The Guardian: pot, kettle........

Yesterday, I posted about the way in which the current crowing over Deputy Mayor Ray Lewis' downfall by the anti-Boris cheerleaders, including The Guardian, ignored identical errors of dligence on their own part. 

Today's Guardian takes that even further, with a wonderfully sanctimonious and finger-wagging editorial which gloats 

The mayor, who promised to clean up City Hall now looks like the inexperienced blunderer predicted by his opponents; someone who failed to carry out even the most basic checks before making a senior appointment. His attempt to defend Mr Lewis from claims that he had misrepresented his past collapsed within hours last week when it was shown, among other things, that the deputy mayor was not a justice of the peace, as he had claimed.

Mr Lewis would like people to believe that he has been chased out of his post by what he calls "fully paid-up members of the 'hair splitters' convention": in other words, people who believe that it is important for office-holders to tell the truth. London voters will ask why the Conservative party was so ready to place its trust in such a man.

Well, Guardian readers will also ask why The Guardian was also willing to place its trust in such a man to the extent that they chose to give his Eastside Young Leaders' Academy a special Charity award just last December, and ran an enthusiastic article defending the award against the criticism that, yes, they were indeed choosing an organization favoured by the Tory party, complete with Tory grandees on its board.

They headlined the article "Ray of Hope".

And prominently featured a picture of their public services editor, David Brindle, grinning alongside Ray Lewis and a group of boys from his Academy proudly holding the Guardian Award.

For good measure, the Guardian's Martin Rowson cartoon today features a grotesque caricature of Boris with a bit of his ample thatch of hair twisted into the word: SLEAZE.

I presume The Guardian is so named because it draws on Plato's theory that 

The best and the brightest, a very small and rarefied group, are those who are in complete control of the state permanently; Plato calls these people "Guardians." In the ideal state, "courage" characterizes the Auxiliaries; "wisdom" displays itself in the lives and government of the Guardians. A state may be said to have "temperance" if the Auxiliaries obey the Guardians in all things and the Producers obey the Auxiliaries and Guardians in all things. A state may be said to be intemperate if any of the lower groups do not obey one of the higher groups. A state may be said to be just if the Auxiliaries do not simply obey the Guardians, but enjoy doing so, that is, they don't grumble about the authority being exercised over them; a just state would require that the Producers not only obey the Auxiliaries and Guardians, but that they do so willingly.

 When the analogy is extended to the individual human being, Plato identifies the intellect with the Guardians.

Famously, the Latin poet Juvenal posed the question "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes"-- Who will guard these guardians?

Plato had an answer which seems to have been tailor made for the world-view and modus operandi of The Guardian:

The question is put to Socrates, "Who will guard the guardians?" or, "Who will protect us against the protectors?". Plato's answer to this is that they will guard themselves against themselves. We must tell the guardians a "noble lie". The noble lie will inform them that they are better than those they serve and it is therefore their responsibility to guard and protect those lesser than themselves. We will instill in them a distaste for power or privilege, they will rule because they believe it right, not because they desire it.

In the case of The Guardian, readers can judge the extent to which its journalists and commentariat believe in their own nobility and disinterestedness. But there's no mistaking in the tone of this editorial the belief that it is better than the elected  Mayor of London, and sees itself as the protector of lesser mortals.

In response to which, it's perhaps best to keep reminding ourselves of The Guardian's hypocrisy as demonstrated in its most famous failure of candidate-checking, Dilpazier Aslam, the advocate of a return to a seventh century Islamic caliphate. Including the way in which it took a great deal longer than Boris Johnson to take the action which led to the departure of Aslam, once his background, and his concealment of it in his job application were exposed by bloggers. And in which it initially tried to respond to the exposure of Aslam by blaming "right-wing bloggers" mounting "obsessively personalised attacks" at high speed.

Pot, kettle.........

Comments

[Alcuin]

Spot on, Judy. Would that Scott Burgess were still posting, to rub the sanctimonious Graun's nose in its own doodoo.

[jeyi]

I second alcuin's sorely missing Scott Burgess who has, no doubt, gone on to a finer and higher place.

But the thing I remember most fondly about Mr. Dilpizier's short-lived Graun panegyrics to the young Brit jihadis who pulled off the London bombings --successful or not-- is his use of the word "sassy". Sassy! Oh Sweet Jesus!