The Times has turned its hand to doing PR for the black-clad balaclava’d up far-right mob who descended on Dover at the weekend. Using the time-honoured British press tactic of lifting a story straight from social media, the newspaper told the heartwarming tale of three women on their way to a weekend in Margate who found themselves sharing a train carriage with the activist agitators.
On Facebook, Jacquetta Morris, a publican from Dover, posted a picture of herself and her two friends with cans of premixed cocktails to the fore and the background entirely filled with masked-up lads dressed all in black. The caption read: “Safest train in the country right now”. How heart-warming!
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Interviewed by The Times, Morris said the men abided by “ladies first” rules and allowed her and her friends to board before them. While the group refused to take off their balaclavas when she asked, she concluded that they were “very polite”, “very pleasant” and that the encounter was “actually quite fun”.
What The Times story neglected to mention is that Morris didn’t just post the picture to her personal Facebook page. She also shared it with a group called ‘South east patriots’, where she has previously liked comments including one about how she has “disassembled the entire media narrative in one photo”. Another recent post in the group features a cartoon of a masked man urinating on an RNLI flag.
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Morris’s picture also appeared in the print edition of the Daily Telegraph where it was captioned “Race for the train: Fresh from their ‘stop the boats’ demonstration in Dover on Saturday, masked protestors board a train as three female passengers, unconnected with the men look on.” On Shelagh Fogarty’s LBC show, the presenter read out a statement from “one of the women [pictured]” which said “the lads were lovely, perfect gentlemen”.
Had the women not been white would their experience have been so pleasant? It’s a question the Times had no interest in asking.
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