The Empty Lobby?

I don’t usually do bloggers v old-style media stories. Whether on a blog or in a newspaper, if you have nothing better to write about than how awful newspapers or blogs are, then you shouldn’t really be writing at all, because you don’t have anything to say.

But the events of the last week have, I suppose, vindicated the professional bloggers on a key point. What do the lobby, in particular, actually do all day? They need do nothing more than check their emails enough times to have received their spoonfed stories from the politicians or publicly funded hangers-on whom they have known since university (often the very recent past). If not before, when one considers that the two universities in question admit from only a hundred schools.

They have gone straight from drinking together in student bars heavily subsidised by the rest of us, to drinking together in Palace of Westminster bars heavily subsidised by the rest of us. Politicians and Fleet Street or BBC types alike did not or do not need to work for several years after university. If they did, then they could never get in. The lowest level positions are only available to people who can live (and that in central London) on little or no pay.

This is all doubtless why, while even they have to admit that being caught ballot-rigging is at least a minor story, they regard it as entirely unremarkable that a political party (it could be any of them) is wafting into a safe seat the 22-year-old spawn of a duly ennobled pollster-to-order and a fashionable vanity publisher, that spawn herself straight out of the Oxford to which she was sent by one of the highest of Lenin High Schools. But for details about exact parental occupation, or exact super-exclusive school, or exact achingly cushy job, they really do just assume that everyone lives like that.