This article is taken from the March 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
The British Pathé film from 1954 shows Prime Minister Harold Macmillan being interviewed as he leaves for abroad. Against a background of men in suits walking about, he sits down at a table, clutching a sheaf of papers, together with two journalists. The first says:
“Well, Mr Macmillan, I understand that you are going to Paris to take part in a meeting of the council of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.”
This gives Macmillan the opportunity to say whatever he wants to say. He is then asked two questions, as follows:
“What will be the subject of the agenda?” and “How do you think the discussions will go?” After he has answered the second question, one of the journalists says, “Thank you very much, sir.”
In January, Sir Keir Starmer gave a press conference in the wake of the Southport murders. Against a brown wooden background, he stood at a podium marked “Downing Street”, flanked by two Union flags. He made a statement.
There were many journalists there, facing him as he spoke, and two of the questions they asked were:
“Do you acknowledge that if that information had come out when the riots were happening it would have provoked further outrage by the public, so you withheld information — is that true?” And “Didn’t the public have the right to know — not least the neighbours who had ricin being produced on their streets?” Unlike Macmillan, Sir Keir called each questioner by name — sometimes their first name. He left the podium to silence. The juxtaposition is eloquent.
I began work as a journalist in 1990, roughly half-way between these two press conferences. So I am a child of the in-between era.
First a word about my credentials, such as they are. I say that I began work as a journalist, but I’m not a journalist in the sense of being qualified or trained. I have no degree in journalism, gained no work experience in it, have no journalistic qualification and can’t do shorthand. However, a friend suggested to the then editor of the Catholic Herald that I interview famous people about God. That they might believe he doesn’t exist was no bar to the exercise. I was presumed to know about God, or his absence, because I had left a monastery.
This was the start of my journalism and also its highlight, because it was the most interesting task I’ve ever been given. Amongst my interviewees were Enoch Powell, Su Pollard, Iqbal Sacranie, Jonathan Sacks, Jimmy Savile and William Rees-Mogg. The tapes are in the attic.
Rees-Mogg took a shine to me and sent me to see Simon Jenkins, then editor of The Times. Nothing came of it. He then sent me to see Charles Moore, then deputy editor of the Daily Telegraph. He seemed to like me, and somehow smuggled me onto the paper as a trial leader writer.
Soon afterwards, Charles was appointed editor of the Sunday Telegraph, and offered me a job there as a reporter — which was just as well, because Max Hastings, who edited the daily paper, was on the verge of firing me.
I then did very little reporting. Rather, I largely undertook analysis pieces for the inside pages of the main paper, though I did cover the Northern Ireland beat between the aftermath of the Shankill Road bombing in 1993 and the first IRA ceasefire of 1994.
In 1995, Charles became editor of the Daily Telegraph, and took me back there as comment editor — writing leading articles (again) and commissioning opinion pieces. The neatness of my progress would have been furthered had Charles then become a member of Parliament, and managed to appoint me as one too.
But this is not how the system has worked since 1832, as far as I know, and in 2000 I was selected as the Conservative candidate for Wycombe, which had been a Tory seat since 1951.
I held the seat in 2001 and again in 2005. These were the Afghanistan, Al Qaeda and Iraq war years — and I represented more Muslims than any MP of my party for the best part of a decade, starting just before planes were flown into the twin towers on 9/11 and ending just after an Israeli incursion into Gaza.
I stood down in 2010 because I didn’t like the direction in which Parliament was going. Tim Montgomerie asked me to become deputy editor of ConservativeHome. I succeeded him as editor when he left in 2013, and served for 13 years through Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak premierships. I still don’t like the direction in which Parliament is going, but it hasn’t stopped me from accepting a peerage.
And that’s more than enough to be going in with — useful only in that it provides background against which to judge my take on change from the era of Macmillan to the era of Sir Keir.
The first point to make about how much has changed is how much has not. Britain was longer than it is wide when I started work, with London its predominant city, and the same condition applies 35 years on.
For all Dominic Cummings’ plan to move the House of Lords to a disused site near York railway station, London still hosts Parliament, the City of London, the Law Lords — recast as the Supreme Court — and Whitehall (in the sense of government, not least the Treasury).
If America has a military-industrial complex, Britain has a journo-political one whose critical mass remains in London and its hinterland, feeding off an agglomerated lobbyocracy of civil servants, charities, campaign groups, researchers and think tanks.
This is Tony Blair’s “feral beast” — which still slouches from its Saturday hibernation with the Sunday papers and their write-throughs, springs into action on Monday, ravages through Westminster on Tuesdays and Wednesday mornings and then, in the wake of Prime Minister’s Questions, slackens off on Wednesday afternoons and Thursdays, before settling down to slumber on Fridays — emerging occasionally with a snarl on the evenings of that day, as some piece of vital news is slipped out in the journalistic equivalent of the witching hour.
Sometimes the story of the week, left by the beast in its bloody trail, is easily identifiable and parsable. Just as frequently, it is ambiguous — open to different interpretations, with uncertain outcomes. Very often, there is more than one big story.
“Blair hails Olympic victory,” the BBC report announced. London had been declared the host city for the 2012 Olympics. The timeline on the report is 8.51, 2005. The first of three terrorist bombs which killed and maimed on that day had exploded at 8.49. The switch from triumphalism to agony was extreme in its absoluteness, but unexceptional in another sense: news is, as the word itself suggests, new — that’s to say, it’s always changing.
But if there is still a rhythm to the week — with its story, or several of them — it resonates less than it did, and fewer people now move to it.
