Almost everybody, including Keir Starmer, can see that the Peter Mandelson affair provoked a genuine political crisis. The media were right to make it headline news. But it also shows the febrile atmosphere in which politicians and the media conspire to turn every incident into an issue of confidence in leadership, and we are becoming a country where it is impossible to focus on the long term. Hyped-up hot takes are far more loved in Westminster than bringing the nation the sustained change that it needs.
There is nothing new in the obsession with political process. I was guilty of it myself when I was editor of the Today programme during John Major’s attempt to ratify the Maastricht treaty in the 1990s. We gleefully put on air rebels and loyalists as the government battled for survival, and our listeners had a far better briefing on the meltdown within the Conservative party than they did on what was in the treaty. This was part of a pattern in which, for decades, EU affairs were seen through a British party prism rather than explaining what was going on in Europe.
But it has got worse. Our attention spans have become shorter, and the arrival of social media has intensified the fury in the national debate. For politicians and journalists alike, a viral post – the punchier the better – represents a good day in the office. You no longer need to wait to be invited on to Radio 4’s World at One to make your case against your leader, because a few words on X during a boring train journey can change the news agenda in an instant. It would be stretching it to say that this is responsible for the rapid turnover of ministers and prime ministers – the global financial crisis and Brexit have had rather more of an effect – but the media environment hasn’t helped at all.
A former senior editor puts it like this: “Most of the media today can’t bear to look at what’s actually wrong with Britain because that’s policy and needs work that they can’t be bothered to do. In any case, why worry when the next sugar-rush of personality or quasi-inquest politics will be along in a minute?”
And yet this downward spiral – this doom loop of politics and the media – is not inevitable. If there is a rationale for public service media, and also for organisations attempting good journalism, it is that they should be able to stand aside from the noise and hysteria and focus on what really matters. Too often they don’t. One of the classic vignettes was Rishi Sunak being asked by the BBC’s political editor in a news conference after a 2023 G7 summit in Japan, not about the world economy or climate change, but about a speeding offence by Suella Braverman. Sunak’s response – “Did you have any questions about the summit?” – was portrayed as evidence of his tetchiness.
In the current government, everything is seen through a prism of Starmer’s survival, and initiatives by ministers – home secretary Shabana Mahmood’s crackdown on immigration, for example – invariably see the focus being placed on their own supposed leadership ambitions.
There is not an overall bias in favour of one or other party, but there is unquestionably a bias in favour of increasing dissent and generating stories for 24-hour news outlets. Kemi Badenoch has been repeatedly asked why she’s not doing better in the polls, when the evidence of the past is that it takes many years to recover from a landslide defeat. Every Sunday on the political shows, there is a drumbeat about Labour’s bad polling, when we are still more than three years away from a general election. It is becoming standard, rather than the exception, to assume that a leader might have to quit midterm if things don’t improve as quickly as journalists think they should.
Memories are short, too. The Today programme went full-on emotional last week in challenging a government minister about why Starmer, as a father, had approved the appointment of Mandelson as ambassador to the US given his friendship with a child sex offender. But at the time of the hiring, vanishingly few of the fathers in journalism seem to have raised this point, despite everything they already knew about Mandelson.
This is not arguing for politicians to be given a soft ride. I’m in favour of giving them a harder time, which would happen if they and journalists were given space to think. The process stories of the Westminster bubble generate energy-sapping interviews, in which politicians parrot the lines they have given by their party. I would much rather hear the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, on her planned reforms to special educational needs and disabilities (Send), or the foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, on dealing with the US. All the more so because the last election campaign barely touched on the more intractable issues and was consumed instead by frothing about Sunak’s attendance record at D-day and the alleged betting scandal in Downing Street.
Labour won the election on a policy-light platform that was designed to be resistant to attacks by the media; and, predictably, it turned out that they didn’t have enough thought-through policies and nor could they claim a mandate for them. Welfare reform is the prime example.
We cannot change the nature of politicians who like to play the political game, and nor can we put the malign social media genie back in its bottle. But we can, still, do better than this. “Sensationalist” is a word used by a broadcasting colleague to describe recent coverage. Wouldn’t it be refreshing if next time we were praising clever and calm analysis instead?
