FRENCH NOVELIST George Perec wrote the novel A Void which doesn’t have a single letter “e” on any of its 290 pages. Gilbert Adair managed the fiendish task of translating it into English in 1995. Perec was a member of Oulipo, a loose collective of tricksters and the joke is a kind of extended prank, a deliberate piece of absurdity.

I raise A Void now because the extended absurdity of writing a novel without the letter “e” reminds me of a bizarre void inside British journalism. A Void is quite impressive and funny to read, but it is also sort of annoying, because all the characters keep saying things like “a thing I cannot pinpoint is missing from our linguistics” — and your mind keeps saying, “Yes! The letter E is missing! Will you just stop messing about and notice it!”

When it comes to journalism, what is missing is something equally basic: any description or acknowledgement of journalism itself. The media can look at politics going rotten but can never see the media’s role in it.

Boris Johnson was in a corner and being a Tory in a corner, he spat out venom, as snakes and Tories do: Boris’s venom was the smear that Starmer, when he was Director of Public Prosecutions, “spent most of his time prosecuting journalists and failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile.”

As many in the press noted, this “Starmer: friend of sex abusers” conspiracy theory is loved by the far right. But there was also a strong feeling across the media that this smear somehow came from the “darker corners of the internet.” It was “Trumpian” because it was like Donald Trump playing on outlandish QAnon conspiracy theories.

So the Guardian said, “Until Johnson’s attack at Prime Minister’s Questions just over a week ago, the false claims about Starmer... Had only a relatively limited circulation in far-right groups on the lightly regulated social network Telegram.”

They even had an expert to support this claim, reporting: “Adam Hadley, executive director of Tech Against Terrorism, said he wondered ‘how Number Ten’s team got hold of this in the first place’ as it was, he said, ‘a fairly niche conspiracy theory being propagated by far-right conspiracy theorists and extremists on Telegram.’”

But there is no need to go fishing in Telegram, a largely unmoderated messaging app often favoured by the far right. Because you could read exactly the same “conspiracy theory” in the not-at-all niche or obscure British national newspaper the Express. Express Columnist Ross Clark wrote an early hit-piece on Starmer in 2020 rehearsing all these arguments. Clark’s column, which is still on the Express website, is about “Why Sir Keir Starmer would be a total disaster for Labour.”

Clark rehearses Johnson’s attack, saying there must be “joy” in Downing Street that Labour have chosen a “a dripping wet London liberal as their leader,” especially as “under his leadership, the CPS failed to prosecute the serial rapist John Worboys for 75 of his suspected crimes... It was Sir Keir Starmer’s CPS, too, that failed to prosecute Sir Jimmy Savile, below, in spite of evidence of his offending.”

Clark was testing Tory attack lines for either the next election, or when the party gets in trouble — which turns out to be right now. Worboys — the very dangerous “Black Cab rapist” — and Savile will likely feature in rumours and smears again when an election comes closer

These attack lines were already developed by right-wing smear website Guido Fawkes in 2018, which listed then-frontbencher Starmer’s “litany of failures” as DPP. Guido Fawkes should be seen as a disreputable hard-right site, but is actually taken very seriously by both the media and the Tory Party. They have accredited “lobby” journalists at Parliament and are a part of the media-Tory ecosystem.

The Guido Fawkes website also developed some of the completely false or misleading smear stories about Jeremy Corbyn later picked up by national media, the Tory Party and the Labour right. The completely false story that Corbyn had a Stasi file from his motorbike tour of the German Democratic Republic (he didn’t have a file and hadn’t toured the GDR) or the bizarre tale Corbyn was somehow anti-semitic for attending a Jewish ceremony with radical Jewish group Jewdas (the smear relied on hiding Jewdas being a Jewish group) both came from Guido Fawkes.

The Guido Fawkes dirty dossier on Starmer also highlighted smears about Starmer’s DPP deciding “not to prosecute John Worboys for 75 sex assaults” and failing “to build a case against Jimmy Savile and being forced to apologise after being damned by a report into the failings.” Guido Fawkes has been pushing the Worboys story hard for some time.

Incidentally, I do see why a small number of left-wingers are so angry at Starmer’s swift, shifty about-turn from soft left promises to very right-wing stances that they are tempted to support, to some extent, the Starmer-Savile argument.

But Starmer-Savile is a smear at two connected levels. Firstly, Starmer was not directly involved in the decision not to prosecute Savile. Secondly, Starmer led the DPP in a more or less conventional way and all the establishment organisations, including the DPP and the BBC, found it hard to pursue Savile, because they are biased towards the rich and powerful and against women, especially those with less money or social standing.

Starmer didn’t make the DPP like this and made some small effort to improve it. But the smear is not that the Establishment is biased towards the powerful, it is that Starmer, because he is a “liberal London lawyer,” went out of his way to protect Savile, because “do-gooders” are soft on sex crimes and perverts: it is a smear that always goes rightwards.

The smear does not come “from the dark corners of the internet,” it comes straight from the national media. But they can’t see or say this for two reasons. Firstly, the media don’t want to admit that the media itself is generally part of the problem of lies and smears in politics.

Secondly, any admission of this would lead to questions about the most absurd and outrageous set of smears and lies we have seen in the media for some time, which focused on Corbyn.

So instead of facing the truth, the media becomes a bit like Count Dracula, acutely aware of other people’s every move, but so dark of heart that it can’t see itself in a mirror.