A full ban on lobby journalism cannot come soon enough
A masterful stroke by our Prime Minister
In normal times, I would find Sir Keir Starmer’s decision to open his own Substack channel faintly amusing. Ctrl-F the terms ‘ballast’, ‘robust’ and ‘delivery’, mock up a cheap satire article and call it a day.
In the context of my own Substack channel being throttled by the Online Safety Act, which his government has implemented (although is not solely responsible for), I should find it enraging, especially given that his posts are paving the way for further restrictions on digital freedoms. I should be gathering signatures from other prominent Substacks demanding that the platform remove his account at once, in the spirit of Jeremy Clarkson’s campaign to get Labour MPs barred from pubs.
But there is a third complicating factor here, and that is the fact that Starmer is opening a Substack, and a brand new TikTok, whilst at the same time restricting the frequency of Lobby briefings, a decision that his government have masterfully snuck in on the last day of Parliament before Christmas break.
For those unfamiliar, in simple terms ‘lobby briefings’ refer to meetings between the ‘Westminster lobby’, a small, accredited group of political journalists who receive off-the-record briefings from the prime minister’s official spokesperson. If you would like to see what they look like from the inside, I recommend watching Michael Cockerell’s documentary ‘News From Number 10’, which shows Alastair Campbell hosting these discussions.
Being able to attend these briefings depends on holding an official parliamentary ‘lobby pass’, which is granted at the discretion of the authorities and in practice allows the system to reward established outlets and marginalise disruptive ones by excluding them from the room. Since ‘news’ must be ‘new’, journalists which can get access to new information quickly receives financial rewards. There is far more complexity to this system in practice (as an example, not all pass-holding journalists attend these briefings) which we will not explore here for the sake of brevity.
The existence of this briefing system was initially kept secret. To even be invited to it required you to never report on its existence. Over the years there have been some mild reforms in allowing attribution (first to ‘Downing Street sources’, later the name of the spokesperson). A 2004 report, the Phillis Review, suggested breaking the entire system by simply live-streaming the briefings. This was more or less ignored by the Blair government. During the Johnson government, mostly under the direction of Dominic Cummings (who promised to smash the lobby and replace it ‘with truth and light’), lobby briefings were televised, which was hugely unpopular with most of the lobby, whose privileged access was being diluted. This effort has since been abandoned.
There are usually two lobby briefings on days in which Parliament is sitting. The changes which the government announced on Thursday, are that the second afternoon briefing will disappear, and that the main morning briefing will continue - but will occasionally replaced with televised press conferences. This, combined with Starmer’s efforts on Substack and TikTok, indicate to me that the government is attempting a new communications strategy in which they attempt to bypass the lobby. Despite Starmer directly attacking my livelihood, I feel that I must praise and defend this action.
There are millions of words which could be written about how this system of patronage inculcates rotten practices and groupthink. How it creates a superstructural ‘politics’ whereby individual Editors manoeuvre with favoured and disfavoured politicians to trade access for their own material gain, without any regard for the public interest. We could discuss how most ‘lobby journalists’ treat politics like Footy pundits and shape all of their analysis based on the ElectionMapsUK X feed (+1 for the Tories, Kemi has only bloody gone and done it).
How the supine acceptance of the government narrative that the blimmin French were jealous of our world-beating AstraZeneca Vaccine has permanently discredited their profession. How the matey alcoholic David Brentisms which constitute their collective vocabulary cheapen, cringeify and coarsen public life.
