Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop describes life as a foreign correspondent for the Beast newspaper in the 1930’s. Lord Copper, owner of The Beast, advocates a style of journalism which is still very much with us today.

‘The Beast stands for strong, mutually antagonistic governments everywhere… Self-sufficiency at home, self-assertion abroad.’

A Beast type newspaper likes to support antagonistic governments because it seeks news through antagonism. Never mind who suffers from the trouble this causes, as long as news and sales follow. In the Scoop world, it appears that the people suffering are comfortingly foreign. They live in places reassuringly far away, like Scoop’s fictional East African country Ishmaelia, or a Balkan state where a journalist sets off a revolution, by falling asleep on a train, getting out at the wrong station, and writing about barricades and flaming churches in the unfortunate country in which he happens to find himself.

The idea that disruptive news can be safely inflicted on distant foreigners is, however, illusory. Scoop has many international complications, which suggest that antagonism is a kind of carelessly used biological weapon, the effects of which are hard to control. Historians have documented the role of the nationalist “yellow press” in stoking up tensions that led to a dispute in the Balkans becoming a Europe-wide conflagration in 1914. Similarly, as the Second World War approached, Lord Rothermere, co-founder of the Daily Mail, was happily supporting the antagonistic governments of Germany and Italy, as a defence against the Bolshevik Russians, and we all know how well that turned out.

It is perhaps the perfect irony that today’s Beast type newspapers, in their continuing support of antagonistic governments everywhere, love Brexit, and so bring disruption back home to roost in the Beast’s back yard. They have helped make Britain into Ishmaelia.

Scoop is a very funny novel. The central character – the writer of a nature column accidentally recruited as a foreign correspondent – is an innocent abroad. But the seriousness underlying the humour and innocence is as relevant today as it was in 1938.