Press
Guilt by association
Bill Grundy
.1twas, I remember, a child who spotted that the emperor had no clothes. It takes a child's eye to see that there is nothing to see. But what sort of eye does it take to not see what is actually there? A blind eye, I suppose. Which suggests that all the hundred and odd members of the Lobby should be supplied with white walking sticks immediately. For the one thing they do not admit is that there is such a thing as the Lobby at all.
They are a rum lot, as the correspondence alongside indicates You'd have thought, wouldn't you, that before writing their first incredibly pompous letter, they'd have rung up The Spectator and asked whether or not Patrick Cosgrave had written 'Tom Puzzle'. The Editor might not have told them, I admit, He might even have told them what they could do and where they should go while they were doing it. But they might have tried ringing up to check the facts. Even the newest reporter on the Southport Visiter would have done that, had he wanted to call himself a journalist. But not the Lobby lads.
They really are the most boring set of fellows it is possible to imagine. Their Code of Conduct, first revealed by Jeremy Tunstall in his book, The Westminster Lobby Correspondents, reads rather like the rules of a distinctly minor prep school. For instance: "Do not run after a Minister or Private Member. It is nearly always possible to place oneself in a position to avoid this." Honestly, I'm not kidding. And what about this one: "Do not crowd together in the Lobby so as to be conspicuous." And wash your hands after using the lavatory, and remember to polish the backs of your boots. And remember that you should not "talk about Lobby meetings before or after they are held, especially in the presence of those not entitled to attend them." Oh dear me, no, or else they might come to believe that there is such a thing as the Lobby, and that would never do at all, since the first rule is to deny any knowledge of it or even that it exists.
Who are the Lobby men, and what do they do? Well, first of all, they are, in the splendid phrase of Anthony Howard, "the messenger boys of British democracy. "Twice a day they have Lobby briefings at which they are told immensely important things like how much HP Sauce the Prime Minister had with his bacon and eggs. If the government wishes to fly a kite, it does it through the Lobby. These men of mature political judgement are as manipulable as any gull. Let a Minister drop a hint that such-and-such might be the case and they report the rumour, without revealing its source, of course, they analyse it, they dissect it, they flesh it out with words, and they inflict it on us, usually in prose so grey that it makes a sea mist look like sunlight.
There is, in theory, some virtue in having a group of men who are privy to the policy-makers. But the net result, as Anthony Lewis once pointed out, is to make them into a group of captives, and what sort of a journalist is a captive one? David Butler once listed the weaknesses in Lobby reporting of the political scene. They included the fact that "scoops are surprisingly rare", which doesn't surprise me at all, since it is obviously difficult to scoop anybody if you're always wandering around together, just one of a flock of sheep. Butler also complained that "political portraiture is oddly unenterprising". Nothing odd about that. Portraiture requires an individual eye, and you can't have that if you are required to see things in accordance with a Code of Conduct.
Now all this is pretty bitchy and suggests that I think no Lobby correspondent is any good. Not so. I have a great admiration for some of them. But only for some. Most of them are the sort of people I wouldn't be seen dead drunk with. Not that there's much hope of that, as their behaviour is as subfuse as their style. And there is the added disadvantage that they are so totally out of touch. I remember talking to a Minister once at a Party Conference when a veteran Lobby man interrupted us and remarked, in an over-tired and over-emotional manner, even though it was only noon, that he thought I didn't know which day it was. The Minister watched him go and then said, "How anybody who spends his whole life in the lobbies of Westminster can imagine that he knows what the real world is like is beyond me."
This band of brothers, this close conspiracy, these brethren of the Serjeant-at-Arms, are beginning to bore me, with their silly rules and their self-importance. I don't suppose Patrick Cosgrave, who is a real political journalist, will be at all inhibited by the loss of his Lobby ticket. After all, The Spectator got along for 150 years or more without one, so I suppose we'll get along for the next 150 years, too. And, most important of all, Mr Cosgrave, who has committeed no offence, broken no Lobby rule, has found out that having his Lobby ticket taken away doesn't stop him from using Annie's Bar, which, as everybody knows, is where the real stories come from anyway.
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