Her flaws as a civil servant. such as a near-sociopathic desire for secrecy, are brushed over, and minor talents are hailed. "She's pretty ruthless at timekeeping," noted one portrait. Often the tone is of a primary-school teacher sending a report to a parent: "One Labour figure said Gray had been a good listener."
There's a term or two for this sort of journalism, as Timothy Noah wrote when it was the team around the newly elected President Obama who were being enthusiastically profiled:
This is the season of the beat-sweetener. A beat-sweetener (some prefer the term source-greaser) is a gratuitously flattering profile that a reporter writes about a government official in the hope that it will encourage (or, at the very least, not impede) that reporter’s access to the official in question. Newspapers and magazines have been full of them, and even the uninitiated may feel they’ve been reading a lot of dull profiles lately without knowing exactly why.
My advice is to adopt a defensive-reader posture and treat all profiles of Obama’s new team as guilty until proven innocent. If you encounter emollient rhetoric in the first five paragraphs, skip the rest and move on. A beat-sweetener is a meal prepared for someone other than yourself, and there’s no reason you should waste precious time ingesting it.
Armed with these concepts, judge for yourself the worth of an article that appeared on the Guardian website a couple of hours ago:
Who is in Keir Starmer’s top team at No 10 after Sue Gray resignation?
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