The deadly Mail

Michael Cove says that the Daily Mail has been taken over by Tory appeasers who detest Americans, and the fight for Western civilisation in the Middle East Could the Iraq war really have united forces that have been hereditary foes? Are clerical reactionaries now happily joining arms with secular militants to oppose a common enemy? Well, I don't know if it's happening in Baghdad, but it's already occurred in London,

As the war on terror has progressed, we've seen a remarkable new coalition form. The nation's most powerful reactionary force, the Daily Mail, has become the objective ally of the British Left in the struggle of the moment — the war against America.

Journalists like myself are perhaps overindined to attribute significance to the editorial positioning of Britain's newspapers. For most Mail executives, the fate of the Beckhams or securing serialisation rights to a new version of the prophecies of Nostradamus probably matters a good deal more than the paper's political line.

But there is an undeniable significance to the Dail Mail's decision to become a fullthroated, anti-war, anti-US, anti-Bush propaganda sheet. It speaks, however shallowly, for a significant section of British conservative opinion which is hostile to the UK's involvement with America in the war on terror. The phenomenon of right-wing anti-Americanism and conservative hostility to the Iraq war needs to be analysed. The attitudes which underlie it are corrosive of the ability of the British Right to be taken seriously and damaging to our national interests. Those attitudes are widespread, but it is in the Daily Mail that they find their most vigorous expression.

Some readers, unfamiliar with the Mail's writing, might think I exaggerate the position. If only. In the past month the Mail's editorials have lambasted the US for its 'crass insensitivity' and 'lamentable heavy-handedness', usually the fault of America's `neoconservafive zealots' who have been responsible for a `politics of manipulation and deceit'.

The Mail's editor, Paul Dacre, has not been content to let his leader column speak for him. There has been a remarkable consensus from almost all its columnists on the folly of the Iraq war and the culpability of those crassly simplistic zealots across the pond. Stephen Glover this week denounced the 'heavy-handed' behaviour of America, the 'neo-colonial bully boy'. In the Mail's Sunday sister, its regular columnist Peter Dobbie announced last November that he viewed the visit of America's President to Britain `with distaste' and he insisted 'I would rather he did not come'. Such hostility to our oldest ally is pretty mild, though, compared with the view of another Mail stalwart, Max Hastings. Last week he proclaimed 'I Hate George Bush' above 1.200 words in which he denounced that country's conservatives as 'lunatics' and proclaimed that 'every single bleak forecast about their follies has been fulfilled'.

Perhaps when he wrote that phrase Sir Max had temporarily forgotten the bleak forecast made in the Daily Mail on Thursday 3 April 2003 by his colleague Correlli Barnett. Mr Barnett is, like Hastings, a military historian much valued by the Mail for his ability to lend authority to the paper's prejudices. In his piece published last April, Mr Barnett authoritatively prophesied that the Iraq war had not 'even reached the end of the beginning'. Iraq's people were `rallying behind Saddatn' and America's 'technological arrogance' would see it humbled before the gates of Baghdad. Just six days later coalition forces watched with pleasure as Iraqis pulled down Saddam's statue and garlanded their liberators. So much for every bleak prophecy being fulfilled. Maybe the Mail should have stuck with Nostradamus.

But nothing abashed, Mr Barnett has been prophesying disaster ever since, sure in his own mind that no good can come of the elimination of a mass-murdering, terror-sponsoring, civilian-gassing dictator. And a similar sourness towards the Coalition's success in liberating a subject people has marked almost every article on Iraq published by the Mail.

To be sure, there have been brave voices of dissent emanating from within the tightly controlled Dacre regime, most notably those of Melanie Phillips and Ann Leslie, both of whom have the moral courage and intelligence to welcome a robust response from the West when faced with its enemies. But from the males at the Mail there has been nothing but a fusillade of sniping at leaders who have dared to take risks against terror and tyranny.

The language the Mall and its columnists employ towards America is practically interchangeable with the rhetoric deployed by the radical left opponents of the Iraq war, such as John Pilger or George Galloway. The accusations of neocolonialism, the predictions of inevitable doom attending any US action, the disdain for American crudity and zealotry, the denunciation of the President's simplistic approach to the world, and the attempt by Hastings in his recent column to link the corporate excess of Enron with Bush's foreign policy are all staples of leftist agitprop.

There is a double irony in the Mail's decision to attack America and its President in this way. Not only is the self-styled paper of Middle England parroting the language of every anticapitalist crackpot and Marxist deadbeat from Michael Moore to Tariq Ali; the title is also exhibiting the very weaknesses it accuses America of.

The Mail attack on America is nothing if not heavy-handed in its refusal to admit nuance or complexity. It is certainly crude in the blanket nature of its denunciation of Bush and his team. The Mail is markedly simplistic in its inability to engage with the real issues at stake in the war on terror. And nothing could be more 'neocolonial' than the patronising insistence of Sir Max and Mr Barnett that America's hicks and yokels won't get anything right until they start attending to the wise counsel of sages from the old country, such as them.

