08 Informed Spotlight


A simple choice that reset news


through which almost every political story is viewed. I went several months without writing a single story that did not have a Brexit implication or angle of one kind or another.” Yet, for all the journalistic resources


thrown at Brexit, there are complaints that the news industry has leſt the public under-served and ill-informed. Disquiet over the new government’s


off-record briefing strategy surfaced in October, when a 700-word texted screed, believed to be from Boris Johnson’s media chief Dominic Cummings, was published by Te Spectator’s political editor James Forsyth with atribution to “a contact in Number 10”. Te protocol of anonymous briefing was being misused to make public threats that could easily be disowned, said some.


In a scathing critique published soon aſterwards by Open Democracy, veteran political journalist Peter Oborne denounced a swathe of his peers as “stenographers” for swallowing “dodgy stories and commentary” from Number Ten. “


Brexit has changed political journalism beyond recognition. Ian Burrell gauges feelings on the front line


Whichever way it plays out now, Brexit has changed the practice of political journalism. Te story has taken over the


lives of Westminster and Brussels correspondents for three and a half years, generating division and personal atacks. Lobby conventions are called into question, and tensions are growing, now that a journalist is prime minister. Te relentless demands of covering this


story are almost unprecedented. “People have had to shiſt honeymoons, move wedding dates, and change their family holidays,” says Paul Waugh, political editor of HuffPost UK. Joe Barnes, new Brussels correspondent


for the Express, talks of “13-14 hour days”, while Amber de Boton, Westminster news editor for ITV News, says her husband “jokes that he is a Brexit widower”. Nigel Morris, political editor of the i paper, says: “Brexit is the prism


With the prime minister’s evident encouragement these Downing Street sources have been spreading lies, misrepresentations, smears and falsehoods around Fleet Street and across the major TV channels. “Political editors lap it all up,” Oborne claimed. A storm erupted. “A wall of hostility from most of the lobby greeted the article – but also supportive messages from journalists outside the charmed Cummings inner circle,” Oborne says. “One told me that the situation was ‘even worse than you say’.” Among Oborne’s targets was ITV


News political editor Robert Peston. He retorted that to have not published a complained-of comment by an unnamed Downing Street official “would have been to treat British people with contempt” by assuming their lack of intelligence. Yet Peston conceded that “conventions that govern political reporting in the UK… may arguably be unfit for purpose”. In September, he also argued in a BBC radio documentary that the front pages of


Mat Kenyon


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