“Whose side are you on?” It’s hard to think of a more literal expression of the question than Monday’s playground tactics inside Downing Street, when political reporters seeking access to an official briefing on Brexit were divided up and made to stand on opposite sides of the room. On one side were those allowed in; on the other the uninvited, including the Daily Mirror, which was kicked off the Tory battle bus during the election campaign.
My ex-lobby correspondent’s heart obviously leaps at the fact that the entire pack promptly walked out in solidarity with the unfavoured. Quite right too; in a democracy, governments don’t get to pick and choose who scrutinises them on behalf of the voters, and briefings by politically neutral civil servants shouldn’t be caught up in political power games.
But it’s not the only example of an alarming control freak tendency emerging in No 10. On the same day, Boris Johnson gave his first big Brexit speech of the year to a business audience from which the three best known business organisations in the country – the CBI, the British Chambers of Commerce and the Institute of Directors – were excluded. Their sin, reportedly, was to have “wasted their time lobbying government” against what they presumably see as the dangers of his Brexit strategy, instead of preparing their worried members to knuckle down and accept it.
The whole point of the CBI is to convey businesses’ concerns honestly to politicians, warning of any job losses or other economic risks they foresee, but apparently that’s no longer how Downing Street sees it. Unless these business groups start selling the prime minister’s deal for him, Downing Street sources reportedly warned, “it is unlikely any conversations they wish to have with the government will be productive”. It seems Johnson meant it when he reportedly responded to business concerns over Brexit with the words “fuck business”.
So like journalists, business leaders must now decide if they want to become part of a propaganda effort or mobilise their collective clout. And it’s the collective bit that matters.
The lobby is often (and sometimes fairly) attacked for groupthink, but its herd instincts can sometimes be a powerful strength rather than a weakness. It was on roughly my second day as a baby political reporter that someone senior from the Sun sat me down and explained the unwritten rules.
Elsewhere on Fleet Street, rival hacks will sell their grandmothers to beat each other to the story. But the lobby is different. Most of the time everyone still chases their own scoop, but when it really matters you hunt as a pack. If it’s the only way of getting at the truth then reporters will quietly pool information with rivals, collaborate on lines of inquiry, follow up another hack’s unanswered question at a briefing rather than pushing their own line. And they’ll stick up for reporters who are punished for being too critical, rather than seizing the competitive advantage, because otherwise governments can simply pick off dissenters one by one until there are no dissenters left.
It’s too crude to argue that Monday’s planned briefing was exclusively for trusted friends, given both the Guardian and the pro-European Financial Times were on the “approved” list. But it jangled nerves because this isn’t the first time the lobby has been seemingly divided into inner and outer circles, and because it’s part of a genuinely alarming picture of isolating critical voices.
This weekend’s briefings about how Dominic Cummings supposedly has spies in every Westminster restaurant, to snitch on special advisors caught hanging out with journalists, were ridiculous on one level – you might as well try and stop the rain falling as stop Westminster gossiping. But it’s clear that Cummings and Lee Cain, the former Sun journalist serving as press secretary to Johnson, are seeking to centralise the flow of government information through themselves, because in politics, information is power.
Control the flow, and you can not only turn the tap off for disobedient media outlets – something already happening to broadcasters, with Downing Street actively boycotting programmes deemed “hostile” or using Facebook Live rather than broadcast interviews to deliver announcements – you also make it harder for dissident ministers to get their version of events out when things go wrong.
What’s happening clearly has some parallels with Donald Trump, and his administration’s war on the White House press pack. But control freakery isn’t exactly unprecedented in British politics either, even if the Johnson administration is taking it to newly aggressive extremes – it’s what happens when a government with a whomping majority starts wondering just what it could do with it. Right now, Downing Street is pushing the boundaries, just to see what happens. It would be a grave mistake not to push back, hard.
• Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
