A tale of two Britains – as told by The Daily Mail and The Guardian

If Britain is two nations, it’s easy to identify the aspiring standard-bearers for each. Step forward, the Daily Mail and The Guardian.

Both work themselves into a frenzy of self-righteousness as they compete to present their unique versions of Britain while taking furious shots at each other.

According to George Bernard Shaw: “Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization.” The Mail and Guardian’s nuclear level of indignation, as each propagates its cause, makes you believe he was right.

The Guardian’s opinion of the Mail is underpinned by its belief that the entire newspaper is in need of constant psychiatric care. In its eyes the Mail treats the poor as a tribe of wicked ne’er-do-wells, soaking the state; a zombie army destroying us all.

The Mail, in the eyes of The Guardian, yearns for a bygone Britain, a lost country where wives wash dishes and change nappies, and husbands mow lawns and go to work carrying proper briefcases, not trendy shoulder bags. It writes stories “laced with class hatred,” and is probably fascist, too.

To the Mail, the Guardian is statist, socialist, old Labour. Its soft-liberal, unmarried readers live together, and sometimes have children out of wedlock. Dreadfully, these readers even love and live with people of the same sex – and adopt children. The Left’s “media mouthpieces” are the Guardian – and the BBC, natch.

I should declare an interest: I read both newspapers, and each amuses, frustrates, informs and irritates me in equal measure.

I spend time occasionally on the fringes of the strangely self-immersed world of Fleet Street, and count good friends in both these warring camps (at least, at the time of writing).

Mostly, there seems to be a rough but friendly rivalry among newspapers.

But Paul Dacre (Mail) and Alan Rusbridger (Guardian) will never be caught sharing a social beer. And it’s impossible to imagine Mail and Guardian journalists getting together for a friendly weekend football game or a run round the park.

Take this passage from Will Self’s Guardian column a week or two ago.

“…. British fascism, I would contend, has never been simply about skinheads sporting swastikas: there remains a sector of our society that still believes parliamentary democracy to be a sham; still thinks that black and brown people are inferior (while Jews are worrisomely and magically superior); remains powerfully xenophobic and looks to a nationalist renaissance; and, of course, STILL READS THE DAILY MAIL.”

My caps; my italics.

And columnist Zoe Williams: “The Daily Mail reminds me a little bit of climate change: you think you’ve got the measure of just how bad it is, but every time you look it’s taken another appalling leap forward.” Williams on this occasion was talking about the Mail’s controversial coverage of the Philpott case; but you could cut and paste her sentence randomly into many of the Guardian’s anti-Mail diatribes.

Guardianistas show missionary zeal, too. This, from a reader: “I managed to persuade my 76-year-old father, a lifelong Daily Mail reader, to start reading the Guardian in his retirement. Better late than never!”

Ah. Salvation.

This glorious artillery of insults is well met by the other side.

The Mail’s Jan Moir, searching for some ultimate insult to direct at a young actor she doesn’t much like, comes up with: “(he)…is merely developing the correct degree of wanton, self-satisfied smuggery needed to play a Guardian executive these days.”

A critic who likes a West End show which the Mail doesn’t approve of (The Book of Mormon), becomes a “hyperventilating female reviewer from the Guardian”.

Richard Littlejohn dismisses The Guardian as the ultimate “bastion of wrong-headedness”. Polly Toynbee’s columns these days are harmlessly oddball, but to Littlejohn she is “splendidly barking and rabid.”

Even spelling mistakes are seized upon gleefully; a Guardian house ad selling stationery, spells it stationary; a story of a Harvard award for Alan Rusbridger misprints “presitigious”

Looking for a bond between Britain’s two crankiest newspapers, I can find only a mutual, unremitting loathing of high-earners and bankers.

If either is your sole source of news, you get a seriously impaired view of Britain and its citizens.

Each seems to live in its own parallel universe, unconnected to the real world in which most people struggle, alternate realities where each is panto villain in the other’s world.

Maybe they deserve each other, but I’m sticking with them both. It’s too much fun watching them fight it out, like two bull elephants battling for turf in a withering savannah. Not like dinosaurs, though – that would be too unkind.

This piece first appeared at http://www.speakerschair.com on 8th April 2013