Aside from Boris’s exhortations to George Osborne, one of the most ear-catching lines of
the day has been uttered by Jeremy Hunt. “I think the relationships between politicians and the media got too cosy,” said the culture secretary on Radio 5 this morning. He’s certainly not
the first to make the point, but he is one of the most prominent Conservatives to do so. The words, I suspect, were chosen to cool the heat rising from yesterday’s lists of meetings between ministers and media organisations. Hunt himself, it was revealed, has met seven times with News Corp types
since the general election.
Hunt’s admission also opens the prospect of a fevered struggle between the Tories and the Lib Dems to appear less cosy with the media establishment. It was, after all, Nick Clegg who staked this territory first, a couple of weeks ago, with his own claim that, “Different bits of the British system — the politicians, the press, the police — became too close to each other, too cosy.” Back then, it seemed that the Deputy Prime Minister would use this issue to rekindle the “new politics” that served him so well during the general election campaign, and to perhaps further distinguish between the yellow and blue halves of the coalition. But now that the Tories are nosing in on it too, the divides may become a little murkier.
The Lib Dems argue that they were never wrapped too tight with the media in the first place: so long as they were far from power, the pressmen never took much notice of them anyway. The Tories, meanwhile, can’t really use that argument. The lists that were released yesterday were intended to be the first phase in a concerted decontamination act; first transparency, then action. It will be interesting to see whether anything substantive follows, or whether the erstwhile cosiness between politicians and the media is just kept to phone calls and shadowy corridors from now on.
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