Blair is now fighting the Tories on their own turf. Can they fight back?

The new season kicked off with an unwelcome pill for political reporters. As Parliament reassembled after its three months’ recess, lobby correspondents hiked across St James’s Park to the Foreign Press Association at 11 Carlton House Terrace. This fine Nash establishment, hard by the Turf Club, has been the disconcertingly grand London base for a collection of mainly down-at-heel foreign journalists. Now it has been rudely commandeered – in the face of ineffectual Foreign Office objections – as the headquarters for the daily Downing Street briefing operation.

The location emerged only recently. But the general arrangement, with television cameras present and non-lobby reporters admitted, was announced last summer. Cabinet ministers asserted that this new method of dealing with the press was a move towards frankness and transparency. The line was swallowed wholesale by the new school of unctuous, pro-government columnists with no hard-reporting experience, of which Mr David Aaronovitch of the Independent is merely an example.

In practice the new system has nothing to do with openness, and was never intended as such. It is about hiding the truth and controlling the press. Back in the late 1980s Neil Kinnock’s precocious adviser Peter Mandelson set out, with pleasing though uncharacteristic honesty, the long-term objective: ‘Of course we want to use the media, but the media will be our tools, our servants: we are no longer content to let them be our persecutors.’ This elegantly phrased prophecy is not far from coming true. Downing Street has now secured a more docile press corps than anything Thatcher dreamt of.

Over the summer Tony Blair talked of securing a ‘new settlement’ with the press. The new lobby system is a key ingredient. The Carlton House briefings are explicitly designed to prevent sustained questioning. The rigorous examination which brought to light Downing Street mendacity over Mittal, or panicked Alastair Campbell and Tony Blair over the Mandelson/Hinduja business, is now becoming impossible.