Andrew Neil’s mea culpa shows there’s still hope for… well, some of us
Opinion
Whatever you think of Neil’s past commentary, he deserves praise for admitting he was wrong. Unlike our former prime minister…
Last Saturday, two truly remarkable articles about President Donald Trump appeared a few pages apart in the Daily Mail, giving telling insights into the credibility of two of the UK’s most prominent political commentators.
One by Andrew Neil — by far the more remarkable of the two — showed that he had the moral courage to admit it when he has got something of vital importance catastrophically wrong.
The other by Boris Johnson demonstrated that the former prime minister is probably incapable of ever learning, let alone apologise for, getting things wrong and may not even care.
A public mea culpa
Neil confessed that the past seven days had confirmed “what those of us who gave Trump the benefit of the doubt have, in our heart of hearts, always feared: that he’s an unprincipled, narcissistic charlatan”.
It is an astonishing sentence by any standards and Neil is to be congratulated for an article containing a long, and public, mea culpa.
But, naturally, there are some obvious problems with a confession of almost biblical proportions. First, Neil can’t help himself from spreading the blame around a bit, as in the “we” who gave Trump the benefit of the doubt.
There is also the question about the “fears in our heart of hearts”.
To what extent did Neil, who leads a very strident public life expressed these days in column after column, go public with the fears in his heart as he routinely attacked the “vacuous” Kamala Harris?
Most serious of all, until the notorious meeting in the White House at the end of February, when Trump and his deputy JD Vance humiliated Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, did Neil believe Trump was principled, and neither narcissistic nor a charlatan?
Forget the evidence
Somehow, he has managed to ignore, or downplay, the evidence that has been around for years about the 34-times convicted felon, an alleged rapist with his name on Jeffrey Epstein’s flight logs who has direct involvement in encouraging the mob attack on the Capitol on 6 January 2021.
Neil must have also ignored, or was unconvinced by, the accumulating evidence of Russian involvement in election manipulation in the West — not just in the US but in the UK’s disastrous Brexit referendum.
Carole Cadwalladr, a distinguished British journalists who has spent eight years at The Observer exposing Russia’s “hybrid war”, obviously did not impress Neil. In a 2018 tweet, he described her as Karol Kodswallop and likened her to “a mad cat woman from Simpsons”. Neil has not apologised for the slur to this day.
Faustian pact
Despite Trump in most cases simply doing what he always promised to do — such as impose crazy tariffs on many of the US’s neighbours — Neil “consoled” himself on the prospects of a Trump win with how terrible Harris would be.
Really? Would Harris have introduced madcap tariffs, threatened to pull out of Nato, stop military aid and even intelligence to Ukraine, side with Russia on almost everything and turn the strongest US economy in years towards recession?
She would also not have ripped up USAID to some of the world’s poorest or put anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F Kennedy in charge of health, for starters.
Was it really beyond the capability of one of Britain’s sharpest political commentators, who knows the US well, to work any of this out until 10 days ago when, as they used to say in Northern Ireland, even the dogs in the street knew all along?
Neil comforted himself that Trump was more right than wrong on a range of issues, from closing the Mexican border to taking an axe to the billions spent on “net-zero nonsense”, from cutting taxes and wasteful federal spending to preventing men competing in women’s sport.
There is still hope
As Neil now splendidly asks of what amounts to his Faustian pact with the devil: “Well, how wrong can you be?”
Indeed — and he deserves praise for going further, much further.
“What fools we were not to take him at his own estimation but to think he could amount to something better,” Neil wisely concluded. “We have no right to be surprised that the man who tried to overturn democracy in his country doesn’t give a damn if it’s now snuffed out in Ukraine.”
There is hope for the former Sunday Times editor. Better the sinner that repenteth etc. Perhaps this titan of journalism was led astray and blinded to the bleeding obvious by his belief in small government and free markets.
More Johnson pontification
As for Johnson, there is very little hope.
Just before Zelenskyy was ambushed in the White House, Johnson pontificated that the Ukrainian president was there to sign “an excellent deal for both Ukraine and America”. Trump, Johnson said, was changing the global conversation in important ways “in favour of honesty and progress”.
This gibberish was taken down by MailOnline on Friday evening and failed to appear in the Daily Mail the next day.
Chastened and apologetic? Hardly. On Saturday, Johnson returned to the contractual pontificating.
The former prime minister thinks the best way forward is to get the US-Ukraine deal signed and military aid restarted. Small problem. Russian president Vladimir Putin has not suggested any concessions other than he gets to keep the Ukrainian land he has illegally seized and maybe even more.
In Boris Johnson Land, Trump critics who say the Russians have embarrassing kompromat on the US president are talking nonsense.
And despite considerable evidence to the contrary, Johnson can “assure” us that the White House meeting was not intended to turn into an unseemly shouting match by either side.
Johnson, who predicted the future with such great clarity a week earlier, is now convinced that the Ukrainians will settle “for a reasonable peace” that gives them long-term freedom and independence, and it will be Trump who will ultimately force Putin to concede, without getting his hands dirty with any of the details.
Don’t hold your breath. But at least this time Johnson was wise to get his column out well ahead of the actual events to avoid obvious embarrassment again.
Raymond Snoddy is a media consultant, national newspaper columnist and former presenter of NewsWatch on BBC News. He writes for The Media Leader on Wednesdays — bookmark his column here.