The morning after Allegra Stratton was named as the government’s new press secretary, the job that she will shortly be doing on live television took place, as it has done almost every morning for decades, off camera.
The daily briefing to Westminster journalists, which is undertaken by the prime minister’s official spokesperson and his staff, regularly descends into farce, and Friday morning was absolutely no exception.
Not so much rumours as near certain facts swirl that whole swathes of northern England are days, if not hours, away from being placed into what will amount to a second lockdown, with the likely exception of schools and nurseries. Countless local northern mayors and council leaders have spoken publicly, claiming to have been told nothing about any of it.
An estimated 15 million people being told they can’t leave their homes for several weeks is what journalists call “a story”, and so understandably, clarification on the subject was required from the prime minister’s official spokesperson.
Custom dictates that the name of the prime minister’s official spokesperson is never mentioned, though this is a strange custom, as US-owned news outlets like Bloomberg refuse to honour the custom, and so regularly write his name, which is James Slack, the former political editor of the Daily Mail. On this occasion, the spokesperson in question, whom strange custom dictates should not be named, even though many news outlets have done, was Jamie Davies.
On Thursday, the chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, gave a briefing to MPs from constituencies in the north and the midlands. That the briefing was with regard to why, when and what might happen in an imminent second de facto lockdown, is fairly close to a certainty.
When asked what was said in this briefing, Mr Davies could only reply that he “obviously wasn’t in the briefing”.
Had he, as one of the prime minister’s spokespeople, been provided with any information on what was said in the briefing? “I obviously don’t have that in front of me.”
Not so long ago, in her role as a political correspondent for The Guardian, or the political editor of Newsnight, or the national editor of ITV News, Allegra Stratton would have been dialling into this call (the briefings are currently not happening in person).
Ms Stratton is very well known, very well liked, and entirely respected by those who do. It is highly unlikely her own view would have strayed far from the conventional view, which is that it was a complete s***show.
And it is a s***show that, as things stand, will shortly be coming to your TV screen, almost every afternoon.
It has already been widely pointed out that to become the public face of a prime minister, and a government widely known for its brazen dishonesty, requires a certain amount of bravery. It certainly does, and bravery is the right word, in the sense that it also takes a certain amount of bravery to leap off the Golden Gate Bridge.
When Sean Spicer became the spokesperson for a president not known for being particularly well-briefed on the difference between truth and fiction, he accidentally self-immolated his public reputation on his very first day in the job, and there is no amount of sequin-clad Argentine tangoing that can ever restore it.
In recent years, almost all ex-official prime minister’s spokespeople have spoken, some privately some publicly, of days of utter terror, of knowing they were off to brief the press armed with answers that did not stack up, and that would not bear the scrutiny they would certainly receive.
To their great good fortune, none of these horror shows, and there have been many, took place on live television. None have become viral hits on YouTube.
Ms Stratton will not have it so lucky. It will be her job not merely to defend the indefensible, but to style out the un-style-out-able. It is a wonder, really, that this recruitment process took place in complete synchronicity with the A-level results fiasco, to name but one, and at the end of it, a single willing candidate could still be found.
It will be her job to publicly take responsibility for a government whose central principle is to take no responsibility at all. That considers all of its totemic failures as opportunities to defenestrate civil servants at the expense of the stunningly incompetent ministers who should bear reponsibility.
Weeks after Boris Johnson became prime minister, his chief of staff, Dominic Cummings, would on occasion loiter at the back of the daily lobby briefing. On one especially farcical occasion, Mr Cummings was himself the subject of the questions being asked, and from the doorway he had to say the words, “I’m not here, I’m just observing.”
It is clear now that he was already scheming out a way to undermine what’s known as the Westminster lobby system. It has already been said that this new way of doing things will make the government “more accessible” to the public. Populist leaders always seek to build direct bridges to “the people”, knowing that a vestige of democracy can be used to knock down things that might stand in their way. We’ve already had “prime minister’s question time” on Facebook, in which Boris Johnson has answered absurd softball questions from the public about his favourite shower gel.
By televising the briefings, there is every reason to hope a noisy enough chunk of the viewing public will side with the politicians against the dastardly journalists and their mean questions, and in so doing they can be undermined. Journalists, for the most part, aren’t in it to be popular. Politicians are. It is therefore not an entirely straightforward or fair fight.
Ms Stratton is already having to style out the somewhat easy hits on her private life. She is married to The Spectator’s political editor, James Forsyth. The best man on their wedding day was Forsyth’s best mate from school, the now chancellor Rishi Sunak, for whom she was, until this week, working as head of communications. The wedding took place fully four years before he became an MP. On the charge of meeting their spouse at work, and him having his friend from school be his best man, Ms Stratton is indeed guilty, of absolutely no crime whatsoever.
Much is also made of an incident in which she interviewed a mother on benefits for BBC Newsnight, and wrongly suggested she did not work as a lifestyle choice. It would transpire that the woman did have a job, and the BBC apologised. That the incident has been so repeatedly brought up since Ms Stratton’s appointment reveals as much as anything that in a near 20-year career as a relatively high profile journalist, she has made only one mistake.
Mainly, the criticisms are as paper-thin as they are pointless. The salient point about Ms Stratton’s past, and indeed present, is that within a matter of weeks, none of it will matter.
In the sense that no British journalist has ever before done the job she is about to do, she is shortly to enter the Strattonsphere. But you don’t have to have been to space to know that it’s a very hostile environment, the air’s very thin, and it was once considered wise to send a dog or a monkey up first, just to check.
The government’s brand new press secretary will not benefit from such caution. She has only copious wishes of good luck to fall back on. And she will most certainly need them.
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