The Decline and Fall of British Political Journalism

Peter Hitchens writes:

I woke from waves of sleep at six on Monday morning to hear the BBC newsreader announcing in urgent tones what the main development of the day was. And what was it? Why, Harriet Harman's spokesperson was saying that a newspaper story about Harriet Harman was untrue. Not true. ‘Untrue Story in paper denied by spokesperson. Not many dead.’ Didn't they have a scare story about Global Warming and Polar Bears, or Swine Flu, or Polar Bear Flu?

I neither know nor care if the Harman story is true or untrue. I suspect it is both true and untrue, like so much of the output of that strange gossip factory called the Parliamentary Lobby. Notice how often BBC reporters now give their own spin on stories by saying at the end of their packages: ‘but (unidentified) observers say that this development is a major blow to Gordon Brown's authority...etc, etc‘ If Miss Harman (or Mrs Jack Dromey, if you prefer) is telling 'friends' that she stands ready to take over from Gordon Brown should he fall, and won't allow a successor to be crowned without a vote, then she is just doing what ambitious politicians do. They see, in the wreck of others' ambitions, a chance for their own. What else should they do? The one undoubted talent which successful politicians possess is the one for seeing and taking a chance, without worrying too much if others are hurt in the process. If you're no good at stabbing people in the back (or the front) don't expect to get much above bottle-washing rank in any government.

The previous day, the BBC had likewise been examining the significance, or lack of it, of an article in another newspaper by a curious, squeaky person called Hazel Blears, who tap-dances and rides enormous motorbikes bigger than herself - and who to my personal knowledge is highly sensitive to criticism. So I will add that she strikes me as wholly vacuous and an illustration of the undoubted fact that most modern MPs are careerists who, if they ever had any real qualities, have made great efforts to suppress them. What does she really believe? What does she really know? How would you find out? She, like all the ambitious, is surrounded by a fog of image-making, which views such information as secret.

Hilariously, the wonderful old crocodile Jack Straw was then roused out of his Sunday lunchtime swamp to declare that there was no threat to the Prime Minister, who was doing a wonderful job, etc, etc.

Perhaps this is true. It is beyond the wit of any normal human to know when this stuff is important and when it's just another floundering, flapping frenzy among the legions of journalists nowadays employed to write about what they imagine to be politics. Maybe this time Gordon Brown really is about to resign, after a visit from the Comrades in Grey Suits. Maybe not.

Jack Straw is my favourite animal in the political zoo, perhaps the most skilful, cunning politician now in captivity. In person he emits a lovely, self-effacing charm, which hints all at once that he knows that you know that he knows it's all rubbish really, and also that he is, deep down, a very serious person, and that he remembers you personally and treasures the memory. I don't know where he learned it, but it truly is a pleasure to experience. I am always amazed that it has yet to carry him to the top, and it may yet do so. If so, he will certainly not get there by making damaging or disloyal remarks about his current leader, as he well knows. In which case what are we to make of his latest intervention?

I suspect that Jack does actually read books, is familiar with the important scenes in Shakespeare's tragedies and history plays, knows in detail the history of his movement, and also that he harbours very radical beliefs which he knows how to camouflage with reasonableness. He has never, to my knowledge, made a single false move since he first got involved in student politics as a very young crocodile back in the 1960s. I suspect that he hasn't done anything, since the day he was released from his playpen, which wasn't carefully calculated to propel him up the greasy pole of power.

I mention Shakespeare because I am amazed at the number of people who seem to take extravagant declarations of loyalty seriously. I just don't see how anyone familiar (for instance) with the scene where King Duncan arrives at the Macbeths' for his fatal visit could ever make this mistake. I just don't think they teach it any more, and how much we all miss as a result.

But my main point is this. It isn't politics, except in the most basic sense of men struggling for positions of power, as they do in offices or Oxbridge colleges or social services departments or Antarctic research stations, for all I know. Can anyone tell me what Harriet Harman stands for that Gordon Brown doesn't stand for, or which principles divide Jack Straw from Alan Johnson, or what the fundamental difference between a Blairite and a Brownite is (since Peter Mandelson and several others have managed to be both)? Come to that, what's the fundamental, non-negotiable difference between a Brownite, a Blairite and a Cameroon?

Of course nobody can answer this, because there is no such difference. Political reporting these days is a giant gossip column, or reality show (‘I'm a nonentity. Get me out of here‘), or soap script, in which things of no importance are hugely magnified to maintain viewer interest. No wonder politicians are so frequently drawn into commenting on controversies in soap operas, or in reality shows.

Take the recent righteous effusions about Damian McBride and his allegedly evil e-mails. Many of the people affecting to be outraged about this stuff tolerated the activities of Alastair Campbell and his commissars for years and years, and strangely never needed to shriek for the smelling salts like affronted maiden ladies, as they did over this business. And, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, do they really think that David Cameron became leader of the Conservative Party with no assistance from the dark arts of spin? How sad, even pitiable, if so.

The wild frenzy now aimed at Labour reminds me of the wild frenzy directed at the Tories back in the early 1990s, when hardly a day went by without some minister being exposed for what was then regarded as a sexual misdeed, and now wouldn't rate a mention in the sexual free-for-all which New Labour has happily licensed since the summary dismissal of Robin Cook's wife, not to mention that poor chap who had a moment of madness on Clapham Common.

It gave the wholly false impression of a government incapable of running the country, so as to accustom the electorate to the idea of change - for change's sake - at the 1997 election. I suppose this was necessary because in fact New Labour never openly offered any policies substantially different from those of John Major's. It did have a radical programme, but it was one it preferred not to publicise. Something similar is going on now, except that the thing to be concealed is not how radical the change will be, but how little change there will be, if Mr Cameron becomes Prime Minister. The freshness of the face is all. The staleness of the policies is not to be discussed.

It's funny (and I explore this in my new book The Broken Compass, now available) how other stories that don't fit this narrative just never take off. They're covered, but they never get half as much attention as Harriet Harman's supposed ambitions. For instance, what do you think would have happened if a group of Labour councillors in a major town in Southern England had been caught vote-rigging and sent to prison for it?

Why, within minutes it would have been laid at Gordon Brown's door, he would have been tormented at Question Time on the matter, the papers would have incessantly gone on about the sickness of this doomed government coming all the way from the top, the BBC would have joined in, in its new Tory-friendly guise.

However, the case, a few days ago, actually involved Tories in Slough. If there's been any frenzy about this, or any general conclusion that the Tories are rotten to the core, or if David Cameron has even been asked about it, I've missed it. The obsessive concentration upon personality, and at the moment upon Gordon Brown himself, is absurd. Nobody could really be that bad, and I refuse to accept that Mr Brown is one whit worse than Anthony Blair, who continues to live a charmed life at least as far as media coverage is concerned. I'm prepared to bet that two or three years hence, many of those now tipping slime daily over Mr Brown's head will be writing about what a 'decent guy' and a 'misunderstood figure' he was. The same people were also praising him when he was Chancellor, and potentially very powerful. Hard, to criticise a man of power. Easy, to attack him when his power is gone, and then to go back to praising him when it no longer matters.