Bearly Newsworthy: The Right Wing Newspapers Resurrecting Dead Cats
The news this week has been chock full of stories designed to distract you from the important things that are actually happening in the country right now
What do non-cancelled Pride parades, private school pupils, face coverings, and a non-existent family who couldn't afford their fifth holiday to Val-d'Isère have in common?
They're all dead cats on the table.
It's a phrase I'm not particularly fond of – I'm a big fan of cats and much prefer them alive rather than deceased. Lynton Crosby, the Australian political strategist who helped run Boris Johnson's campaigns, popularised the term.
The idea is simple: when your side is losing an argument, or the public grows weary of your failures, you shift attention to something so outrageous, so garish, so provocative that it forces the conversation to change. It doesn't matter if the cat is dead, irrelevant, or entirely fabricated. What matters is that it shocks. And while people gawk at the cat, they're not looking at you.
We're now firmly in the era of dead cat politics. Every week brings a new carcass to the table, helpfully laid out by someone from the Mail, Reform UK, or whichever ex-Cabinet minister is feeling especially online. This past week offered up a veritable four-course buffet of decomposing distractions – each one designed to outrage, none of them particularly real.
Let's start with the Pride parade that wasn't cancelled.
Stafford Pride and the Illusion of Outrage
On Saturday, high-follower X users began crowing that the Reform-led Staffordshire County Council had "refused to pay" for the Stafford Pride parade, and that the event had been "cancelled."
There were just a few small problems with this:
The parade hadn't been cancelled. It's still scheduled for 9 August 2025.
While it supports and champions Pride, the council doesn't fund it. Never has. The Reform councillor's vow not to pay carries about as much weight as me refusing to buy your nan a Segway.
Even if they could cancel it, Pride isn't some fringe carnival. It's a well-attended community event that boosts local business and brings residents together across all backgrounds – exactly the kind of local economic activity councils should champion, regardless of their personal views on Pride.
In short, this was pure posturing dressed up as policy – a councillor who confused his personal opinion with actual governance. There's no budget to cut. There's no moral crusade to wage. There's just a political party that understands neither the powers it wields nor how local events actually work.
And that might've been the most honest story of the week – because next up, we had the Daily Mail.
The Boy, the School, and the Story That Wasn't
The headline was dramatic: an eight-year-old boy denied NHS treatment because he attends a private school. Conservative MPs branded it a "vile class war." The Mail went all-in. Outrage erupted.
But beneath all that noise, the facts proved both more mundane and more telling.
The child in question wasn't denied medical care at all. He was refused access to Occupational Therapy – a form of educational support – through his local authority. The reason? His private school sits outside the council-funded state system. This isn't new. It's not Government policy. It's a decade-old rule that stems from the Children and Families Act 2014, passed under a Conservative government.
To be clear: it is a rule worth revisiting. All children deserve access to support, and if this policy creates gaps, it should be addressed.
But what the Mail did – and what the MPs then echoed – was to take an obscure, highly specific funding mechanism and twist it into a moral panic headline about the Government denying healthcare to children. It was designed to outrage, not inform.
And that's the real pattern here.
Because just when the noise began to die down, another story was hurled onto the table.
The Return of the Burqa Debate
It started during Prime Minister's Questions. Reform UK MP Sarah Pochin – freshly elected in Runcorn – used her very first question to ask Keir Starmer whether, for the sake of national security, he would support a ban on the burqa.
The timing wasn't accidental. Within days, Suella Braverman had penned an op-ed in the Telegraph calling the burqa "a garment of erasure." Then Kemi Badenoch chimed in, suggesting workplace bans are the answer. Cue the chorus of culture warriors, ready to re-litigate a debate last seen on page one in 2018, and before that in 2006.
The UK has never had a national burqa ban. And it doesn't need one. The arguments – public safety, integration, mutual recognition – have been raised and rebutted countless times.
But more to the point, this was never really about face coverings. It's about distraction. It's about finding a group to marginalise loudly enough that no one asks about the NHS backlog or the cost of living.
