Abstract
Political reporting in Britain has been criticised for being incestuous and outdated. But, argues
As with most British institutions, it is creaky, in a state of disrepair and full of ideas that are worth preserving. The most important of these is that independent journalists should be embedded in the centre of political power.
The lobby gives journalists privileged access to the prime minister’s spokesperson who does a question-and-answer session each morning and afternoon, not unlike those rapidly edited scenes in the US TV series The West Wing, except with more gloominess and less forward momentum. Until 2000, these sessions were off-the-record and – before my time – you used actually to learn things. Nowadays they are on-the-record and rarely reveal anything that wasn’t intended for publication.
The invited journalists’ skills include a heightened ability to interpret the motives and consequences of particular words. They use this in a game with the spokesman to prise out nuggets of useful information. The atmosphere is one of mutual understanding, against a backdrop of systemic animosity. For the spokesman, it is a very delicate operation. The slightest ill-advised turn of phrase can lead the news headlines within minutes.
There is a good-humoured, collegiate attitude in the lobby – both among journalists and between them and politicians – which makes the daily brutality of politics somewhat easier to bear. Partly this is a result of the fact that lobby journalists have escaped their boss. They are regularly hassled by the news desk, of course, but it is remarkable what it will do for someone’s disposition to arrange some geographical distance from the management.
The proximity of members of parliament makes it easier to create and maintain contacts. But it also plays a symbolic role. Many MPs would love to move the lobby out of parliament and across the river, or possibly dump it in it. They hate having journalists freely walking around parliament. This discomfort is a barometer of how useful the lobby’s constitutional function is. As a rule of thumb, a comfortable politician is a bad one.
Above: A BBC television crew film outside the Houses of Parliament in London
Credit: Justin Kase z11z/ Alamy
Very recently, digital news outlets, including the one I run, started to be allowed in (2009, in our case). This was a strange moment for the parliamentary authorities. On the one hand they had to recognise changing consumer habits. On the other, there had to be a reason for some blogs to be allowed in and others not. There is still an uneasy truce over admissions, but it will not hold for long. Too many major players in the online world are outside the lobby system. It does them comparatively little damage. It does the lobby system rather a lot, because it makes it seem ancient and ill-suited to the modern media climate. This is a criticism that even its most committed defender would have to accept.
The atmosphere is one of mutual understanding, against a backdrop of systemic animosity
For many, the lobby system has become a symbol of journalists’ connivance with MPs. The relationships in some places are too close, but that is a human problem pertinent to any kind of journalism. To know things, you must get close to people. But by getting close to them you sometimes find you rather like them and then seek to protect them. It is a philosophical quandary, not a modern one. The solution – admittedly a limited one – is to separate the staff who are intended to make friends with contacts from those who screw them.
But the thrust of the criticism is accurate. There is something undeniably establishment about the lobby. It sometimes feels as if someone has offered you a pair of slippers, a fireplace and a copy of the Daily Telegraph. Only the most psychologically damaged of 30-year-olds would find that an attractive proposition. But as you age it becomes more seductive. Eventually, you might empathise more with your contacts than your readers.
The lobby system has also been partially undone by technology. Being able to question the prime minister’s spokesman is a luxury. But the demands of daily online journalism make it a demanding one. It’s 40 minutes away from the desk, twice a day, all so you can receive a drip of information that will be tweeted by your colleagues as soon as it is said.
It has also been used and abused by political parties. As newspapers’ and broadcasters’ resources dwindle and staff numbers are reduced, journalists have found themselves ever more reliant on party press offices for their stories. Smart Downing Street communications officials will keep stories in their back pocket for journalists as a reward, or to dampen a damaging story. It is not dissimilar to the way you treat a child. In Westminster, the Conservative Party press office is particularly effective at feeding journalists stories about their opponents.
After the second leader’s debate of the 2010 general election, for instance, Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg was temporarily the subject of huge public acclaim. His polling went through the roof and even started to nudge up against that of the leaders of the two much larger parties. People got nervous. Suddenly there appeared in the press an extraordinary range of attacks, overwhelmingly originating in opposition Conservative party HQ, about the man who would later become deputy prime minister. His expenses were questioned, as was his employment record. The Daily Mail even used his multicultural background to observe that he was “by blood the least British leader of a British political party”.
A similar campaign was deployed against another party, Ukip, ahead of this year’s local and European elections and will be deployed again against Ed Miliband’s Labour Party in the upcoming general election.
Of course, journalists and editors should always be wary of being used as a political party’s meat puppet. The fact that the political departments of various newspapers are working side-by-side also has drawbacks. It encourages, even among very different newspapers, a pack mentality. It is a homogenising force in an industry that prides itself on its variety. The internet has made it easier to break away from this trend, because it has revealed a ready audience for serious news stories outside the mainstream cycle. But many know no other way.
The biggest obstacle the lobby faces does not come from politicians, or even from its own internal contradictions, but from readers. Increasingly, the public has lost interest in Westminster. And without Westminster, the lobby is nothing but a wild animal with nothing to eat.
British politics has become fixated with the 100,000 or so swing voters who decide an election. As all three main parties hone in relentlessly on that middle ground, the grand ideological narratives of politics are being lost, to be replaced by nuggets of focus-group-approved policy and personal power struggles.
This resulted in years of hostile press briefing between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, two men who had fewer political differences than most people have children. Yet somehow this battle of personalities – one telegenic and half-crazed, the other dour and wooden – dominated British political life for a decade. Newspaper readers, like many voters, decided that wasn’t for them.
You can get more traffic from a celebrity rumour than from sending a correspondent to the corridors of power
Then there is the uncomfortable reality of Westminster’s declining relevance. Multinational corporations wield far more power, as do transnational institutions like the EU. Many of the most significant political events of the last decade came not from elected politicians but relatively small non-state actors like al-Qaeda or Occupy.
This loss of interest in Westminster has coincided with the internet’s destruction of journalism’s financial model. There is less money for lawyers. There is less money for staff, so the remaining journalists are rigorously overworked. And there is more data available on readers’ habits, all of which suggests that you could get more traffic regurgitating a celebrity rumour than from sending out dedicated correspondents to the corridors of power. Increasingly, editors are sending inexperienced staff to the lobby or just picking up political news off the wires.
The natural endpoint of this type of business model was expressed by David Montgomery, chief executive of Local World, which owns several local newspapers across the UK. The “human interface” involved in local news publishing would disappear within four years, he said in 2013. The “content harvesting process” would invite police forces, for instance, to publish their own press releases on local news sites. Montgomery seemed unaware, or unwilling to be aware, of why this would not provide effective scrutiny of authorities. It’s a nightmare vision of political journalism.
For all its faults, the lobby represents a barrier against that type of coverage. It is the journalism of time and money, where reporters are sent somewhere and given time to discover secrets and where editors have the funds and inclination to face down legal threats.
Undoubtedly the lobby needs to change, to expand its coverage and broaden its membership. But it can’t be given up on. Establishment or not, it puts the fear in politicians. And that alone should commend it.