To illustrate the point, let me return to that first day of the politico-journalistic week: Sunday. During my time at the Sunday Telegraph, it was the cruellest day: the papers, like the deep blue air in Larkin’s poem, were endless: page after page, supplement after supplement. I would trawl my way through the competition, seeing what stories others had got — and we, or rather I — had missed. No internet. No social media. No GB News. No podcasts, no blogs, no Substack. The lobby had a franchise on political news, almost a monopoly, in fact.
Those years were approximately halfway between the Macmillan age of deference and the Starmer age of confrontation, if not contempt. Meetings of the council of NATO still took place. And murders took place in 1954 — though not a slaughter of innocents by a terrorist. So perhaps setting the one press conference beside the other is unfair. But they do seem to me to bookend the cultural changes that I’ve seen at work.
At the time of Macmillan, politicians condescended to journalists. In the age of Starmer, the roles have switched. In between, the two boxed roughly equal. Brian and Maggie, the recent Channel 4 dramatisation of Brian Walden’s 1989 interview with Margaret Thatcher, is a product of that period: an incisive interviewer quizzing an indomitable politician. The years to come saw a golden age for Newsnight, the red tops running rampant, phone hacking, Max Clifford, “Tory sleaze” and the rise of Tony Blair.
But the long transition from the age of Northcliffe and Beaverbrook through that of television to Instagram and Twitter was taking place: newspaper sales were falling, mobile phones had come in — and the internet, Blair’s “information superhighway”, was just round the corner.
The brief period between its arrival and that of Twitter — some five years or so — was the time of the blogs. From the right, I select three: Guido Fawkes, ConservativeHome and Iain Dale’s Diary. Iain moved on more or less when social media took off. Guido was splendidly mad and unrestrained — or seemed to be, anyway. The heyday of ConservativeHome was sometime before April 2010, the date when I joined it.
There is an old image of a man playing a piano — but the keys are broken, the instrument is out of tune, the pianist is drunk and a brass band is playing in the background. Now pick out the song. That’s what it’s like now. Identifying the story of the week, assuming there is one and not several of them — that’s to say, whatever is preoccupying the journo-political class — is still possible, but it’s much harder to do because there is simply so much more to read and watch, of which these words are perhaps an example.
Then there are the WhatsApp groups — that dancing mass of pixels where politics, journalism and private life meet. I have a theory about the decline of productivity. It’s driven by WhatsApp groups. Because people are too busy on them to do any work.
Economists will doubtless say that isn’t so, but there is a point here. People have always huddled in their corners — red-voting or blue (or yellow, tartan or green). Take your pick: ITV or Talk TV; the Sun or the Guardian; Novara media or J’Accuse; Netflix or ARY Digital; none of the above.
But the WhatsApp groups exemplify a speeding tendency: talking to those who are only like ourselves at increasing speed in apparently decreasing time and under increasing pressure. It is Robert Colvile’s Great Acceleration. And it is not conducive to good decision-making, let alone wider understanding.
In the face of so much giddying change, it’s easy to lose a sense of perspective — and dismiss the “legacy media” entirely. Last year, only 48 per cent of young people watched TV weekly, down from 76 per cent in 2018: instead they’re on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube and their phones.
Perhaps the time of TV, which kicked off in the era depicted in Mad Men, is drawing to an end. Or maybe the Russian story has a contemporary moral: in it, the Orthodox priest is asked who will worship in his church once the old women who do so have died. He replies: “The next generation of old women”. Maybe Generation Z will return to the all-seeing eye.
The most likely future for traditional TV and newsprint is managed decline
But whether they do or don’t, the “legacy media” is leaving, as legacies tend to do, an inheritance to draw on. Of viewers who watched TV news last year, 71 per cent tuned into BBC One and 49 per cent watched ITV1 news or the equivalent. TalkTV doesn’t even make six per cent.
The most likely future for traditional TV and newsprint is one with which we’re only too familiar — managed decline. Then there is the context. Liberal democracies with ageing populations, high migration and low growth run short on trust. Where is it all going? How fast can you travel when you’ve broken the speed of light?
I don’t know, and you don’t either. What’s more predictable is the response of politicians as their aides seek to push stories into the new journosphere, not least the morning and evening email newsletters that set the scene each day.
They are knocked out. Spent. Knackered. Even with the energy of youth, they can’t keep up with it all. Today, Newsnight, Paul Dacre’s Daily Mail, the weekend papers, Marr on Sunday, Charles and Matthew Parris the day before, the Spectator: this was more or less the weekly cycle (on the right, anyway).
Now the hinges have been blown off the door, and there’s Trevor Phillips, UnHerd, Camilla Tominey, Balls and Osborne, Political Thinking, These Times, Inside Briefing, Coffee House, the News Agents (for masochists), Campbell and Stewart (ditto) …
And instead of two or three big Telegraph pieces there are four, six, eight or more online. Pieces in print on Saturday whizz up on Friday afternoon and then vanish from easy view.
A plus for them: in the wake of Leveson and all that, the red tops are not what they were. A minus: like Jo Cox and David Amess, they may be murdered. Or stabbed, like Stephen Timms. Or simply trolled, stalked, abused and harassed like others.
Politics is down. Journalism is up. Nothing may say more about the state of Britain — and elsewhere. Bad news for some, much better for others. Especially journalists.
Do you too have no degree in journalism? No work experience? Do you not have shorthand? Not to worry. None of these drawbacks were fatal in 1990, and they are even less so 35 years on. If I can do it, anyone can do it. There are more places to work than ever before.
