If you suddenly say “I’ll buy the Daily Mail now” because a journalist asks tough questions at a briefing, you’re a putz.

The Daily Mail is good at understanding the way the wind’s blowing. It’s entirely ruthless.

It just wants Cummings out and a Tory leader it can control.

There are far too many people in the media or teaching about the media who don’t… understand the media.

Perhaps it’s better understood as professional wrestling.

In professional wrestling there are heels (bad guys) and faces (good guys)

Sometimes bad guys go good — a face turn — sometimes good guys go bad — a heel turn.

The Daily Mail is fundamentally always loyal to the bosses just like all the wrestlers in the WWE are fundamentally working for the McMahon family.

When the Daily Mail appears to be attacking the Conservative government, it’s part of the storyline and the underlying plan remains the same.

The Mail only throws blows at a Conservative Party advisor or politician when it decides *another* Conservative Party figure would be better for it.

The other reason that the UK press is like wrestling is that columnists, like wrestlers, can easily switch between franchises.

Look how many columnists have gone from The Daily Mail to The Guardian and back again.

They use the same moves and just do them in a different order.

In wrestling, there’s a concept called ‘kayfabe’ — it’s the agreed fiction that what happens within the ring and around it are ‘real’ despite being scripted.

The UK political media has a form of kayfabe. People who ‘play’ fights with each other on broadcast get on famously in green rooms. Lines are taken to push on various storylines.

And, like wrestling, which only works because wrestlers agree to a shared grammar and vocabulary of moves, UK political journalism only works because there are underlying assumptions that all mainstream commentators accept unquestioningly.

In May 1996, there was an infamous event in the WWE where kayfabe was publicly broken; it’s called the Curtain Call.

The Kliq — a group of the top wrestlers who were real life friends — broke character to reveal their connection despite kayfabe feuds.

It was the point at which the WWE and other franchises were forced to really address scripted elements.

There will be no Curtain Call in UK politics. The system is too committed to industrial levels of gaslighting.