The Spectator magazine doesn’t hide its establishment bias. In fact, it lashes out whenever threatened, including by this parish. You may recall they recently had a mild hissy fit over us publishing Iain Dale’s Power 100 list. They didn’t like that I appeared on the list (which was devised by an independent panel of MPs and journalists not by Breitbart London or me).
But the magazine’s own accusations of us having some kind of vested interest perhaps are only being deployed to mask their own.
You don’t have to dig particularly deep to know that the magazine’s parent company is chaired by BBC host Andrew Neil, and owned by the Tory donors, the Barclay brothers. No matter, no mind. Westminster is a small village, and I do trust the editors to make the editorial decisions.
And to me it seems that’s precisely what’s going on, especially when you consider Sebastian Payne’s fawning piece about Dominic Cummings of the Vote Leave Take Control omnishambles “anti-EU” group.
Payne has been writing a lot of pro-establishment campaign stuff in the last few weeks, “breaking” news that he’s spoon fed by Matthew Elliott and his gang, in a desperate bid to win over the bubble and cut out Nigel Farage and Arron Banks (who have, recently, been very kind and conciliatory towards the Elliott group).
And Mr. Cummings’s wife is none other than… Mary Wakefield, commissioning editor of the Spectator.
Is it any wonder then, that Payne’s piece contains six mentions of Mr. Cummings (and no mention of most of the other speakers) including such vomit-inducing sycophancy such as:
“Dominic Cummings, the co-director of the Vote Leave campaign, argued that a vote to leave the EU would force a rethink of the entire European project… Cummings’ strongest argument was that the EU is a throwback to the world of the 1950s… Cummings also continued to make the argument that there is a possibility of two EU referendums… the most striking moment of the night was Cummings’ point that every single treaty change over the last 70 years has resulted in more power for the EU”
But if you look at what Mr. Cummings actually said at last night’s Spectator event, you’ll see that apart from advancing the horrific idea of two referendums, he didn’t really break any ground.
In the end, I’m not sure anyone really cares. If the Westminster types want to talk to themselves in a salon behind the British Library that’s fine. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage is giving a speech at Swansea Stadium on Friday, to over 500 voters, which will be livestreamed to over 10,000 people.
And they wonder why there’s resistance to the establishment campaign?
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