Why I Now Own £500 Picture of Nigel Farage

On the price of getting it wrong, learning how to write properly, and why shouting on the internet doesn’t count as journalism.

In July 2023, on a stiflingly hot day on my way back home from the office, I made a decision that I would usually reserve for a sleepless night at 23:47 in the evening - I opened a Twitter account so I could anonymously shout at politicians without terrifying my actual friends.

Photo by Florian Klauer on Unsplash

In that moment, that was the plan. The whole plan. I didn’t think much past it.

There was no brand deck, no content strategy or writing goal in place - just an over-worked homosexual immigrant on a packed train who got annoyed with a Tory MP and a penchant for swearing at people.

I named the account Iratus Ursus Major (the Big Angry Bear) - somewhat because latin makes everything sound clever (just look at Boris Johnson) and partly because “I am cross” felt just a bit too Anglican for what I had in mind.

It was a pressure release of sorts to begin with - I would see a minister go on the telly or radio or Tik-Tok and tell a fib with the wide-eyed assurance of a cocker spaniel that’s just been caught eating the sofa and I would type.

I would see the Home Office of the day invent a new and horrifying administrative mincer for people who came into the country the same way I did and I would type even faster.

In the beginning, I sort of assumed that maybe about 20 people or so would read it, three of whom were sex robots, seven of them Elon Musk clones and one of them my husband checking that I hadn’t said something that would get me arrested¹.

But then, in that insane way that the interwebs has the habit of rewarding the unwise, actual human beings started paying attention to me - likes, follows, retweets. People started appearing in my DMs like slightly haunted owls, and the dopamine switch was flicked to on - and my god, how greedily I drank from it².

The year or so that followed was the first stage of a graph that should be familiar to many people, the Dunning-Kruger curve. If you’ve seen an example of it, you’ll know the bit where confidence rockets straight up into the air like a Roman candle reaching the peak of Mount Stupid with staggering speed, while actual competence remains at ground level.

The peak of Mount Stupidity was a gloriously fun place to be.

That was me - tail high, claws out, fully convinced that I had finally cracked politics and journalism (and possibly macroeconomics if anyone fancied asking me for my opinion). I was convinced that if I said something in an angry, snarky enough tone, that my message would get through that much better. The volume knob and sharpness of my tone, and not the actual content, seemed to do the trick - louder, funnier, crueller.

Again and again and again.

I felt oh so terribly righteous about it all - and it also felt, in retrospect, somewhat suspiciously easy, and there was a good reason for that, because it was too easy and I had to have a few points of education before I realised just how much I didn’t actually know.

My first education arrived together when an editor - my firsts real editor - asked to run one of my rants in a newsletter. She (women as it turns out, would be the ones to civilise me), took my molten, verbose paragraphs about the importance of the ECHR and started cutting.

She rearranged things, shortened the guff I had been going on about and turned what was a 3,000 word manifesto meets polemic into a 789 word readable piece of prose.

It was my introduction into the concept that less can be more (especially when it comes to writing), and through it all, I discovered that there are few things that are more humbling than watching your best tantrum being dismantled (in the kindest way possible) and being handed back a calmer, better argument.

The second lesson came from my second editor, when I started writing a regular column for Byline Supplement towards the end of last year - a woman who was absolutely brilliant at her craft and scrutinous for detail.

My columns were thoroughly checked over each Wednesday, and deadlines became a thing. I learnt the importance of not only fact checking, but also showing exactly where those facts came from - one errant link or one unsupported claim, and the mark-up would come back to me for a fix. It was gently pointed out to me that referring to Donald Trump’s “bright orange ring” being kissed may be just a tad too scatalogical. She was right on all of these fronts.

The third came via another editor - we met in Keele after a literary festival for a long overdue chat after working together for months on a day so hot that the air itself seemed to be just a bit uncomfortable. We talked about stories, about our histories, about politics and largely set the world to rights.

She said to me, almost off hand “your pieces are good, and we thoroughly enjoy working with you and you hold people’s attention.” I nodded as if I’d always known that, and then went home and thought about it for a week. I had, up to that point, been using attention like a sparkler - look at me, light! noise! attention! - and now someone had suggested that this was actually important. Useful even. Like a lamp - which is far less thrilling than a sparkler, but admittedly also far more useful.

The silly truth that I learned through, slowly and through much muttering to myself was that the shouting, trolling and snark was easy, but writing (actual writing) and getting a message across was hard. Shouting is a sprint - filled with the most addictive adrenaline, punchline and release. Writing is a trundle, a well planned walk - turning up, mile after mile, checking the weather app, packing a sandwich and good sensible shoes.

Shouting is “YOU WON’T BELIEVE THIS?!” while writing is “so, here’s how we know and here’s what it might mean, and this is why it’s important.”

That realisation didn’t arrive as a single ray of bright white light while I looked into the middle distance and whispered “craft” to myself - it arrived in a series of small embarrassments that I had not been doing well enough until then, in tiny but practical instalments. Instalments that I will forever be grateful for.

These incidents were also not the end of my education - not by any stretch - and more recently, I had a very unpleasant and far more unpleasant lesson taught to me than any of the editors I had worked with had done so far, this one coming in the form of a picture of Nigel Farage.

A few weeks ago, an email popped into my inbox (ping!) with a worryingly official looking demand from a certain media agency. I had, in an article published on Bearly Politics, a couple of weeks before, cropped an image of a headline - screengrab including a picture of Nigel Farage (because at this stage, there are only about three politicians that get their picture put up anywhere), as I wanted to critique the headline.