What is most tragic, though, about the Mail's response to the war on terror is not its juvenile concentration on blaming the one country most determined to fight for freedom but its student-union suggestions as to what might be done instead. In its leader column last Saturday, the only positive proposal that it could muster for dealing with the global terror threat, and the lack of freedom in the Middle East which fuels it, was a bigger role for the United Nations and pious bromides about the Israeli–Palestinian peace process. The Daily Mail prides itself on fearlessness. Yet its only notion of how we should handle the war on terror is to surrender responsibility to the organisation which let Saddam's tyranny off the hook for 12 years, and reward the Middle East's most intractable terrorist organisations by pressuring the region's only democracy to grant them concessions.

However depressing it may be to read this stuff in a once great newspaper, what is profoundly dispiriting is the recognition that the views the Mail declaims so raucously are wide ly shared on the British Right. Correlli Barnett, Max Hastings and Stephen Glover have all used the pages of The Spectator — along with writers I admire, such as Frank Johnson and Matthew Parris — to argue for Tory hostility towards Bush's America and the Coalition's actions in Iraq. Their views seem to find an increasingly warm response in the ranks of the Conservative party, as the Tory frontbencher George Osborne reported in this magazine when he recorded the antagonism towards Bush among many of his colleagues.

The reasons for the growth of this swelling chorus are not hard to find. The stance of Canning, Churchill and Thatcher, the belief now characterised as neoconservatism, which holds that it is the West's duty to stand up for liberty against its enemies, has not always held sway in Tory ranks. There has always been a strain in Conservative thinking, the Little Englander or isolationist tendency. that has been deeply suspicious of foreign intervention. A majority of Conservatives supported appeasement in the Thirties and did not want British troops to 'die for Danzig'. John Major's government shied away from confronting the dictator Milosevic and stood aside from the tragedy in Rwanda. For many Conservatives now, a Powellite reading of foreign affairs appears tempting, and a belief that if we stay out of foreign quarrels we shall be safer has become seductive.

Reinforcing the appeasing tendency, among both Conservative columnists and the wider party, is a personal antipathy towards the Prime Minister. Views of both the Iraq war and America have been distorted by the red mist that descends before many Tory eyes when they look at Tony Blair. The idea that a Labour prime minister, especially one as infuriating as Blair, should be both a stalwart war leader and the favoured ally of a conservative American president is too much to take for many. Instead of acknowledging the inconvenient fact that Mr Blair has for once, done the right and principled thing — and that a prime minister Hague or Howard would have done the same — many on the Right prefer to denounce both the Iraq war and the President simply as means of getting at the Labour leader.

With the Coalition encountering difficulties in Iraq, it will be tempting for many Conservatives to join the anti-war, anti-Bush insurgency, especially given the energ with which the Daily Mail is rallying supporters to the cause. But Tories should pause to consider three things.

First, whenever the Tory party marches to the Mail's drumbeat it leads to humiliating defeat. When William Hague fashioned his 2001 election campaign around the Mail's Little Englander agenda, he succeeded only in enthusing a dwindling hard core, and the Conservatives recorded a result worse even than in 1997.

Second, if the Tories flirt with hostility towards Bush's America, they will be encouraging precisely those forces most hostile to a revival of modern conservatism. AntiAmericanism, as popularised by Michael Moore and articulated by Robin Cook, has not become the defining feature of left-wing discourse by accident. The Left dislikes America because of that nation's belief in liberal economics, national sovereignty and popular democracy. They particularly hate Bush and his foreign policy mentors because they recognise that the neoconservative belief in a strong and engaged America was responsible for the fall of the Soviet Union and exposes the bankruptcy of their international vision. For Tories to turn on America now would be a rejection of support for free markets, free peA)ples and free nations. It would be a triple denial to rank with Peter's.

Tories should note that anti-Americanism on the Right has, historically, either descended into marginal extremism — as with JeanMarie Le Pen or JOrg Haider — or insipid quasi-social democracy, as with Heath and Chirac. If British Toryism is to grow as a movement which is both mainstream and identifiably conservative, then it cannot do so by embracing anti-Americanism.

But perhaps the most important reason to reject the anti-war position is its desperately un-Tory utopianism. The idea that we can insulate ourselves from risk by refusing to engage in the war on terror is a denial of reality. Spain's reward for electing a government which promised to withdraw its troops from Iraq has been the discovery of more bombs on its railway tracks. When dealing with terrorists and tyrants, weakness is always more provocative than strength.

It was our failure to deal firmly and early with Osama bin Laden's attacks in the 1990s that emboldened al-Qa'eda and helped him recruit and train his jihadists in Afghanistan. It was our failure over 12 years to deal with Saddam Hussein's defiance that only reinforced the message that the West was weak and ripe for attack.

If we were to falter, and withdraw from the frontline now, whether with a United Nations figleaf or under some other pretext, those bent on terrorising the West would draw only one conclusion: they were right, we were weak all along. Nothing would be more likely to encourage them in their belief that ever more audacious attacks would yield ever larger prizes, and nothing would so dispirit those in the Middle East who are struggling to overcome secular tyranny or religious oppression.

In foreign affairs, as in so many other areas of life, if we were to follow the Daily Mail's advice, then we really would be heading for disaster And you don't need to be Nostradamus to see why.

Michael Gove is Saturday editor of the Times