Do you know who Lee Cain is? If your answer is yes, you are unusual, an aberrant departure from the norm. If you know who he is and care a jot about him and his career, you’re a freak.
Wall-to-wall coverage of Cain’s departure from Downing Street reminds me why I’m so glad I stopped being a Lobby reporter, and demonstrates everything that’s wrong with our political-media culture. It’s part of the national sickness that means so many people ignore or disdain politics as something distant and irrelevant to their lives. And actually, as far as this story is concerned, they’re right, because goings-on in No. 10 really are irrelevant.
So why do journalists write so much about things like Cain’s departure, and spend so much time speculating about the future of Dominic Cummings or whoever? I know the nominal reasons for this: the functioning of the No. 10 machine matters for the effectiveness of government and the working relationship between the PM, his ministers and Parliament. Reporting on the tiny in-group in Downing Street, it is said, really is of public interest, because it affects public policy.
Today the cognoscenti justification for fixating on Cain is that the performance of the No. 10 comms operation is of vital public interest because it affects compliance with Covid restrictions.
But honestly, that’s cobblers, and I should know because I’ve been there, done that and spouted the same self-justifying horlicks to explain to others (and myself) why I was writing screeds about some people no-one had heard of instead of stuff that my readers might actually have cared about.
The reality is that journalists like writing about the people in No. 10 because they know those people, or at least like to give the impression that they do. Familiarity with senior political people is currency in the village, and being able to speak knowledgeably about top Spads in No. 10 marks you out as a person of importance and access. Being able to hold forth confidently about what ‘Dom’ says or does or thinks is far more important to a political journalist’s career than, for instance, knowing what real wages are in the north-west of England or understanding why Quantitative Easing creates intergenerational unfairness.
Having been a political reporter for the 15 years leading to the EU referendum vote, I often wonder how much our collective failure to notice or take seriously the things going on in the country beyond SW1A contributed to that vote. Wittingly or not, we helped sustain the idea of a political system disconnected from the electorate and in need of a good kicking.
To be clear, I’m not criticising my old colleagues in the Lobby here: that would be woeful hypocrisy, given that I played the same game for many years. Journalists, like any other people, respond to incentives and reward, and we’ve all collectively contrived a situation where ‘access’ and the ability to retail gossip about office politics are rewarded.
And most political hacks know the nature and limitations of the game anyway. The older ones have seen this story play out enough times. I started reporting at Westminster in 2001 when the office gossip was all about Blair and Brown, and their staff, especially Alastair Campbell (Did he tell the Observer that Brown had ‘psychological flaws’? Oh, how important that question was said to be.) Then came Damian McBride, Stephen Carter (remember him?), followed by Andy Coulson and Steve Hilton, then Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill.
Their antics and adventures were all, like the activities of Dom and Lee and the rest, breathlessly presented to the public as somehow significant or interesting. The public, of course, were having none of it. The implied justification for so much reporting about successive cliques of government aides is that it somehow makes a difference to the governed. It doesn’t.
Twitter, naturally, makes all this worse. It’s easy enough to find people online who do think this stuff matters. Dominic Cummings is, for some, an important and interesting figure whose actions, not least in driving to County Durham, actually mean something. They may even be able to use some charts (ooh, charts!) to suggest that the ‘Cummings moment’ was significant to Covid compliance rates. But remember, the vast majority of people aren’t on Twitter and don’t give a hoot about whatever it is gets lots of retweets today.
If this was all about journalism, it would be sad enough. But the trade I love, which is harming itself by fixating on trivia, is bad for everyone. Lobby culture creates grim feedback loops to governing itself, and means we get worse government.
People who have actually tried to change and implement government policy often tell the same sad story of how their efforts failed the ‘lobby test’, where a policy gets rejected or abandoned because it raises the risk of a minister getting monstered by political journalists for a few hours.
Or worse, where a policy gets conceived and announced simply because it’s the sort of thing that will get good write-ups and make it look like that minister is doing something. I’ve said this before, but far, far too much political journalism consists of reporting on politicians announcing that they will do something, with little or even no attention given to whether that thing actually happened and the consequences that had. That creates incentives for politicians to focus on announcing stuff instead of implementing stuff. Good copy is often bad government.
Spad-fixation harms the machinery of government too. Once upon a time, David Cameron announced a cap on the number of special advisers, apparently to signal to the British public that he would not govern as New Labour had, but in truth because stories about Spads are good copy. The effect of that announcement on public opinion was, of course, nil, but it helped establish one of the silly rules of the Westminster village, which says that the number and cost of special advisers is somehow important.
So we have a situation where Cabinet ministers can appoint one or two or three special advisers and no more. Those advisers end up with absurd workloads and responsibilities out of all proportion to their experience or salaries, typically burning out and moving to the private sector for bigger salaries after a few years. Ministers meanwhile get frustrated that they can’t impose their will on the Civil Service, and civil servants complain that they don’t get clear and consistent steer from overworked, underpowered Spads. And tension between the two is itself, good copy: ‘Dom’ and friends have done very well over the years by briefing journalists about the curiously persistent failings of the machinery of government and its failure to see the big picture of stuff that really matters. The multiple ironies contained in that history go almost entirely unnoticed.
More Spads with more experience and higher salaries would mean better government, but it can’t happen because of that political-media culture that makes ministerial advisers more prominent and interesting than they really are. Lee Cain and the rest of them aren’t public figures, they’re ciphers – their only importance comes from the people they serve and the jobs those people are supposed to be doing. Every drip of ink, every pixel devoted to them is describing noises, not signals.
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