Grexit, Brexit, Fixit, Wrexit? Think six months of constant turmoil behind closed doors from Athens to Brussels. Think of last-minute “bundles” and desperate diversions. Then think of it as a mere Greek meze before the great barbecue of British renegotiation really begins. How are journalists going to make sense of it all: Britain in Europe, the most intractable, counter-intuitive story of our time?
“Due impartiality”, as Trust-inflicted on the BBC, won’t help make anything clear, of course. Try applying its hallowed editorial guidelines to this debate: “Across our output as a whole, we must be inclusive, reflecting a breadth and diversity of opinion. We must be fair and open-minded when examining the evidence and weighing material facts. We must give due weight to the many and diverse areas of an argument. And breadth and diversity of opinion may require not just a political and cultural range, but, on occasion, reflect the variations between urban and rural, older and younger, poorer and wealthier, the innovative and the status quo.” Motherhood, apple pie – and rather sticky custard.
But one crucial lack is the presiding role of the old-style diplomatic correspondents, drawing red lines, explaining the choices we must make. It used to be a mighty newsroom job, but the passing years have not been kind. If you define the diplomatic correspondent’s job in traditional terms – trooping along to morning briefings at the Foreign Office news department – there are very few leaders left in this band. London may be a cultural world centre in many ways: politically it’s an international also-ran.
Almost 20 years ago, John Dickie of the Mail, the last of Fleet Street’s great mass-market diplomatic correspondents, noted wanly that: “As the news value of the foreign secretary, ‘in action abroad’, dropped down the ratings of events that mattered, television crews stopped sending camera crews on trips … and the number of newspaper correspondents dwindled from double figures down to just one or two.”
And television, of course, is part of the problem. Like the video engine of YouTube, TV needs pictures. But diplomacy, especially EU diplomacy, is visually moribund. Men in suits round tables, sometimes discussing, sometimes eating. Even the words they mouth don’t add up to much. Go to a European summit behind the scenes. Every would-be statesman with something to say has a tame spin doctor on hand, selling a particular story from a particular sweet stall. There are tales of triumph or disaster, all reflecting well on the country peddling them. Cameron digs heels in/boxes clever/wins the day. But they are as insubstantial (or at least unverifiable) as a trip to the stall next door, where the wares seem suspiciously different.
The only way to tell a real story from more puffery-as-usual is to try to match understanding with early aspirations once the whole circus has left town. The story is buried in the textual analysis that a highly experienced diplomatic correspondent might be able to supply. (See Mark Urban make a good stab of it on Newsnight.) But such expertise is perilously thin on the ground. It is mostly, these EU days, provided by political correspondents based at Westminster, who rely on Downing Street for their daily bread.
The renegotiation we’re asked to follow – then vote on – currently consists of no stated objectives trawled through dozens of bilateral meetings around the continent, all yielding unsubstantiated briefings on or off the record that could be (a) true or (b) the precise reverse of truth, as the great game called diplomacy lugubriously unwinds. But nothing you read in today’s headlines – or, worse, see shoehorned into a 200-word TV bulletin – is as yet an actual story, a tangible development. Athens has been going through the Grexit mill of Syriza mystification, and still any denouement fades into the mists of July. Economics correspondents do the economics; political correspondents do the politics; Brussels correspondents do the EU end; old warriors such as Nigel Lawson say what they thought in the first place in the name of “due impartiality”.
And here’s the problem for editors to ponder over the next two years of to-and-fro. When is a story not a story? When it is based on meetings behind closed doors and briefings with no names attached? When there are many more meetings scheduled anyway? When nothing really starts until the talking stops? When the phoney excitement of the week erupts over whether Rupert Murdoch will or won’t endorse a deal neither he nor we have seen? When no one remembers the difference between empty space and diplomacy.
