Here, amid all the flames and furies, is a logistical point that any journalist will understand. If you’re anxious, going on paranoid, about leaks, then the fewer people you confide in, the better. So Theresa May and Jean-Claude Juncker talking among themselves, door locked, can have a proper conversation if they so desire. Stage that same chat around a bulging Downing Street dinner table, however, and vividly differing accounts soon surface.
Thus, within a few incendiary days, we have May patrolling her bailiwick yet again, crying electoral mischief from afar. “Hands Off Our Election” echoes a dutiful Daily Mail. “Nuclear Juncker!” snarls the Sun. A couple of detailed leaks to Germany’s most solid journal of record, plus a bit of Polish bidding-up on the exit fee front, seem to have started a sour war of words and bleak suspicion.
Which potentially, of course, is only the beginning. Johnny Foreigner hasn’t said anything very inflammatory on the record yet. Indeed, Martin Selmayr, Juncker’s top aide and the man most suspected of toxic dinner-table leaks, is instantly chatting to the indispensable reporters of Politico, declaring that in fact they had all shared a “very constructive dialogue” – and that Theresa is “a tough negotiator … we need someone who united the nation behind herself”. Some saboteur, some plot!
Remember, though, no one has started negotiating anything yet. And at the heart of the next couple of years – if you decide not to foam at the mouth – stand inescapable mechanisms for thrashing out a settlement. There’s a systemic problem to take on board.
Britain has George Osborne and Paul Dacre to negotiate with every time newspapers thud on No 10’s mat. Theresa May needs to keep both Jacob Rees-Mogg and Anna Soubry tolerably happy (or at least quiet). But Michel Barnier, as ostensibly Europe’s lead negotiator, is in a much stickier situation.
Quite apart from keeping Jean-Claude and other commission dignitaries informed, blow by blow and session by session, he’ll be required to update 27 different governments in 27 different nations as well (never forgetting the serried ranks of the European parliament). And there is no way – absolutely no way – that such multiple briefings can be kept secret.
Whether a strong, stable and silent May likes it or not, whether it’s part of her plan or not, there will be leaks and spun versions in abundance day after day: with infinite scope for much tit-for-tattery. See how, within hours of the first dinner-table leaks, the Daily Telegraph magically got its hands on a supposedly sensational document showing the EU dragging its feet on reciprocal migrants’ rights. This is a game any number can play.
What’s to be done? Some close observers make a case that, only three months ago, would have seemed ridiculous. If you can’t negotiate in private, then do it out in the open, session by reported session. Let everything hang out. At least that way there’ll be less scope for briefing wars, thanks to one of modern journalism’s oddest, most potent phenomenons: boredom on the record.
Want to strip away the blanket of secrecy from children’s courts? Then win that recent gallant battle, but don’t expect to see many reporters sitting there taking notes. Indeed, the adult courts themselves have faded from view – as the chairman of the Bar Council observed last week. “The large majority of cases, although conducted in public hearings up and down the land, and although producing outcomes that often dramatically affect the lives of the citizens concerned, operate essentially unseen and unheard by the public.”
That’s the non-story of council meetings too – just as, to be brutally frank, the old tribes of reporters who used to sit in Westminster’s gallery, recording what was said and done, have vanished.
Here’s one way to defuse that nuclear Juncker. Week after week of close detail. Joint progress reports from Brussels once a month. No secrets, no news? No “exclusives”, no interest. No hush-hush dinners in Downing Street or synthetic indignation: no indigestion.
