The Prerogatives of Harlots

Peter Hitchens writes:

Who should pick the leaders of our political parties? Those parties, or a bunch of journalists? The answer seems simple to me. I don’t like the Labour Party, but it represents an important strand in British opinion. If its members choose Edward Miliband to lead them, according to their own rules, then that is their affair.
The same goes for the Tory Party. In the days when Conservative leaders were still picked by the party rather than by the media, Iain Duncan Smith was fairly elected.

The media later played a major part in the campaign to destroy and overthrow Mr Duncan Smith in a democracy-free putsch. Michael Howard, and later David Cameron, were anointed by journalists and chosen by them. In fact it was the absurd and well-organised adulation of Mr Cameron by the tiny clique of political writers and broadcasters that thrust this obscure Young Liberal into Downing Street.

Now the same clique are enraged by the refusal of the Labour Party to do what they told it to, and had in many cases wrongly predicted that it would do. Most of last week’s coverage of the Labour conference was an extended scream, from the journalists’ playpen, of ‘Waaaah! We wanted David and you picked Ed! How dare you! We’ll get you for this!’ And they will, you just wait and see.

A dull, flaccid speech by David Miliband was lauded as if it were some mighty oration by David Lloyd George or Abraham Lincoln. A dull, flaccid speech by Edward Miliband was sneered at as if he were barely coherent. This was much like the treatment, some years back, of David Cameron and David Davis by the same people. Everyone said the same thing. All opinions, in our supposedly varied and competitive Press, were the same. Ever wonder how this happens?

And so it will continue. David Miliband’s petulant walkout from politics is treated as a heroic Shakespearean tragedy. Everything Edward Miliband does from now on will be a blunder or a gaffe. Every tiny quarrel will be magnified into a split the size of the Grand Canyon. Unflattering photographs of him (not difficult to find) will be chosen in preference to kinder ones.

It’s a scandal. And this is only half of it. The other half is that this media clique, most of whose members make the average sheep look like a forceful individualist, are all agreed that the key qualification for being in office is that you must agree with them, Sixties liberals almost to a woman.

Yet they are utterly unaccountable. Parliament is transparent and the Labour Party electoral college a model of democracy by comparison. It is time somebody told these people that they have too much power and not enough responsibility.