I credited it, linked it and somewhere in my head a sleepy gremlin named “fair use” assured me it was fine.

Then came the email. It turns out they disagreed with sleepy gremlin³. They disagreed very expensively my rationale, and I will be honest, there is nothing quite like the prospect of paying nearly £500 for a picture of Nigel Farage that makes you question yourself in terms of your additional career choice.

That was a truly adult lesson in writing in publishing - you don’t just get into a bit of trouble for slipping up, you get a big old bill⁴.

Another recent lesson was just a week after that.

I had been trawling The Telegraph for insane headlines (truly like shooting fish in a barrel these days), when something about one of their articles really caught my attention. Names, timings and a pattern that I thought may have meant something.

I spent an entire Sunday connecting dots, feeling for all the world like I was one of those investigative journalists in a prestige drama, good lighting included⁵ and possibly even a beret. It was exhilarating, and by the end of the day, I was ready to hit publish - until a small, very irritating voice piped up inside my head and politely asked:

“Are you sure?”

A horrible question that - “Are you sure?”

It meant putting down my sword that I was swinging wildly, and reread everything again. And it turned out that I wasn’t sure - the links were there - but tenuous. Not nearly strong enough, and looking at it, I was actively looking for another very expensive email to ping into my inbox.

So I didn’t publish. The Bear from a few years ago absolutely would have, and fuck you to the consequences. He would have happily pressed “Send To Everyone Now”, basked in the applause and dealt with any corrections later.

The me who has now been exposed to three editors and one copyright infringement, on the other hand, realised that he much prefers silence to being sued.

That was Sunday that I learned the power of not hitting “publish” - and the fact that while it doesn’t feel triumphant, it does feel right.

And somewhere in between all of this, I also started learning just how strange this new media ecosystem that I find myself immersed in really is.

Traditional journalism has its guard rails - editors, sub-editors, fact-checkers, lawyers and even the odd intern whose job it is to double-check the spelling of “defamation.”

Independent media, by what I’ve now learned is a frightening contrast, has just you.

Your research, your conscience, your double checking and your cat judging you from the windowsill - and while the freedom of it is intoxicating, the responsibility is sometimes pretty nauseating.

I found it very easy in the past to sneer at legacy media - and god only knows I still do that on a daily basis - but that structure that exists also provides protections. Protection against your own worst instincts that happen when you write on your own.

And I’ve learned now that when you are doing this on your own, you have to figure out that structure yourself - out of time and caution and the occasional text to a friend to ask to read over something to make sure you don’t sound like a crazy person.

It’s a whole new, and sometimes terrifying landscape we work in now - Substack, BlueSky, Threads, Twitter - all these strange little islands where writers have to be their own newsrooms⁶. Because many of us have realised that we’re no longer just typing a shout into the void anymore - we’re also editing, publishing, marketing, moderating and making sure of ourselves.

It’s something that’s thrilling and exhausting at the same time - the rules are still forming and audiences are still migrating, and the whole exercise almost feels a bit like the early days of radio when everyone was yelling into static and hoping that they would be heard.

And when it does work, it really is magic - but when it doesn’t? That’s the point at which the Dunning Kruger curve moves on just a little bit more and how you end up with a £500 photograph of Nigel Fucking Farage in your documents folder.

I’m going to keep the picture there there (and possibly even consider framing it, since it’s more than I’ve ever paid for a piece of art), because everytime I see it, it’ll be the reminder that this (whatever this is) isn’t easy or risk free - and that it it’s not supposed to be. But the point, I think, is to learn to do it better, a little more carefully and with a little more grace each time.

I’ve also grown a near revenant respect for people who before I merely admired - for people who have spent years, decades, walking this road properly. People like

Carole Cadwalladr

and

Sam Bright

and

Josiah Mortimer

and

Peter Jukes

and

Adam Bienkov

Lewis Goodall

and so many other journalists who have paved the roads that people like me are tentatively navigating.

People who do the work, the late nights of researching, the legal double checking and who have taken the punches so the rest of us can see what’s true. They make me realise that I’m not, and probably never will be a journalist in that sense.

I’m something else - something newer, far less defined and still (hopefully) growing - a bit of a mongrel of columnist, commentator, analyst and chronicler - equal parts Bear, bureaucrat and bloke still muttering to himself about fairness. It really is a strange role that didn’t exist that much before, this thing where you write alone but thousands are listening and the editing room is your conscience and the newsroom is all the detritus you gather together as you go along.

But, it could be that that’s the point - journalism as a profession has rules, and I respect them now more than ever, even as I’m sometimes learning them as I go.

Every craft has its tuition fee - part of mine just happened to arrive with Nigel Farage’s face on it.

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If you’ve enjoyed this reflection on the joys of shouting into the void, paying for it, and then learning how not to, Bearly Politics is full of similar cautionary tales - with better lighting and worse language.

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If you don’t wish to take up a subscription, you can also support my habit of verbosity through buying me a cup of coffee.

And if neither of those, a share is still the cheapest way to stop me buying more photos of Nigel Farage.

1. My husband will quietly tell you that this is still nearly a full time job description of his.

2. In my defence, dopamine is cheaper than therapy.

3. That sleepy gremlin has since been sacked for gross negligence.

4. “Big Old Bill” is the very polite version of what I actually called it - if I had to put in print what was said when I got that email, everyone’s screens would crack.

5. I am a gay man of nearly forty - the lighting in my house is very, very good.

6. And from time to time HR Departments, legal teams and wellness-Susans.