For around three days in mid-January, Rachel Reeves was on the verge of losing her job—according to the UK’s news media. The Daily Mail splashed that she was a “lame duck” two days in a row. The Telegraph and Times ran pieces on who might replace her. Keir Starmer not answering a question as to whether she would be in place until the next election caused a day-long frenzy of speculation.
It was all complete nonsense. Reeves had not tanked the economy. Global concerns about inflation led to rising bond yields after Christmas. In such circumstances, governments have to pay more to borrow. Then, after better-than-expected inflation data in the UK and US, they fell back again. Reeves did nothing to cause the rise or fall. There was never the slightest chance of her losing her job, given all she had done was to implement agreed government policy. The UK’s fiscal position is very fragile, but it was last year, and the year before that, too.
This was an example of the lobby —the group of political journalists who attend daily briefings with the prime minister’s spokesperson—engaging in a collective hallucination, rather like when ChatGPT gets things wrong. With nothing they considered adequately interesting to write about, they conjured up something out of nothing.
As I discussed in my recent book Failed State: Why Nothing Works and How We Fix It, the ways in which news reporting has changed over the past few decades is deeply unhelpful to good governance. As physical newspaper sales and advertising income have declined, publishers have had to make savings, slashing the number of specialist journalists. This means that the lobby, made up of generalists, has to cover everything.
Given that they need to write multiple stories a day, while also appearing on podcasts and 24-hour news channels, lobby journalists cannot plausibly understand policy detail or how financial markets work. It’s also not what they’re good at. Their skillset is to nose around and cause trouble. If you want a scandal covered or to get insider tidbits on a juicy internal row, then the UK lobby is the envy of the world. If you want a sober analysis of welfare policy, it is not.
Which means everything that happens now gets turned into a political row, because that’s what the journalists whose job it is to cover politicians do. The BBC has joined in too, both because it has had to make its own cuts and because it’s easier to “both sides” a row than judge the quality of a policy.
The last government dealt with this by spewing out ridiculous announcements designed to keep the lobby quiet, rather than actually making anything happen. In any given week, there might have been something about a new unpleasantness to be visited on asylum seekers, another welfare crackdown, a largely imaginary knife crime initiative, and so on. Often the same announcement was made multiple times, in the knowledge that no one would notice due to their ephemerality.
Labour, on the other hand, is new enough to still be trying to actually govern, albeit with mixed success. As such, while we’ve had a few Daily Mail-friendly faux announcements on welfare and -asylum, the comms grid is mostly filled with worthy attempts to do something useful. Likewise, the party has remained disciplined so far, meaning there are few real rows to report on.
For a lobby that’s had years of being hand-fed easy headlines, while also enjoying the chaos of the Brexit years, the charismatic -dysfunction of the Johnson/Cummings administration and the comedy of Liz Truss, this is a pretty painful state of affairs. Thus the ChatGPT-esque hallucinations.
The government really only has two choices in how it reacts. It could do what the Tories did and try to feed the lobby journalists what they want. But not only does this lead to being stuck with a load of absurd and undeliverable policies—like the scheme to send immigrants to Rwanda—it’s not even good politics. As the Tories discovered, the public will notice that nothing is getting better in the real world, even if the tabloids say otherwise.
The only alternative is to get on with the policies the government believes are required, communicate them as best as possible, and ignore the lobby going feral. This is a better fit with Starmer’s and Reeves’s characters, but it does mean operating with an even more intensely negative media backdrop than Labour governments usually have.
If there’s a positive for Labour, it’s that the lobby is losing its audience. Media consumers are fragmented across different social media platforms, and increasingly large numbers of people are ceasing to engage with the news altogether. This causes plenty of its own problems, in terms of tracking disinformation and allowing bad actors to manipulate unknowing audiences. But it may, at least, make it easier to break free from a model of political communications that has been enormously destructive to Whitehall’s ability to function.
The risk, though, is that as the government’s popularity wanes and backbenchers become more fractious, the temptation to get a few good press cycles overrides the desire to try to do things properly for once.
Sam Freedman is a senior fellow at the Institute for Government and senior adviser to the Ark schools network. (L/A)
