Phone hacking: British politics has been corrupted by a cosy camaraderie

For the briefest moment during David Cameron’s press conference on Friday, I thought he was going to say it: to state outright what was really wrong with the relationship between politicians and the press. He actually referred in his opening remarks to there being not just a problem with the ethics of newspapers, or their regulation, but with the way “politics works” in this country. Wow, I thought, this might be the bravest and most perceptive admission that any political leader has made in living memory.

But, of course, he didn’t go anything like that far. He did admit, in terms that were more blunt than we might have expected, to what he called a “deeper truth” that went beyond the present farrago: that party leaders were sometimes so eager to get the support of newspapers that they got too close to the people in them. Meaning: we all (not just I, David Cameron) sucked up outrageously to the Murdoch empire and I for one am now prepared to say that this may not have been such a great idea. Not just because it has blown up in my face, but because there is something fundamentally unhealthy about such apparent collusion between government and what is supposed to be an independent press.

What he did not do was to extrapolate from that rather minimal insight to what he would probably call the “wider question”. And so he missed an opportunity to bring a glimmering of real understanding to the folks at home, for whom the relationship between politicians and journalists is enveloped in an impenetrable miasma.

The truth is that for all its adversarial and investigatory strengths – which are considerable – British political journalism is basically a club to which politicians and journalists both belong. There is a degree of cosy camaraderie between the press and the governing class in this country which my American journalist friends find startling. As one of my counterparts from Washington said to me on a visit to London (in tones that were both shocked and mildly envious), “Everybody here knows everybody else.” And they really do know them. It is considered part of my job to take politicians to lunch regularly, and to cultivate them in a way that encourages confidences – just as fraternisation with the media is regarded as an essential aspect of any ambitious politician’s game plan.

Surprisingly perhaps, considering how generally open and friendly American society is, relations between journalists and politicians in Washington are far more formal and officially distant than they are in Westminster. There is certainly a well-developed school of spin there, which Bill Clinton’s administration perfected (and then exported to Blairite New Labour), and the Obama people clearly have close and mutually adoring relations with the New York Times. But the blurring of distinctions between commentator and player, or between political correspondent and party adviser, which is a regular feature of Westminster life would be seen in the US as a breach of probity on both sides.

Like so many spheres of life in this country – the art world, certain areas of academia and the higher reaches of the legal profession are examples that spring to mind – it is almost impossible to survive in political journalism as an outsider. Which is not to say (as is sometimes thought) that you actually have to have been to school or university with the people you are trying to engage – although that can help – but that you must adopt the manners which prevail in any club: the coded vocabulary, the discreet understandings, the accepted attitudes.

Which brings me back to what I thought, for a wild, hallucinatory moment, Mr Cameron might have been about to utter. It is this familiarity, this intimacy, this set of shared assumptions (about, for example, what is politically possible) between almost everyone who participates actively in the business of Westminster which is the real corruptor of political life.

The self-limiting spectrum of what can and cannot be said, the often patronising preconceptions about what the ordinary public will or will not understand, and the self-reinforcing cowardice which takes for granted that certain vested interests are too powerful to be worth confronting. All of these things are constant dangers in the political life of any democracy. But when politics is run as a club, it is so much easier for them to escape challenge or genuine scrutiny of the kind that comes with critical distance: from the outsider’s eye and the voice that can speak without fear of being excluded. The fact that government has been too slow and too soft on the press phone hacking scandal of the moment has to be seen from within this context.

In the recent past, this threat of exclusion became literal and brutal: Alastair Campbell, who has been running from one broadcasting studio to another over the past week to gloat preposterously over the unedifying link between Mr Cameron and News International, used to swear at Westminster correspondents in public and threaten to get them sacked if they strayed from the accepted New Labour line. Members of the media who were not happy to board the ship were press-ganged or thrown overboard. Not so much a club as a quasi-religious cult in which you were held captive.

But that is not, on the face of it, Mr Cameron’s style – although he may have hired Andy Coulson precisely because he wanted someone who would ride shotgun for him as Campbell had for Blair. What Mr Cameron is used to are the attitudes that prevail in actual clubs – in which loyalty and the bonds of fellowship are paramount virtues. (Hence his refusal to denounce his friend Andy Coulson.) But how appropriate is fealty to the business of holding politicians to account – which is the true responsibility of the press?

There are journalists who see it as their proper function to ring up politicians and take dictation, then relay with almost total fidelity what those party spokesmen have said. And similarly, there are party activists who are enraged when a newspaper they consider “ours” is critical of their leader. That is what is seriously amiss with what Mr Cameron calls “the way politics works in this country”. In many ways it is more dangerous than statutory repression of the press, which is overt, clear-cut and susceptible to change. What should worry us are not new, restrictive laws – which can be fought out in the open – but the old consensual complacency, which is so familiar that it is almost invisible.