A general election on easy mode

With a Labour triumph now assumed, hacks are looking to how they'll get on the right side of the new government.

This is the 900th edition of this newsletter. Thanks for sticking with it and with me.

Previously: The Rosetta Stone of British Conspiracies

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I have to stop you there — this is ridiculous. This is ridiculous! You said in an interview earlier this year that you were bloody loyal to the North East. What happened to that? 

Sky News presenter Jon Craig boiling over as Conservative Party chairman Richard Holden repeatedly refused to answer questions about his chicken run to a potentially safe seat in Essex, preferring to repeat a prepared line about Emily Thornberry’s comments on education, made for good television. But Craig’s miniature Network moment only happened because the media has decided that the Tories are toast.

Don’t just take my word for it. Look at what Emily Maitlis and Lewis Goodall had to say about the incident on an episode of The News Agents podcast earlier this week:

Maitlis: … this has always happened but the fact that broadcasters are letting you see those workings behind the camera and amplifying those on Twitter tells you that they are no longer scared of the power that Conservative Central Office holds over them. It is not like the days where a lot of broadcasters were sort of running around trying to please Boris Johnson, trying to please David Cameron, sort of cheerleading along that government. Now they’ve kind of decided that Rishi Sunak and dare I say Richard Holden probably won’t matter politically that much in a month’s time. And therefore they can pretty much do what they want. 

Lewis Goodall: Yeah, I think that’s spot on. You can see the power evaporating. If it was a Labour equivalent now, it might not be quite so aggressive. 

That’s the kind of frank analysis of broadcasters’ approach to senior politicians which would have been dismissed as conspiratorial at the time that Boris Johnson’s piggy administration was being so thoroughly greased for electoral success. What Maitlis is admitting during this liminal period between one parliament and the next is that for a large section of the political media access trumps everything.

The increased willingness to treat Tory politicians like pinatas was also apparent in Nick Robinson’s Panorama interview with Rishi Sunak in which he accused him of “having a bit of a nerve” to accuse Labour of planning to put up taxes.

Not only is Labour running an election campaign that takes the old ‘man carrying a Ming vase over a polished floor’ analogy to another level — Keir Starmer is looking at the vase from a safe distance — but it is avoiding anything resembling real scrutiny of its plans and ambitions for government. Before a single vote has been cast, the story of the election has been written. For many people that’s probably fine; they want to see a Labour win and the removal of the terrible Tories but we’re being set up for the same situation all over again with different colour rosettes on the winners’ lapels.

If the oft-repeated maxim about “speaking truth to power” that is so beloved by many journalists truly applied, political reporters and interviewers would be just as willing to challenge someone headed for electoral success as total disaster. But the need to be sure that future ministers will appear on your show, be interviewed by your paper, or act as reliable sources for the avalanche of anonymous briefings to come means that truth is rarely evenly distributed.

Grant Shapps using radio interviews to warn against a Labour “super-majority” and Jeremy Hunt publicly discussing how likely it is that he’ll lose his seat are the political equivalent of scrawling a ‘kick me’ sign and attaching it to your own back. As the Tory Party campaign shifts into a multi-week end-of-the-pier concession spectacular, the temptation to rain blows on them while letting Labour spokespeople duck and weave is obvious. Political journalists are lazy predators, they go for prey that’s already weak.

You should bookmark Maitlis’ words for when it becomes clear that the new Starmer government is being given an easy ride in its first months in office, as the New Labour tribute act throws its weight around. The scandals of the early years of Tony Blair’s government — notably the Bernie Ecclestone affair and the Hinduja passport farrago — had their seeds in the period before the 1997 election when many journalists went from scepticism to cheerleading. The rush of big donors to Labour in the last few years practically guarantees a repeat of that situation.

That Labour is going to win the election is the very reason why it shouldn’t be allowed to play it on easy mode. In the early days of Boris Johnson’s time in Number 10, the Institute for Government argued, with a terrifying level of understatement, that he would “make more mistakes and ultimately deliver less effective policies” in the absence of proper scrutiny. The same goes for Keir Starmer.

It should be a far more uncomfortable thing for a figure like Maitlis to admit that journalists so cravenly follow the flow of power. Her analysis reiterates a theme that I’ve explored so many times before in this newsletter: The media is too often a player pretending to be a referee. The colour of the shirts on the winning team may change but the game remains depressing the same.

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