And you can tell it's a dead cat because even Reform UK's own party chair resigned over the question. Zia Yusuf called the proposal "dumb." That's his word, not mine – though he has since rowed back on that comment and returned to work for the party.
But there was one last story. And it might be the most revealing of all.
Al and Alexandra: The Couple Who Never Were
In late May, the Telegraph published a story about a couple – Al and Alexandra Moy – struggling under the weight of private school fees. Earning a combined £345,000 a year, they had supposedly been forced to cut back from five foreign holidays and switch from Waitrose to Sainsbury's. The backlash was instant. So was the ridicule – across the country, you could hear the sound of a thousand tiny violins screeching.
Soon, journalist Ian Fraser spotted something odd: the image was stock photography from 13 years ago. No trace of the Moys existed online, and eventually, the Telegraph quietly pulled the article, issuing a statement that their source had lied.
To their credit, they admitted the mistake. But that doesn't explain how it reached publication in the first place. The story sounded absurd – a couple on £17,000 a month after taxes asking for sympathy – because it was. Yet it was published because it fitted the narrative the paper has pushed for months: that VAT on private school fees is unfair, that the wealthy are under siege, and that Government policies will plunge the upper middle class into hardship.
This time, the fabrication was caught, but the burning question remains: how many others slipped through?
Because this wasn't a blog. It wasn't a tweet. It was a story in a national newspaper, based on nothing but one phone call with a man no one could verify.
The Politics of Productive Avoidance
This is where all these stories converge – in the comfortable space of opposition without alternative.
Each of these stories could have – should have – been nothing. An empty file. A spike in the edit room. A quip, not a column. Instead, they were inflated, amplified, broadcast as if they mattered. Because they served a dual purpose:
To stir cultural resentment (Pride, burqas)
To weaponise the language of fairness (school therapy access)
To stoke economic grievance from the top down (the Moys)
To avoid the hard work of actual governance
Notice what's missing from each manufactured controversy? Any actual policy proposal to fix anything.
Reform UK can tell you they're against Pride funding (that doesn't exist) and burqa wearing (that barely exists) but ask them about their plans for the NHS backlog or housing crisis, and you get silence or slogans.
The Conservative Party can work themselves into a lather about an eight-year-old's therapy access – created by their own legislation – but where's their plan to fix the broader crisis in children's services?
This isn't oversight. It's strategy. Being against things is infinitely easier than being for them or fixing them. Outrage doesn't require spreadsheets. Moral panic doesn't need a business case. Cultural grievance doesn't demand costings or implementation timelines.
This captures Reform UK's approach to local government perfectly: rather than proposing how councils might deliver better services with shrinking budgets, they focus on what councils shouldn't fund - diversity employees that may or may not exist, art projects that sound silly when stripped of context.
It's politics as permanent Opposition – always diagnosing, never prescribing, and that's the real genius of dead cat politics. It doesn't just distract from the Government's failures – it distracts from the Opposition's emptiness.
Because that's the choice we face. In a country where the economic model is broken, the NHS is crumbling, and real wages have stagnated for more than a decade, you can either roll up your sleeves and fix the problem, or find a scapegoat.
And let's be honest – finding a scapegoat is quicker. Easier. More lucrative. And it doesn't require much strategy and barely any hard choices.
So you throw a dead cat on the table. Then another. And another. And another.
All while hoping we don't notice the stench of what's rotting underneath.
A Dead Cat on Your Table: A New Guide to Culture Wars and How Not to Lose Them by Peter York, illustrated by Martin Rowson is available from Byline Books.
Bear Necessities of Politics and Power: Decoding the Chaos of Modern Politics, One Ideology at a Time by Iratus Ursus Major is available from The Great British Bookshop.
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Loathe though I am to offer encouragement to Reform, surely this is a newspaper problem not a politician problem.
As you say none of the stories should have reached publication because there literally is no story.
Newspapers with standards wouldn’t carry them but they fit their agenda so they do and hope no-one notices.
I’ll be counting the “Dead Cats” for an unforeseen time, going forward.