The difficulty of finding interesting things to say

Media Matter
Nick Thomas
Still it goes on. 'Iwo weeks after the general election the post mortems continue, the learned analysis of who voted for what and why, the portentous opinion pieces urging this or that course of action for the Government, the Opposition, the electorate. Only to be expected, no doubt, for this happens after every election, but there is a new, ironic twist to the exercise this time, for the underlying theme in all the commentary is how little things have changed. We have the same government, notwithstanding the inevitable reshuffle, and the Conservative Party is still in pieces on the floor. Moreover we have just seen — yawn — the lowest turn-out since 1918, and fewer seats changing hands than at any election since 1910. In other words the whole thing was a colossal non-event, and the commentators are using up acres of print and hours of airtime saying so.
They have no choice. They are obliged to make everything that happens seem as dramatic and exciting as possible, and if there's no news to speak of, that becomes news in itself. The top story on Monday was Ann Widdecombe's decision not to run for the leadership of her party, which beat the news that Queen Anne is still dead into second place. At times like these we begin to see the value of the old governmental habit of relaunching old policies as new initiatives. At least it gives the programme anchors something to talk about.
Monday's Daily Mirror caught a dose of the same fever, leading on the story that two airliners had not collided at Heathrow, but at least the paper had the sense to realise that its readers are thoroughly fed up with political stories, and need a break. Apparently what they're not fed up with, though, is the paper's columnist Tony Parsons, whose picture took up rather more space than the Heathrow headline on the front page. For reasons best known to themselves, his employers decided to use up three precious pages printing extracts from his new novel, albeit with copious illustrations, brief descriptions of the main characters for handy reference, and text cut up into bite-sized tabloid paragraphs. This seems to evince little editorial confidence in the attention span of the readers Ken Clarke once described, in the Commons, as "morons", but perhaps running extracts of prose fiction at all is a brave attempt by Piers Morgan to raise the tone of the papers, as well as raising the profile of the paper's Tone. (That tabloid style is infectious. I must read a TLS from cover to cover immediately.)
Not that the Parsons profile could get much higher, at least in this, the nation's only seriously Labour redtop. Skipping from the first two cheap, lazy paragraphs of his oeuvre to the end, I learnt that he will be reading from the thing at the Festival Hall's Purcell Room, of all places, on July 12; and turning to his regular column I found that the film rights have just been sold in Hollywood.
Now I have nothing much against Tony Parsons. He is a fine columnist, especially when writing in a broadsheet, and his documentary about the modem working class, The Tattooed Jungle, remains one of the most incisive and brave TV films of recent times. It's just that all this self-promotion, especially in the cause of a pot-boiler novel, seems a little over the top, if not actually counter-productive. Newspapers, after all, are notoriously nests of back-biting and intrigue. At the bottom of the page bearing Monday's column there was a "reader's thought for the day", submitted by one Bill Drew of Birmingham. It ran "When your work speaks for itself, don't interrupt." I wonder if one of the Mirror's subs, suffering from a surfeit of Parsons, had anything to do with the selection of Mr Drew's little gem for publication.