This week, Simon Alexander MP sees the late career turn of author and former Shooting Stars team captain Mr Will Self
‘Did you read the new Will Self SITREP?’
‘Vish,’ I told my policy adviser as I reached out for a croissant, ‘do you think I have time and energy to read any Will Self, given that you need to have to hand a mountain of books and a dictionary even to grasp the point of one of his paragraphs?’ I took a sip of coffee, expertly put together by media adviser Em-Dash, and picked up the latest edition of The House magazine. ‘What’s he on about now?’
‘Well,’ Vish said, ‘I just learned that he’s irritable.’
‘Tell me something I don’t know.’
‘No I mean his skin is literally irritated. Here,’ he said, passing me his iPad. On it was an interview from earlier this year when Self was promoting one of his long, rambling novels. It transpires that the man had had a stem cell transplant; he can no longer go on his long rambles through cities, and needs to apply topical cream to his whole body.
‘Crikey, that thing about Alastair Campbell is actionable. He needs to respect the law.’
‘I don’t think he respects anyone. He has the air of a man with a terminus in mind and a rage to expel before the light dies.’
‘Are you actually Will Self in disguise?’ Em-Dash said, pausing from her video cropping (of me, not of her).
‘No, because as it says here Self was sacked from a newspaper for shooting up in John Major’s plane. The rascal! The rogue!’
‘You don’t remember Shooting Stars, do you?’ I said. ‘That nice Bob Mortimer from the tele, and his friend Vic Reeves, a man who now paints birds. Here,’ I said, finding a clip of Reeves saying nonsense words for two minutes. Both advisers were unimpressed.
‘“Uvavu?” I guess this was funny in the Stone Age?’
‘It was funny before Youtube. Remember, this was when Ricky Gervais wasn’t outrageous yet, and when we all thought Russell Brand was hilarious.’
Jimmy Carr told actual jokes: he had one whose punchline I absolutely cannot repeat without being reported to HR, but the feed line was: “What’s worse than finding a worm in your apple?” Different times. As I thought on this, Vish clicked on another clip, this time of Matt Lucas in a tight outfit corpsing over the word ‘Peanuts!’ ‘I literally have work to do,’ he said, sighing, leaving me to read the rest of Self’s interview with the New Statesman. I didn’t know Self was a pariah after he criticised Sally Rooney’s literary work, but I did briefly hear about the treatment of his late wife, which he pushes back on in the interview.
I had no interest in his new book, being more of a Jonathan Coe man; I cannot wait until I get a moment during the Christmas break to read his new book about early 20th century classical music, a copy of which I’m going to get signed at an event at the Institut Français next month. About halfway through the piece I felt sad for the man: he was Abe Simpson yelling at a cloud, his rage misplaced and being quite keen to attack his fellow authors. It seems like saying that the book could be his last was like an ageing crooner announcing a farewell tour, before inevitably reneging on the threat to retire.
As for pAs for politics, Self says it is all ‘comfort food, weight-loss injections, holidays, consumerism and promises’. He should read my inbox. He wants people to be good Samaritans, to protest against war and to read his late-period trilogy (sorry Will, duty calls). As Vish recommended, I turned to Self’s Substack, where he publishes his long, rambling essays full of five-dollar words. In August he was radicalised by the Jason Arday suicide, first accusing lots of (mainly female) journalists of not being good at their jobs, and then attacking the system and the status quo.
Here’s what he wrote in his second piece on the subject at the end of August, which I read just before term started. He was discussing the attention economy which demanded ‘reader loyalty, contributions and digital engagement’ and, more to the point, ‘MORE: more items, more users, more reaction, more duration, more recursion.
‘Publication now decisively alters the field it purports to describe: an article produces searches, posts, denunciations, defences and fresh disclosures; those reactions are counted; the counts enter editorial judgement; that judgement produces another article. Reality is recursively reordered around the journalist writing the story. The public interest becomes indistinguishable from the public being interested, while the measurable fact of interest is used as evidence that further publication serves the public. Everyone was only responding–nobody was responsible. But somebody wrote every word; somebody commissioned every article; somebody pressed publish.’
Persuasive, and with no need of recourse to a dictionary. Some newspaper owners, Self continues, want to build their reputation, others the length of their summer holiday thanks to the value of the shares they hold. Journalists, meanwhile, need to rediscover shame and courage, and we can infer that Self wants the tribe to call out other members for their crimes, rather than upholding ‘the Fleet Street omertà whereby journalists demand transparency from every other institution while treating their own editorial conferences as inviolable mysteries’.
About 5000 words into his 6000-word screed, Self gets to his take-home point. The reader ‘has watched journalism investigate everybody except itself, comfort its own afflicted and afflict anybody made sufficiently interesting by the metrics. You call this a debate? It’s the muffled snoring of a tired old industry dreaming that it is awake and chasing the evil rabbits of some forgotten era.
