Sanna Marin and the rise of fake controversy

With an honourable exception for the Beastie Boys, I can’t stand the use of ‘party’ as a verb. It immediately reminds me of ‘Party, party, party, oikies!’ – the war cry of the drunken potbellied Afrikaaners who once roared in their bakkiesonto our Namibian campsite at about 2 a.m. and proceeded to be, well, Boerish. It’s a usage that smacks of creepy men in movies inviting young women into their cars, or footballers in search of questionably consensual sex. It has passed from a frat-boy Americanism into a tabloid euphemism for illegal drug use and sexual sleaze without ever quite passing through a phase of meaning, actually, having a party.

Yet ‘partying’ is what the Finnish Prime Minister stands accused of. Video has leaked of 36-year-old Sanna Marin dancing and lip-syncing to pop music with her friends, drink having evidently been taken. One is said to show her dancing ‘hip-to-hip’ with a male pop star to a hip-hop track. Another, according to a bluenose quoted in a Finnish tabloid, depicts an evening in which the married premier ‘danced intimately with at least three different men' and 'sat on the laps of two different men'. Intimately, eh?

More than that – and this is what has those seekers-after-truth with the curiously Russian-tinged syntax excited – the tapes contain reference to ‘flour’, which is claimed to be a slang reference to illicit substances. Never mind that we seem to be struggling to find Finnish speakers who can attest to hearing the word used in this way. Flour is the principal ingredient in cake; and cake, as students of Chris Morris will know, is a ‘made-up drug’.

This is, then, a made-up story. It has roared through the mainstream media, as far as I can see, even though not a single detail in it attains to being both true and consequential. The true bits – Finnish PM gets squiffy on her day off; doesn’t mind looking a bit silly when dancing; likes to flirt - aren’t consequential. And the consequential bits – Finnish PM takes illegal drugs, tries to seduce random men for adulterous sex – aren’t true.

You’d really have to work at climbing aboard your high horse to make the case that getting tipsy or, for that matter, outright plastered now and again on her day off would render Marin unfit for office. The social use of alcohol is hardly unprecedented in politics, and it’s only relatively recently that its use in professional contexts has come to be frowned on. Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher were both drinkers. Pitt the Younger would put away a bottle of port before he addressed the House. There’s no suggestion that Marin is an alcoholic; just that she’s prone to the occasional drink as many sociable women in their thirties are.

Yet since enough trolls are pushing it through social media, we’re licensed to report the fact of the ‘controversy’; and besides, everyone loves an embarrassing leaked video and the Finnish PM is an attractive woman so the story illustrates well. It has legs mainly because the Finnish PM has legs. Yet just to calm this nonsense down, Sanna Marin has had to take a drug test – which itself becomes news.

This, then, is how a particular sort of fake controversy spreads. Parallels present themselves – and, to knock that one on the head early, our own ‘partygate’ is not one of them: the outgoing PM wasn’t being persecuted for eating cake or drinking wine; the complaint was that he did so in defiance of virus-containment rules he put in place himself. Strikes me, rather, that there are shades here of the baseless row all those years ago about Barack Obama’s US citizenship. That story was given fuel by nativist doubts about Obama’s ‘loyalty’; this one by the prurient modesty-policing of female behaviour.

As in that case, a sewage dump of innuendo with a pretty clear political agenda contaminated the public conversation. Obama was finally forced to release his long-form birth certificate to see it off (in the process, of course, giving the story still more play); while Marin has had to submit to a drug test. Some of the same interests, it’s safe to say, will have been satisfied by both things. Some of the same interests, it may not be too much to suppose, will have been cheerfully stirring the pot.

So the story, here, does seem to me to be significant; but not in a way that has the first thing to do with our interest in how Finland’s Prime Minister chooses to let her hair down of an evening. It has to do, rather, with how easy it is to let nonsense pollute our information ecosystem. That’s down to the way we as individuals let it propagate through social media, and the ease with which the sort of legacy media that can legitimate and amplify it are seduced into doing so. Nonsense like that isn’t cost-free. It muddies the waters. It smears. It distracts. As Philip K. Dick put it, kipple (i.e. nonsense) drives out nonkipple.

Now Philip K. Dick, since we mention him: there was a man who knew how to party.