How did Trump go from bad joke to good bloke in the UK press?

Suddenly, Donald Trump is not such a bad man. A large portion of Britain’s media betrayed an increasing measure of enthusiasm for the US president even before the Sun devoted seven pages on Friday to its “world exclusive interview”.

Although it meant the rest had to play catch-up, with the Daily Mail carrying a lame page imagining what Trump would say to May, they didn’t take long to repeat and analyse his genuine undiplomatic statements. Even when Trump tried to deny his Sun interview by laughingly calling it “fake news”, the Brexit-supporting papers continued to delight in his attacks on Theresa May, which the New York Times rightly described as “a breach of protocol”.

The Daily Telegraph, which ran four successive days of pro-Trump page 1 stories, contended that he was speaking sense on Brexit and dared to urge “someone” in Downing Street to read his book, The Art of the Deal.

The Mail welcomed his delivery of “typically blunt home truths”. A Daily Express front-page headline extolled his “bombshell on May”.

This was anything but a one-off, however. It followed days of enthusiastic coverage of Trump’s controversial statements before he set foot in Britain.

The Telegraph vied with the Sun over which could spin most positively in Trump’s favour. His “candour has the merit of honesty”, said the Telegraph, in urging Europe to listen to Trump’s views on Nato. The Sun agreed in a leading article headlined “Trump’s right”.

Rightwing commentators sang from the same hymnbook. The Mail’s Stephen Glover thought Trump “right to give both barrels to Germany”, as did the Express’s Stephen Pollard (“Trump is right to criticise Nato spending”) and the Sun’s Rod Liddle (“Trump is dead right”).

This amazing transformation from bad joke to good bloke is largely about the newspapers’ domestic political agenda and can be traced to Boris Johnson’s claim five weeks ago that Trump could handle Brexit better than May. The leave-supporting press thought Boris was on to something and piled in behind him. In effect, they agreed that we shouldn’t continue with all this time-consuming negotiating business. Let’s just leave and be done with it.

Bashing Merkel and May fits the pro-Brexit bill, as does backing Boris. So, having conquered their initial distaste for Trump’s vulgarity and wilfully turning a blind eye to his sexual peccadilloes, Brexiter editors decided they liked his brand of politics. Not only that, they also found much to admire about his blunt political modus operandi: tweet first and think later.

No matter that he has labelled the US media “the enemy of the people”. That’s their problem and, anyway, US journalists are a liberal elite who deserve all they get. What counts in the UK is that Trump thumbs his nose at the EU, doesn’t see the point of Merkel and believes immigration to be the source of all troubles in advanced capitalist societies. The Donald is their new pin-up. He is a walking, talking tabloid leader writer. Short phrases. Pithy insults. A stranger to self-doubt.

It’s not only about Brexit, of course. They see virtue in Trump’s belief that he, like them, affects to represent the common people through the application of pragmatic politics based on good, old-fashioned common sense.

Example: if only there were fewer immigrants (or, better still, none) there would be jobs for everyone, a reduced welfare budget, less crime, smaller classroom sizes and shorter waiting lists at hospitals where, incidentally, there would more beds (neatly overlooking the fact there would be no one to service those beds once we seal our borders).

The Little Englander philosophy of the Brexit-backing press dovetails with build-the-wall, protectionist Trumpism.

In spite of the waning circulation of the national press, the populism it shares with its new poster boy, Trump, is on the rise: and it’s no exaggeration to suggest their philosophy amounts to a very real danger to democracy.

MacKenzie’s candour passes without comment

It is rare nowadays for the former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie to break cover, and rarer still for him to be utterly candid. So I’m amazed that no one picked up on his interview with the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland on Radio 4’s Archive on 4, because he spoke with an unusual measure of honesty.

He admitted for the first time in public that he was fired as a columnist from the Sun in May 2017. At the time, it was said his contract had been “terminated by mutual consent” after he compared Everton footballer Ross Barkley to a gorilla.

MacKenzie said he liked the way tabloid journalists were depicted in films and television because it was accurate to see them as people who were “not all that bright”, with “some cunning” and exhibiting “a lack of morality”.

He suggested they lack empathy because they look upon people merely as opportunities for stories. “I don’t see why scrabbling around in someone’s dustbin should be illegal or disreputable. That’s where the truth can be found,” he said.

He expected a backlash. “I’ll end up getting a whole load of abuse from tabloid journalists pointing out ‘you were king of the scumbags, we’re not like you, you’re the reason why we are so reviled’.” But his comments came and went without a murmur. I wonder why.

How Brexit will rob Irish citizens of rights

For many months, the Sinn Féin MEP Martina Anderson has been making speeches about the deleterious effects of Brexit within Northern Ireland.

Her persistent complaint is that it will rob people on her side of the Irish border of their rights as citizens of the European Union, even though they will still be entitled to Irish citizenship. Inexplicably, this claim did not gain the kind of newspaper coverage, in Ireland or Britain, that it deserved.

Now, at last, her concern has been treated with due seriousness by Brian Feeney, a columnist in the Belfast-published Irish News. It is clear, he wrote, that Irish citizens living in the six Ulster counties that compose Northern Ireland will lose their rights as EU citizens.

Neither the British government nor the European commission wish to create a precedent in which Irish people domiciled in Northern Ireland retain EU rights.

It means, as Feeney told his readers: “Your Irish passport gives you the same rights as someone in Honolulu or Timbuktu holding an Irish passport. You will be part of the Irish diaspora.”

This is not some arcane point. After Brexit, the rights they think are guaranteed by the “regulatory alignment” – which Theresa May sold to Ireland’s taoiseach, Leo Varadkar – will disappear.