A note on what I’m doing and why. I’m an investigative journalist who worked for the Guardian for 20 years latterly investigating the intersection of politics and technology that included 2018’s exposé of the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal. The opaque and unaccountable Silicon Valley companies that facilitated both Brexit and Trump are now key players in an accelerating global axis of autocracy. I believe this is a new form and type of power that I’m committed to keep on exposing: Broligarchy.
And we’re launched!
Last week, I explained how out of the rubble of my previous newspaper, five of us, all long-time colleagues from the Guardian & Observer – and all women! – have joined forces to plot a new, truly independent publication. And this week, in an adrenalin-fuelled whirlwind of action, we launched it.
www.thenerve.news is now live!
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It’s been quite the week. We launched a new (beta) website, put out our first two newsletters, hosted a panel at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool, threw a launch party and just to ensure that we kept things nicely edgy, I decided to kick things off with a deep dive into Tony Blair’s financial relationships with Israeli defence and technology interests that included new allegations about some of the richest people in the world.
This was already a timely piece because of Blair’s reported involvement in ‘redevelopment’ plans for Gaza as reported earlier this year in the FT including this extraordinary graphic. (The “Elon Musk smart manufacturing zone” alongside the “Gaza Trump Riviera”)
But this, our launch investigation in the Nerve had new revelations. A web of financial links between Blair and funders embedded in Israeli tech and defence, including Larry Ellison, the second richest man in the world and founder of Oracle who has funded the Tony Blair Institute to the tune of some half a billion dollars.
For me, this article was an important statement of intention. The Nerve is ‘culture first’. We’re going to be reporting on the arts and entertainment and there’s going to be light and shade and fun and joy. But our core focus is culture, politics and technology. And these are all mediated by billionaire technology platforms and exposing these and their power and influence in our world has been at the centre of my work for the last decade. And whatever, the Nerve is, it’s been essential for me that it has to do that too.
We are in a democratic emergency. I had dinner last night with Nerve advisor and global superstar, Maria Ressa, the journalist and Nobel laureate who’s faced down a dictator in the Philippines. We were with her lawyer, Can Yengisu, who’s kept her out of jail and talking about the global, populist takeover, a subject that Maria is an expert in, I said in in a slightly glib, slightly catastrophist way, that I thought we had three years. “I think we have less,” she said.
Please read the piece. Larry Ellison’s breakneck takeover of US media and entertainment, including local press and – with his new partner, Rupert Murdoch – US TikTok feels like nothing we’ve ever seen before.
And what my beat has covered since 2016 is how Britain and America are cojoined. Brexit and Trump were inextricably linked, the same tech platforms, same data harvesting, same Cambridge Analytica, same far-right politicians. And that transatlantic power axis is true, even now, that we in the UK have a supposedly Labour government.
That government is entering into a series of grossly naive and self-sabotaging deals with Silicon Valley billionaires, with Larry Ellison, the prime mover at this time. And what I wanted to pull out in this piece is that this is not just a US-UK relationship and set of deals, there’s another foreign power that’s also playing a central role.
In 2016, I kept on finding the influence of a foreign state threaded through the story I was reporting: Russia. And in researching Larry Ellison and his web of influence in the US and the UK, there was another foreign power that kept on cropping up: Israel.
We were already on an incredibly tight deadline. And then the night before publication, came the announcement that Blair would be part of Donald Trump’s new ‘Peace Board’. It meant the piece couldn’t be more timely…but also that it needed re-nosing, re-editing, re-legalling…
Still, there’s nothing like making last-minute legal challenges in a breaking news situation minutes before you launch a new publication and are about to host a event in an unfamiliar city having left your laptop charger at home…
I like to think that – many months from now – the team will thank me for providing that extra editorial challenge [gritted teeth emoji/screaming emoji] but it’s fair that to say that Sarah Donaldson, who’s leading the project, was ever-so-slightly hysterical when she got to our launch event having finally pressed the button.
Tbh, it’s a massive testament to the Sarah, Jane, Lynsey and Imogen that they pulled this off. Only a tight-knit team with literally decades of production experience could have done it. A week earlier, we hadn’t even decided which platform we were going to use let alone started to build the site.
