slamming and banging”. At one point Symonds could be heard telling Johnson to “get off me” and “get out of my flat”.

The neighbour said that after becoming concerned they knocked on the door but received no response. “I [was] hoping that someone would answer the door and say ‘We’re okay’. I knocked three times and no one came to the door.”

The neighbour decided to call 999. Two police cars and a van arrived within minutes, shortly after midnight, but left after receiving reassurances from both the individuals in the flat that they were safe.

What nice neighbours. They had recorded the argument and phoned the newspaper. The Guardian got on the blower to plod and… cue media firestorm.

Johnson’s defenders are focussing on the role of the nosy neighbours. Who records domestic rows and then telephones a newspaper?

The Johnson fans are missing the point, though, or they are deliberately seeking to divert attention away from the nub of what will count here. The row makes Johnson vulnerable. His fate rests with Carrie Symonds. If she left him, and issued a dignified statement, it would be no go for BoJo. Remember, Symonds is just weeks away from moving into Number 10 as his partner. If she could not stand the thought of that, and he is cast as an unthinking brute prone to rages then he will be done for. He would have to withdraw and the Tories will need to run the latter stages of their Commons leadership voting round again. The membership in revolt would insist. Stand by your phones, the Gover and Saj!

If, on the other hand, as friends expect, Symonds sticks with her Bozzie Bear, and turns up at hustings events to cheer him on, then quite rightly he can say – if he says anything at all – that all normal couples have rows and sometimes verbally let off steam about marks on the sofa or a dropped glass of cheap plonk.

The situation is classically Johnsonian. Living in a girlfriend’s flat is the man-child undergraduate fantasy of an exciting life. He has allowed this to develop in the most unwise fashion with too little thought, during a high pressure leadership race, of the risks to her and himself. For weeks, months, Symonds has lived under virtual house arrest in that flat in a neighbourhood so left-wing they think Jeremy Corbyn is insufficiently Marxist. The situation outside the flat is a nightmare, apparently. With hacks and snappers outside permanently, and nosy neighbours poking about. She has been unable, it seems, to take up her job at Bloomberg. Getting out at all is difficult.

Anyone thinking straight, with access to resources, or favours from friends, would have secured somewhere much more safe and secure. Couldn’t Boris rent a house in London?

The answer, it seems, is no, which exposes the unspoken truth that Boris is not a wealthy man. Yes, he is paid a fortune for his column by the Telegraph, a sum equivalent to twelve Britons working full time at the Camberwell branch of Macdonalds. But Boris has a complex web of financial commitments, involving several families. The book advances are quickly burned through. He lost his London house in his divorce after the referendum and kept the shabby-chic farmhouse in the country. It was his brilliantly brainy wife – now former wife – the Brexity top lawyer Marina who was the more practical one in that relationship.

Now, here he is, without a pad of his own in town until Number 10 (Downing Street) falls vacant. Oh dear.

This all sounds bad for Boris. But one caveat aside – what else will emerge? – I do not think for a moment that it is the end of Boris.

I say that not just because many sensible people will observe the scandal and conclude that it is pathetic. If a couple having an argument is a barrier to membership of British society then the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh will have to go, followed by Charles and Camilla, William and Kate, Harry and Meghan, and then tens of millions of us, every non-boring couple in the country.

Even better for Boris than that, a large part of the media class in Britain is in the process of going quite mad, gripped by hatred of the idea of Boris winning. The bossy hysteria suggests to me panic over losing control of the ability to set the agenda. Media class meltdown will only help Boris, because a great many Britons cannot stand the media class.

I’m a hack, so of course I can see the merit in the details of the story as reported. The thing itself – the domestic row plus nosy neighbours – is clearly a cracking tale, made for British newspapers and broadcasters. What has been more interesting is the interpretation and attendant weeping and wailing from social media, where every micro twist in a tale that will be forgotten the next day is treated for a couple of hours as though it is the denouement of Watergate.

Indeed, the hysterical response reminds me a lot of being in America at various points in 2016. Every time Trump committed a terrible outrage, it was portrayed by his critics as the final step too far. Surely this – we said – this latest horror story will be the end of Trump? It didn’t work, and the media fury that it wasn’t working – that the old rules, set by the media, no longer applied – built to such a peak of intensity that by the end his critics in the media were reduced to emitting the broadcasting equivalent of a primal scream of horror and rage. And then he won.

In the US, a great many people had become sick of the media class telling them what they should and shouldn’t be outraged about. Sick of being bossed around by ultra-liberals, they had come to see much of the media as part of the problem. In the US, I suspect the wheel will turn again and people  will pitch back to valuing institutions – including an independent media – but not for a while.

In Britain, we’re in the middle of a similarly messy realignment produced by the fragmentation of media. To make an impact, to stay relevant and afloat in the face of competition and social media, media must shout louder, shock more and be thrustingly opinionated.

Twenty years ago the arc of a story was easier to plot. The rules were agreed and understood by the spin doctors of the political class spin  and the media class. What constituted a resignation or an outrage was fairly clear, and the amount of pressure (a week or so) that could be endured without a resignation mid-scandal was accepted by all involved. The media decided what a scandal was and measured its seriousness in stock phrases.

Today, no-one is quite sure. Politicians are deeply unpopular. Yet much of the media is equally disliked, not just on the left but on the centre-right. Those who vote for the Brexit party, or some who vote for the Conservative party, won’t be told for a second by some “woke” pious person on their television screen what is acceptable about Boris and what is not. In the eyes of such voters, annoying the media class is a positive attribute.

Sensing this, Team Boris has trialled some anti-media lines during the campaign so far. After this episode, I wager they’ll get a little more Trumpy in their statements supporting him.

Those who hate or distrust Boris will hate Boris some more, of course. That applies to the minority of anti-Boris Conservatives too. There is a strand of British conservative opinion that is highly censorious and deeply socially conservative, that will read the Boris story and recoil, but there aren’t many people like that left. They could mostly be fitted into the confines of one clubhouse at a Hertfordshire golf club, with room left over in the bar. Almost everyone else has experience of divorce, complication or difficulty in the family.

With everyone else Boris needs to win  the party leadership and a potential early election, this helps. Seeing him being assailed by the media class and taunted by the unrepresentative Twitterati  won’t put them off him. It will add to his appeal.