one of the great myths of our time is that the strategists behind the hard right ascendancy in Britain and elsewhere are at loggerheads with the mainstream media. In truth they court, engage with and manage professional journalists just as their centrist forebears did...

the only difference is they feign dislike and distrust as part of their anti-elitism charade. But the real trickery is that this provides the basis of entirely false equivalences between the hard right and the socialist left...

in various ways, it has been used by centrists in efforts to delegitimise and discredit the left and to obscure a fundamental truth: that people like Dominic Cummings owe their political lives to some of the very journalists they publicly 'critique'