It’s four and a half months since we left the Guardian and to say that this week has felt cathartic is an understatement. I wrote here about the circumstances of our departure, a brutal bloodletting of journalistic experience and talent, in what was an opaque and unaccountable deal by the Guardian management.
But it’s also true that we wouldn’t be here now if it hadn’t gone down in the way it went down. It made us understand why we need a truly independent news media. Why the existing media ecosystem of opaque billionaire-funded vehicles of political influence is not fit for this moment and why, however scrappy the Nerve is, it’s a breath of fresh air not to be inside a big multinational corporate that pretends to progressive values and it no longer practices.
(All words and opinions, my own! It’s why I’m proud to be part of a new, insurgent journalistic collective but also will be continuing to write freely, exactly as I please, here. My colleagues bear no responsibility for any of my views!)
This is just the start. We made the decision to put our own cash into this project. To put ourselves on the line and to just launch. We are starting small! That’s deliberate. We have big ambitions but as we go out and meet funders and investors, we wanted to show not tell. To be able to show Lynsey’s beautiful bold colourful designs, and how even as a media minnow, we can land great gets like Nicole Kidman, and how tracking Nigel Farage’s far-right movement is a core and ongoing concern (done with humour by the inmitableJohn Sweeney, who before he went to the BBC to kick up trouble was another Observer veteran).
And we couldn’t have asked for a better bunch of supporters, friends of the Nerve, buddies and former colleagues to show.
Carol Vorderman not only brought the glam she’s also her incredible positive energy and generous spirit towards championing the cause of independent media. There’s no-one quite like Carol in the UK media space. She has huge cut-through in the mainstream, she’s been a stalwart of TV entertainment, but she’s become a one-woman news machine in recent years. She takes the facts and explains them in forensic but entertaining detail on her Instagram and she lifts up independent investigative journalism wherever she finds it. We’re thrilled to have her as a contributing editor.
Contributing film writer Ellen E Jones – the author of Screen Wash:how film and TV can solve racism and save the world – brought a suprisingly optimistic vision of how culture really can change the world. And comedian, satirist and cult hero, Stewart Lee, gave us a huge boost of confidence just for being there.
His column was often one of the most read across the entire Guardian and Observer weekend output. He was offered a new contract at the new Observer. And when we asked him if he’d join the Nerve, a scrappy start-up with uncertain likelihood of success, he agreed pretty much instantly.
I’d arrived at the venue in a cold sweat minutes before the panel kicked off with slightly trembling hands following a last-minute sprint to the Apple Store to borrow a laptop charger to file my legal changes and a sudden panic that no-one would show up. But they did. We were in the OpenEye gallery in Liverpool, a beautiful space run as a charitable trust, loaned to us in one of many acts of generosity, and our launch event – on why culture needs more nerve – was nerve-wracking and life-affirming and above all fun.
If you’re British and of a certain age, you may remember the teenage journalism show, ‘Press Gang’. And there were times in the last week, when this whole enterprise had similar vibes.
But to be clear, that’s a good thing. It really is amazing what you can accomplish with some ‘fuck you’ energy and a deadline.
One final pic (for now), this was the ‘survivors’ shot, the Nerve-sters (+friends of the family) left standing at the end of the evening after an exhausting day following an exhausting week.
This photo reminded me of something so am re-pasting here. Sarah kept saying that the last week had reminded her of the sweat and panic and stress and insane hours of publishing Cambridge Analytica and I went and dug out this photo.
On that day. I was only held upright by the amazing team around me. That was all-women too and Sarah bossed it then as she is bossing it again now.
As Press Gazette reported on Friday, the Nerve has blasted past our target for the first month in a single week.
I’m almost beginning to think this could work.
The Blair Rich Project
I started my piece on Blair and Israel with this vignette from back in the day. The christening of Rupert Murdoch’s youngest daughters on the banks of the River Jordan, starring Jared Kushner, the Queen of Jordan, a couple of Hollywood celebs…and lurking just out of shot, Tony Blair.
