More power to the press

It has for many years been a commonplace of political analysis that journalists have grown in stature as we politicians have shrunk. But the full reality of our reduced condition was rammed home to me, yet again, on the morning after the general election.

On the invitation of the BBC I went on telly to comment on the prospects of an exciting new Lib-Con coalition. I was falteringly trying to give my opinion when my interviewer, Jeremy Paxman, broke in.

‘Haven’t you got a city to run?’ he said with his trademark testiness. ‘Then why don’t you go off and run it!’

I did manage to say something in return, but by then Zeus had turned his shining eyes away and the overall effect was, no doubt, like a fifth-former caught in the tuck shop and being ticked off by the most sneering and flowery-waistcoated of all the prefects in the school.

We have just been through the most protracted humiliation of politicians, at the hands of the media, that this country has ever seen. In the last 18 months many of my former parliamentary colleagues have been reduced to a kind of moral zombiedom, staggering around like Japanese generals after Nagasaki or like the poor blue-nosed people from Avatar, overwhelmed by the superior firepower of the press.

We have been stripped of our second homes. We have forfeited trust. We have lost our dignity. We have even had our porn videos confiscated. It has been a complete rout. The nation has responded with a most unusual event — a hung parliament — the psephological equivalent of a shrug of the shoulders, because the sympathy of the public has been overwhelmingly with the media, and the electorate has strongly supported the brilliant truffle-hounds of the newspapers as they have dug out the malodorous truth and laid it before them.