‘My dear dead Jack Russell, when he got hold of anything – a stick, a slipper, a newspaper – would shake it as if his little life depended upon killing it. The British legacy media now resembles the object in the animal’s jaws. The vicious little Jack Russell shaking it is social media–but social media is itself clamped in the jaws of a far larger dog: the magnificent seven technology companies and their stupendous market capitalisations, shaking the platforms for more churn, more arousal, more behavioural data and more capital return.’
Jason Arday was symptomatic of the current media landscape: he was made into a mascot by Cambridge then discarded when he became a distressed asset. ‘Legacy journalism did what it does best nowadays: supplying the authority that produces much, much more repetition. Social media may well have supplied velocity, appetite and apparent public warrant, but the same platforms that support the entire legacy media supplied the architecture of recurrence. And most importantly, it’s capital–which knows no borders, allegiances and disabilities, while recognising vulnerabilities only to then exploit them–that supplied the command: MORE. No one dog needs to have intended the killing, but the thing in their jaws is dead.’
In a final Selfian rhetorical flourish at the peroration, he brought us back to the dog: ‘All they can do is cast around for somewhere to bury it, before walking off in that slightly embarrassed way that dogs do when they’ve just done a big, bad shit.’
I paused, watching Vish work through the inbox and Em-Dash altering the lighting of the video that was going to go up later today. We need Will Self and his ilk, but we also need the scrutineers of legislation. Ooh, Word hasn’t put a red line under ‘scrutineers’, so I’ll definitely use that around the estate this week (segue), where work is in full swing after conference recess. The PM, who seems hilariously compromised after letting Abu Dhabi money rejuvenate Manchester while he was Mayor, is doing his best to corral his cabinet into pursuing his legislative agenda.
We are all excited to see how John Healey will gently let everybody down next Wednesday with the Budget, like his predecessor did in 2024 and 2025. Dr Cooper, the Health Secretary, and Sir Gawes Streeting in Defence are begging for slices of the economic pie, while Ed Miliband continues his world tour as if he’s Bob Dylan. He’s got G20 responsibilities next year and G7 presidency in 2028; in fact, Manchester will host the G20 Leaders’ Summit next November. Rollcall for the G7: Canada, the US, Japan, France, Germany, Italy and the UK. That’s five that lean to the left and two which are led by troublesome right-wingers, and two of the others go to the polls either side of Easter.
Auf Deutschland, the AfD party are snapping at Friedrich Merz’s heels; Frau Wiedel has three months to persuade non-Nazis to get her and her party over the line on January 30. La France picks her successor to President Macron in two rounds of voting in April and May, if they stop setting fire to their democracy and schools. Will they opt for Gabriel Attal, the heir to Macron who is currently his party’s National Assembly leader, or Marine Le Pen, the daughter of the late Jean-Marie and leader of what used to be called the National Front? It’ll be fourth time lucky for her if she gets in, and I am sure there will be much chatter about an entente cordiale between the UK and France, especially now we’ve got that Tapestry in our Museum.
I haven’t planned this link, but Will Self is married to a French literary critic named Nelly Kaprièlian, so I expect there’ll be a Sitrep on that theme soon. Last time I checked, Self’s most recent essay was a month ago, concerning Naomi Klein’s new book End Times Fascism. Instead of dealing with the issue as if Hitler and Stalin are behind it, he writes, we should follow his lead (of course we should) and obey his edict of dromodronology, which roughly means things are connected to one another like the Dem Bones song.
‘It goes like this: AI companies demand energy because their competitors demand more; states subsidise AI because they fear strategic subordination; fossil-fuel interests exploit the new demand; climate disruption accelerates migration; migration supplies the affective material of nationalist mobilisation; nationalism fortifies borders and licenses surveillance; surveillance expands the computational infrastructure; and that infrastructure further increases both energy consumption and the capacity of platforms to isolate, excite and activate their users.’
And this is one of Self’s more comprehensible sentences. Try this one: ‘It instantiates the bidirectionality their argument is incapable of adequately conceptualising.’ ¿Que? I literally had to read that four times to spot where the main verb is. Self does persuasively suggest that Klein’s book is her latest brand exercise, after No Logo and This Changes Everything and even Doppelganger. ‘Their/our denunciation of the technology barons becomes content for platforms owned or governed by those barons; their/our summons to collective action becomes a succession of individuated acts of reception; their/our opposition to acceleration is itself accelerated so forming another accelerator—wheeee!’
Wheee indeed. He then mangles Timothy Leary’s advice to kids in the 1960s, telling us to ‘turn off, tune out, drop in’ and maybe read some of Self’s novels while we’re at it. I like his argument that fascism is emotional and then retroactively ideological, which segues into a discussion of the tech bros – your Elons and Altmans, your Zucks and Bezoses – who have unleashed the forces of evil while ignoring Google’s dictum not to be evil. I’ll write about AI and tech barons in a fortnight or so, but I’ve got Daniel Susskind’s book on growth to read this week.
Naturally, Self doesn’t offer any solutions because he’s a writer, not a politician, but I shall certainly bear his criticism in mind as we in This Place take on Rupert Lowe, the Not So Hateful Eight of Reform UK plc and the less sinister forces of my old party, who seem to be on another one of their jolly purges while in opposition. Such fun.