It’s no secret that print and digital publications are having to diversify their content to stay afloat. Unexpected turns have often raised eyebrows, but none more so than over the last twelve months, in which magazines with some of the largest readerships in the UK have been running stories that could well have been funnelled directly from CCHQ.

This behaviour might have been understandable during an election, when all media outlets step up their political coverage – but there’s no expectation that our governing party should be prioritising campaigning right now, with an election well won, and with the various challenges on its plate. If anything, the year’s gross political mismanagement should have been enough to reap criticism from some of its biggest allies.

Nonetheless, political puff pieces, viral videos, interviews – all have been offered up to audiences seeking out beauty, lifestyle, and entertainment, and all have led me to ask the following question: what the fuck is going on with British magazines?

One of the biggest culprits is Glamour UK, whose editorial board has become expert at making Conservative figures palatable by shooting them through the lens of feminism – #girlboss or otherwise – despite their parliamentary records often indicating the contrary. In October, we were told that Priti Patel is a frontrunner in the fight against female genital mutilation, when legal practitioners have observed that the Home Office’s deportation practices and hostile environment policy prevents some of the people most affected by the issue from gaining refuge in the UK. Bullying your staff isn’t a well-known tenet of feminism either.

Parliamentary affiliates have also enjoyed the spotlight. Lifestyle magazines have always shown an interest in the partners of prime ministers, but a piece on ‘our new girl crush’ Carrie Symonds shortly after the start of Boris Johnson’s premiership left readers uncomfortable about its celebratory tone (which also centred her ‘feminism’). It went down like a lead balloon, and was removed from Glamour’s website shortly afterwards.

In the publication’s most off-kilter move yet, Glamour waded in on the Jeremy Corbyn antisemitism row. As his supporters reeled from his suspension following last month’s EHRC report, editors were commissioning a political column dressed up in designer clothing: ‘These are all the reasons Jeremy Corbyn is antisemitic, despite his claims to the contrary’ was written by a journalist with no prior relationship to the magazine, and whose writing has more commonly appeared in LabourList and the Progress blog. It’s not unreasonable to assume that pitching an article of this kind to Glamour would never have worked in the past – so why now?

With other outlets, the tonal shift has been more policy driven. Black Lives Matter and its critiques of policing have been one of the top stories of the year, so the fact that Cosmopolitan decided to conclude 2020 with what can only be described as a police recruitment advertorial is, frankly, bizarre. The piece features a number of case studies from young women in the force, and stresses the ‘family’ rhetoric found in the army recruitment ads that lurk on TV every Results Day. Priti Patel’s proud promotion of the article on Twitter, alongside a government link to police recruitment, didn’t help dampen suspicions that the idea might not have originated from within the magazine’s offices.

The increase in government-friendly content isn’t limited to glossy women’s outlets, either. GQ are no strangers to political profiles, and recently sent David Walliams to meet with Conservative London Mayoral candidate Shaun Bailey for a nice adult chat. Emphasising Bailey’s connections to the city and his troubles with Sadiq Khan in the London Assembly, any reader might come out of the piece charmed by this ‘enigma’ – but based on what we know about Bailey, that end product lacks the genuine care you’d normally see taken with a GQ interview.

Crucial details are missed on a subject who’s reminisced about the days when teachers ‘were men’ and accused schools that embrace Muslim and Hindu festivals of ‘robbing Britain of its community’, which apparently turns the UK into a ‘crime-riddled cesspool’. Walliams got as far as challenging Bailey’s views on implementing mandatory drug testing in workplaces, which may as well feature as a footnote in the wider context of the conversation.

So how do we explain the shift? Is it possible that the Conservatives are plugging Corbyn-shaped holes in magazine and digital media? Perhaps it’s a new Tory PR campaign seeking out relationships beyond traditional print? Or is it just the case that, with a solid Tory majority and no signs of that changing, the media establishment is getting comfortable and stating its allegiances in new and creative ways?

Right-wing tendencies are often the standard in British newspapers, and it’s common knowledge that titles’ policy interests usually lie with their ownership. With magazines and digital media, though, these questions have been less pertinent. Audiences as a whole care less about what political angle their magazines are coming from if those magazines deal primarily in fashion and beauty, not politics. Murdoch is a household name; the Hearst family and the Newhouse family – which own Cosmopolitan, and Glamour and GQ, respectively – less so. But both are unsurprisingly worth billions.

It would be wrong to say the Left has been neglected. Jeremy Corbyn reaped the rewards of magazine coverage during election cycles: he featured on the covers of GQ and NME, in coverage that did, however, at least seem relevant to the Gen-Z and millennial audiences that were so central to his popularity. The Conservative Party simply does not have that relationship with young people; at least the demand to see Corbyn spotlighted in those publications actually preceded the coverage. The cross-pollination is all the more confusing considering the fact that women’s magazines in the US, like Teen Vogue, increasingly embrace radical politics.

The impact of this trend is yet to be seen. Online audiences seem averse to the attempted spoonfeeding of party lines, particularly in the places they seek respite from the political chaos of the year – but the ruling class’s grip over the newspaper industry is iron-tight, and we should be genuinely concerned about the spread. Whether it all comes down to power-driven editorial decisions or an effort to connect with The Youth is unclear, but one thing’s for certain: it’s more important than ever to diversify the media we consume, and to open up space for independent publications which make their political interests much clearer than this.