The Daily Telegraph, much to the chagrin of its elderly readers’ cardiologists, is Britain’s most excitable newspaper. On a sunny day, when a pleasant breeze blows through Britain and all our troubles seem so far away, it is there to remind us that the country is on the brink, on the slide, in the middle of a meltdown, in a full-blown spiral, heading for extinction-level event and going the way of the dinosaurs.
The Telegraph turns every drama into a crisis – especially those dramas with non-white actors playing Edwardian gentry. It is the only paper that could write “Celebrity Traitors is yet more evidence that Britain is heading down a slippery slope to illiterate oblivion”.
It employs a journalist called Allister Heath, known by some at the paper as Chicken Little after the children’s character who felt an acorn dropping on his head and declared that the sky must be falling. He churns out columns like the magnificently precise “Britain has a 75 per cent chance of going full banana republic” (November 19), plus cheery stuff like “This is how civilisations finally die” (September 24), “Starmer’s Britain is descending into anarcho-tyranny” (September 3) and “It is now too late for Britain to avoid financial Armageddon” (June 11). A normal newspaper would have sent him to the seaside for a nice long rest; the Telegraph promoted him and made him editor of its Sunday title.
But now, to many of its readers, the Telegraph has finally gone too far. And the culprit is not the ludicrous Heath, busy shrieking that “Starmer and Reeves are now a threat to British democracy” (December 3), but a quite reasonable article about Brexit.
On November 29, veteran assistant editor Jeremy Warner, described by the paper as “a serial winner of awards” and “one of Britain’s leading business and economics commentators” told the Telegraph faithful it was “Time to admit the truth: Brexit has been an unmitigated economic failure”. His article discussed the recent estimate by the US-based National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), that “Brexit has reduced UK GDP by 6pc to 8pc, far more than most previous estimates”.
The NBER estimate was so apocalyptically Heathian in nature that Warner began with some caveats. “All economic analysis of Brexit tends to reflect the prejudices of those involved in putting it together,” he wrote. “All five of those who have put their names to the NBER paper are highly respected economists but there doesn’t appear to be a Brexit-supporting voice among them.”
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And he added that because UK GDP growth since the start of 2016 had marginally outstripped that of Germany and Italy, “there is something faintly incredible about the (NBER) numbers”.
Yet this was where the good news ended for Brexit-supporting readers of the Brexit-supporting Telegraph. “Even Brexit’s most enthusiastic cheerleaders – including the leading lights of Reform – would concede that on almost every front, Brexit has so far proved a major disappointment,” wrote Warner.
Instead, he said, it has delivered “a regulatory burden that almost unbelievably makes business leaders long for the comparative freedoms once enjoyed within the European Union”. The “Boriswave” of higher net migration and post-Brexit trade deals were “judged by the OBR to be too insignificant to qualify as a meaningful positive for medium-term economic growth.”
Warner concluded: “If Brexit was supposed to be a moment of national economic renewal, it has comprehensively failed to deliver as it was supposed to.” He might have added that the king was in “the altogether, altogether as naked as the day that he was born”.
In the Emperor’s New Clothes, a single shout from the crowd is all it takes for everyone to realise that the monarch is naked. Alas, the same has not happened after Warner’s warning cry, and the Telegraph’s comment section remains a throng of people praising the daring cut of Brexit’s invisible cloth.
The piece has attracted 4,155 comments, the vast majority of them hugely negative. “Unmitigated rubbish”, “ridiculous article”, “boring… one-sided predictable hatchet job”, “pathetic” and “what a load of Brussels Sprouts” are among the acclaim for Warner, as well as a suggestion that he might “move to the EU if you hate our country so much”. That was, of course, an option Jeremy Warner would have had if we had not left the European Union.
“I would give up 3% or more economic growth just so I didn’t have to be told what to eat, drive, think or how to work by a commission of unelected Belgians,” wrote one subscriber, who didn’t give their views on giving up at least double that in lost GDP. “Remainers were in charge of Brexit from start to finish,” wrote another.
A third, even more confused, fretted about something that didn’t sound like Brexit at all – “if we refused the French access to fishing waters unless they stop the dinghy parasite invasion or play fair on other fronts, they would turn off our electricity supply in the winter”.
The best comment of all came from a breathless-sounding Mervyn Lee. He wrote: “The problem is the governments have not made the most of Brexit we should now be like Singapore and deregulate everything and not panda to Europe.” Panda! No wonder Brexit is now an endangered species!
After this outbreak of unwelcome reality, it surely can’t be long before the Telegraph retires Jeremy Warner and gives Mervyn his column instead. For, after all, it is a paper whose mascot should be the Brexit panda: eats, shoots itself in the foot and leaves.
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