Hosking v. the Prime Minister

Mike Hosking continues to deliver what his paymasters pay him for, if today’s Herald is anything to go by. No surprise there – Hosking has always been under no illusion as to what it is that he has to sell.

What is worth remarking on, however, is the evident emotional pleasure that Hosking gets from rehearsing his familiar anti-government diatribes. He positively exults in detailing the various challenges the government has faced as a consequence of the coronavirus pandemic, and he can’t restrain himself from celebrating the hard times that the country as a whole has endured. He can’t quite seem to grasp that the downsides of our recent experience are attributable to the virus rather than the government.

He seems to be under the illusion that he is engaged in a hand-to-hand struggle for primacy with the Prime Minister – a personal struggle in which he (if not the Prime Minister) has invested a great deal of emotional capital. It is our bad luck as Herald readers that we have to put up with his self-ascribed role as prosecutor in chief. There is only one remedy available to us – we can stop reading both him and the Herald.