Tabloiding the Truth by Steve Buckledee

Author:Steve Buckledee
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030472764
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Up Yours Delors

At midday tomorrow Sun readers are urged to tell the French fool where to stuff his ECU.

The Sun today calls on its patriotic family of readers to tell the feelthy French to FROG OFF!

In the headline, subhead and first sentence cited above, an astonishing concentration of offensiveness is achieved in just thirty-eight words. The tendency of French people to lengthen English vowels is ridiculed in ‘feelthy French’, while it is perfectly legitimate to produce a headline in which the rhyme depends on mispronunciation of Delors’s name. The words frog and froggie are traditional insults for French people but here the noun is converted to a verb to create an imperative normally expressed using a different four-letter word beginning with f. It is taken for granted that the ‘patriotic family of readers’ concurs with the insults directed at Delors and his compatriots.

It was to get worse over a quarter of a century as a series of treaties establishing greater European unity coincided with developments in British politics that saw hostility towards Europe grow ever stronger in the right-wing tabloids. The first was Margaret Thatcher’s fall from power in November 1990, not as the result of an election defeat, but because senior colleagues decided that they had had enough of a prime minister who delighted in bashing the EEC with her handbag. Although the Sun had lost its warrior-queen, it nevertheless campaigned for her decidedly less charismatic successor, John Major, in the 1992 general election, and when the sitting prime minister gained an unexpected victory the UK’s best-selling newspaper claimed credit for having turned things around for the Tories with a typically immodest headline—‘It Was the Sun Wot Won It’—variations of which have been widely used after practically every subsequent election.

Major led a party that was divided over the question of further European integration with a considerable number of Thatcher loyalists implacably opposed to anything that smacked of federalism. On the 1st of November 1993, the Maastrict Treaty went into force, and on that day the European Economic Community became the European Community. Even to people who had read nothing about Maastricht, that name change was sufficient to understand that the European project was now about far more than free trade. The process that would eventually lead to the creation of the European Union with a single currency had begun, and in both the country and the Parliamentary Conservative Party there were profound misgivings to which the Mail, Express and Sun gave shrill voice. Although Major had negotiated opt-out clauses for the UK (notably on the single currency), he had difficulty getting the Maastricht Treaty ratified by Parliament, partly because he had a small majority but mostly because of internal dissent. Indeed, the Treaty was initially rejected because of the votes of Conservative MPs who became known as the Maastricht Rebels, and ratification was only achieved when Major made the second attempt a vote of confidence. Later the prime minister referred to the Maastricht Rebels as ‘bastards’ at the end of a television interview when he thought the microphones were switched off.

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