Why doesn’t Boris Johnson make important announcements in parliament first?

MPs come back to the House of Commons today, two days after Boris Johnson announced an important change in government policy at a news conference in 10 Downing Street. Lindsay Hoyle, the speaker, has repeatedly said that important statements should be made in parliament first – so why do prime ministers repeatedly ignore this convention? 

The first reason is speed. In a crisis such as this, information about the spread of the virus does not keep office hours, or take a break for half-term. It would seem that Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance, of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, had become sufficiently concerned to force a meeting of ministers on Friday. Johnson, Rishi Sunak, Matt Hancock and Michael Gove decided further restrictions would have to be imposed. They hadn’t agreed the details, but within hours information about the decision had started to be published by journalists. 

This provoked fury about the government’s communications strategy. Not only was an important change not being announced in parliament, it was being “selectively briefed”, some MPs alleged, to favoured journalists. 

This is a rather distorted view of how information flows around government and to political journalists. Far from being a deliberate strategy, it is a process that also infuriates Johnson and his aides, just as it has annoyed prime ministers and their spin doctors before him. Peter Mandelson once tried to calm Gordon Brown down when Brown, as prime minister, was raging about someone in government leaking against him. Mandelson tried to explain the concept of “seepage”: that information is likely to spread from any meeting of ministers, and that often it does so not because someone is deliberately trying to manipulate the media, but because people show off and journalists ask questions. 

Last Friday, Johnson hoped to finalise the measures over the weekend and announce them in parliament on Monday, with a news conference immediately afterwards. But the reports in Saturday morning’s newspapers (which appeared on Twitter on Friday evening) prompted the prime minister to bring forward the news conference to Saturday afternoon. He could hardly have recalled parliament in that time, so MPs had to wait until today before they could have their say, and will have to wait until Wednesday for their chance to vote on the changes. 

As Esther Webber of The Times commented: “The way the government has communicated with the public has been a sore point throughout the coronavirus crisis, as people find it hard to understand how such huge changes can filter out through the papers rather than in an official announcement.” 

There are three possible ways of solving this supposed problem, but each cure is worse than the disease. One would be for decisions to be taken by a smaller group of people, with the prime minister consulting scientific advisers and ministerial colleagues but not telling them anything he has decided, even provisionally, until he makes the announcement; another would be to impose absolute discipline on ministers and advisers, banning them from talking to journalists and sacking them if they do so; and a third would be to ban journalists from reporting anything without government approval. 

The price of a free media is that journalists will publish things before the government wants them to, even if this annoys ministers, MPs – and the general public. But we journalists should do a better job of explaining to the public that what we do is ultimately in their interest.