'Hello, Mike, um, yes I don't really like paragraph two' ... Forget artists and critics, should journalists and politicians ever be friends? Photograph: Dan Chung
I hesitate to intrude into this debate. But hey, I started my Guardian career working on the arts page, a long time ago, when Shakespeare was a boy. More to the point, the dilemmas which Guardian critics have been describing here about their relationships with artists of every kind are intensely familiar to those of us engaged in politics on both sides of the critical divide.
Reading Jonathan Jones's austere policy, for example, reminded me of the late Norman Shrapnel, the Guardian's much-loved parliamentary sketchwriter of my youth. His rule was never to meet MPs because it might cloud his judgment. But Ian Aitken and his political team (it included Edward Greenfield at one stage) all knew that it was also because Norman was shy.
In the days when I was the Guardian's sketchwriter (1977-84), I did drink and sometimes eat with MPs and peers, not least because I was also a lobby correspondent writing news stories. I found that if your criticism was justified most politicians would say "fair cop". Yet I do recall Eric Heffer, who grumbled amiably if you teased him in print, hounding me for being unfair to one leftwing colleague. Eric was right, though it was not until the colleague lost his seat that I dropped him a note to confess that he'd been on my conscience.
I like politicians as a breed. What they do is difficult and as I get older, and the contemporary fashion for treating them all as fools or knaves intensifies (we will come to regret this), my sympathy grows too. The world is full of mouthy backseat drivers, lawyers, academics, media pundits, millionaire tycoons, even rock stars and playwrights, who couldn't get elected to a parish council, let alone manage the lighting on the village green.
Yet they feel free to pontificate on matters where their ignorance is painfully evident. OK, in a democracy everyone is a stakeholder and entitled to their view, but not all views deserve equal respect: you have to put in the work. At this point my instinctive alignment is, I imagine, much like that of a critic who supports the writer/actor/director against the philistine ravings of the Daily Beast. Come to think of it, the Beast is often the enemy of the public good in both politics and the arts.
So what do I do in practice? Well, it is a sad fact, not confined to politics, that one can approve of someone you don't particularly like and vice versa. Thus I had a soft spot for the often-deplorable Alan Clark. Down the phone from Saltwood Castle on a Sunday afternoon he was a good source of posh gossip. He was fun.
But I never took his political career as seriously as he did and did not flatter him. I slightly regret that austerity because I would have enjoyed seeing my name in the index of Volume One of the Diaries (by far the best volume).
What I am trying to say here is that one should keep one's distance from politicians, even those you like or approve of. I realise we are not talking high art here -the day-to-day rough and tumble of politics is more low than high. But politics is important, very important even in a marketised economy where they must hold the ring against plutocratic forces which actively use the media to undermine faith in elected governments and their legitimacy. Taking the view that I do, it follows that reporters and columnists owe politicians and - more important - the voting public a duty of fairness, to treat their ideas, their performance, their achievements, fairly.
Not objectively, I think Jonathan Jones's ideal deploys the wrong word. We all bring subjective values to the task. I tell students to be fair, even to the BNP whose voters have grievances which should be fairly examined along with their grotesque remedies.
Fairness is a word I have long associated with the gallant Michael Billington. Kindness too. If it is a fault (sometimes it is), it is a good fault.
But it does not mean I do not keep my distance. There are politicians in all parties whom I like and regard as "friends". I think Adrian Searle's contribution was trying to make this point. I lunch with MPs I like, though more often with promising newcomers I don't yet know.
But few MPs have ever passed through my front door, nor I theirs. But there are no firm rules. Some of my colleagues dine in MPs' houses and vice versa, but feel able to attack them the next day. Others, dined or undined, become part of a faction, a known "Blairite" or - a rising share price this one - a "Brownite".
It does not automatically make them toadies, though the risk is always there. A powerful politician can be very seductive, as CP Scott, Liberal MP as well as editor/proprietor of the Manchester Guardian, learned in his dealings with the feline Lloyd George. What art critics call "puffs" - a good Grub Street word - we now call spin. I bet old LG was a brilliant spinner.
So when a Blair aide spent an entire Chinese meal trying to persuade me that the Millennium Dome at Greenwich was going to be a huge success I was delighted when he complained as we walked back to work that I was "unspinnable". Actually he wasn't quite right. I had privately decided not to knock this wholesome if over-optimistic project, though I rated its chances as slight.
And Blair himself? I knew him slightly before he succeeded John Smith in 1994, more approving of this ambitious moderniser than instinctively liking him. We lunched once at the Tate gallery, but he had to leave before the soup to answer an emergency: the bill for my soup and a roll was a triumph of austere expenses. "Lunch with future PM £6."
When he took over I recall Blair saying over the phone "we must get together more often, Mike". I replied: "Best to keep our distance, it only ends in tears." Was that right for the political editor of the Guardian? Not necessarily, but it was right for me. Once in government Blair and Alastair Campbell often savaged the Guardian, in public and private, for not being "loyal".
I wrote a piece around 1999 explaining that the paper saw itself as a candid friend, not a cheerleader. I predicted too that when their fair-weather friends eventually followed the opinion polls back into the Tory camp that some of us would still be trying to be candidly constructive. So it has proved. It hasn't prevented me (and others) being tarred "Blair clones" for defending some of his trickier positions in recent years. But that's politics for you.
No, I realise it doesn't sound much like a first night at the National Theatre or the private view at a West End gallery. It isn't. But our dilemmas strike me as recognisably similar.
