1st April 2022
I tweeted something knowingly untrue this morning.
I said that, contrary to my long-standing absolute and principled objection to the gods-awful and professionally divisive QC system, I had the honour of accepting appointment as a QC.
Given the aside in yesterday’s in yesterday’s post, I thought it may amuse somebody out there.
I think it amused one or two.
But it convinced many more.
And so I got hearty sincere congratulations for something I would never do, and indeed I would rather boil my head than do.
Many readily believed I would brazenly be such a hypocrite.
A prominent Tory politician did something similar – and got this earnest tut-tut response from a Guardian journalist:
*
And then it struck me.
What a dated thing to do.
April Fool’s Day is now itself as dated as the black-and-white Panorama film footage of spaghetti-bearing trees.
April Fool’s Day in part presupposes a core trusted media, where one can be playfully topsy-turvey with the actualité.
A twelfth night of inversions – but with the media.
An annual exception to the mundane lot of straight(-ish) reportage.
Yet with social media, fake news and hyper-partisanship, such inversions are a commonplace.
The norm even, and not an exception.
Perhaps we can instead have a day each year where everyone – including all on social media – has to be strict with the truth.
And if we did, one suspects that would not last past midday either.
***
Comments Policy
This blog enjoys a high standard of comments, many of which are better and more interesting than the posts.
Comments are welcome, but they are pre-moderated and comments will not be published if irksome.
For more on this blog’s Comments Policy see this page.
I think there other different factors at play here. Twitter design uses tribalism rather than humour and pluralism and nuance as it’s recipe for promoting addiction.
Congratulations on your QC.
What was interesting in both your QC example and the hilarious Rory Stewart quote were the characteristics of the reactions, which typify social media: rapid, emotional reactions with no fact-checking.
Oops – left same reference, sorry.
In the States, the number of April Fool jokes in my overflowing inbox was zero-a fast cultural change. As you say, context has changed such that there’s no agreed stable starting space. Waiting for Apple to drop the April 1 notification in its calendars.
Same time that dear Rory Stewart bamboozled a handful into believing he’d been appointed Downing St’s new Head of Communications. Yours was more convincing tbf. Good work by both of you though ☺️
It made I larf!
Reverting back to the blue tick issue, its presence does not necessarily confer authenticity, but its absence can indicate when you’re being wound up.
Yesterday morning, the Parody Boris Johnson Twitter account changed its name to Boris Johnson MP, and Tweeted: “After much deliberation, I have handed my resignation to the Queen” (or words to that effect).
After an initial brief frisson of excitement, I noticed the lack of a blue tick on the Tweet, thereby sparing me the embarrassment of announcing this ‘news’ to the entire office where I work.
How true what you say is, David, and how sad that our contemporary climate of habitual lying makes the innocent fun of April 1 outdated. Mind you, I once got into trouble at my job by being April-fooled: there was an article in the construction press on that day many years ago about a wonderful new plant-based cement, and I took it on trust! After that I always looked out for supposed authors who signed themselves as Lirpa Loof….
Have you a link to something you’ve written on the absurdity of the QC system, please (form a solicitor advocate)?
Hear hear…!
Hopefully this isn’t too off-topic… I wanted to take a moment to explore the hyper-partisanship side of this story.
It is important to remember that radicalisation and hyper-partisanship are critical elements needed by autocrats and dictators to establish their control.
First step is to create and then denigrate an opposition – to use insults and smears to demean them in the eyes of the broader audience (for example, consider “Mexican Rapists”, “Lyin’ Ted Cruz” and “Shifty Adam Schiff”). Note that it isn’t sufficient to criticise them of some apparent failing, but to portray them as flawed and weak and do so in base terms.
Once this foundation is built, once an autocrat has established that these other individuals are worthy of scorn, the second step is to attack them with increasing vigour. So attack phrases like the “Do-Nothing Democrats” take on a more serious edge. This is also a “test” stage, where the attacks are designed to provoke a response, helping an autocrat determine whether or not their “base” is “on-side” with their message, willing to blindly follow no matter the reported failing of their leader. The step can be repeated until enough of the base is on board.
In the early days of Donald Trump’s presidency, after the press corps in the US had endured a particularly brutal campaign, had been “penned” in enclosures at rallies and had scorn and vitriol poured on them, one journalist asked the President why he continued to use the term “Fake News!” so much. His answer was unusually candid, saying, in effect, that if he could convince his base that journalists were not to be trusted, then any time the press printed something that was both critical and true, he could shout “Fake News!” and his base would believe him.
So the third step is to repeat the lies, ad nauseam, until an audience starts to rationalise that behaviour by thinking, “If this were a lie and it was being repeated so much, surely someone would call him out over it… so as nobody is doing that, maybe it’s true…”
Now, with this pattern set, the would-be autocrat can set about the acquisition of power through corrupt means. Any time someone catches them in the act, the fact that misinformation has become so prevalent, that anyone critical has been portrayed as somehow “second class”, the fact that any critical published story can be derided as “fake news”… all these things combine to enable and facilitate the risk of an autocrat or dictator. With the foundation laid, an autocrat can argue that they had “perfect” phone calls to ask foreign leaders for favours, or to ask an election administrator that they just needed to find 11,780 votes, or that when they stood at the Ellipse in Washington DC and told a crowd that they would have to go to the Capital Building and “fight like hell”, well, of course that wasn’t supposed to be taken literally.
Sometimes, when strife befalls us, we may wish that we had stronger national leaders, to protect and preserve our democracy. Ironically, it can be that when we have “strong” leaders that our democracy can be at its greatest moment of peril.
Misinformation and hyper-partisanship are the first two steps on a very, very slippery slope.
The essence of a good April Fool, to my mind, is that it has detail, through which you eventually realise it is ridiculous. One-line April fools were never my thing.
Joe Lycett’s spoof Sue Gray report was perfect, even if it wasn’t on 1 April. There was an entire made up report with increasingly unbelievable details.
I think this kind of April Fool is still playable and entertaining. At least until we arrive in a state so authoritarian that believing the unbelievable is compulsory.