It was turned into a 19-page Hello! photoshoot and I included it because I had an eye witness who’d seen photos of Blair in white robes in the River Jordan where he “looked like the Messiah” and, a minister’s political aide had told me that it’s also Blair’s nickname around Westminster: Jesus Christ. He wields such power and influence ove Keir Starmer and his government, aides routinely find themselves asking “What will Jesus say”?”
I’m mentioning for a bunch of reasons: 1) There’s a never wrong time to post a photo of Rupert Murdoch looking like a cult member. 2) This first piece I wrote for the Nerve exemplifies why journalists needs editors. And 3) Because this same tableau is also mentioned in this week’s Observer, just with somewhat different framing.
Journalism is a discipline as much as anything else. It’s the process of going out and finding information, talking to people, sucking up facts and trying to distill what you’ve learned into some sort of sense. But, you’re only forced to figure out what it means when you have to put words in some sort of order down on the page. And that requires a deadline, an editor and a process.
Some journalists with far greater self discipline than me can do it by themselves but I can’t. I think through my fingers: it’s only when I write stuff down I figure out what I know and while I love the amazing informality and total liberation of writing whatever I like here, I also respect the process of journalism, the collective intelligence of it.
And I feel profoundly grateful there is somewhere where I’m able to investigate and write about some of the most powerful people on earth. That I get to work with a team of journalists who want to stick it to the man, to shine a light on dark corners, and will go to huge lengths to make that possible.
Carol Vorderman told the story at our launch of how she sacked twice by the BBC for speaking up. And I told the story of how I was sacked twice in the same day, also for speaking up (my contract was terminated by the Guardian on the transfer of the Observer to Tortoise Media and minutes later, by the Observer).
The head of the Scott Trust and the editor-in-chief of the Guardian told us that no jobs would be lost. That turned out not to be true. But also: for the best. Yesterday, I also felt profoundly vindicated. Not just because we’d managed to launch the Nerve. But because this was the Observer’s cover story:
The source for this piece appears to be none other than Tony Blair. It’s a glowing hagiography of Blair. It’s not that there’s no mention of his multiple conflict of interests from his business dealings and financial links to key friends and allies of Netanyahu, as exposed in theNerve this week, there’s barely half a sentence on Blair’s catastrophic adventurism in Iraq.
And here’s how that same baptism scene that I opened my piece with is painted here, embedded in a paragraph that bigs up Tony Blair’s close ties with Mr Bonesaw himself: Mohammed Bin Salman, the man who ordered the brutal slaughter of Jamal Kashoggi.
The article includes not one but four Blair allies talking about why he’s the man to “redevelop” Gaza but there was no space for a single Palestinian voice.
Instead there’s this, sourced either from someone briefed by Blair, or, more likely, from Blair himself:
He has no intention of being a “name on the door”, detached from the reality on the ground. He would base himself in the region, at least initially, and be hands-on in securing funding for the reconstruction of Gaza and ensuring that money is properly accounted for and wisely spent. Already, the Tony Blair Institute has almost 100 staff working across the Middle East. The aim is for the people doing the day-to-day governing of Gaza to be Palestinians through a technocratic, apolitical committee.
You don’t need me to tell you that there’s no such thing as a “technocratic apolitical committee”. Technology is politics. And Blair is being funded to the tune of half a billion dollars by a key ally and close friend of Netanyahu and a bunch of other people making money from Israeli defence and tech.
This isn’t “peace”, it’s total capture and erasure. And unless we have a press that critically reports on the money behind these individuals and their control of technology, politics and the media, Maria Ressa is right: the clock is ticking.
“The Phoenix Project”
Last week, I wrote about how it’s the subscribers to this newsletter that have supported me financially while I’ve worked on this new project, but it’s way beyond that.
These were just a few of the messages pasted in the comments. Thank you for the encouragement and support. There’s so much more we need to do but we can only do this with you.
If you got to the bottom of this screed, I salute you. But I wanted to bring you up to speed with what’s happening and some flavour of what’s been going on behind the scenes.
I have a whole lot of other Russia-related updates that I’ll try and do later in the week. In the meantime, bon courage, and do let me know what you think.
With huge thanks to you all. It literally wouldn’t be possible without you.
This post has been syndicated from How to Survive the Broligarchy, where it was published under this address.