Even conservatives like me won't defend Downing Street's selective press briefings

If you want to know just how contentious the government’s decision to allowed only certain journalists to attend certain press briefings has been, you need only look at how conservatives have reacted to it.

There have been a few toadies keen to toe the line, of course, and plenty have shrugged their shoulders at what they see as a Westminster bubble issue of entitled journos not getting their way. What harm, they think, given the propensity of the media class to spread misinformation anyway?

But the majority of right-leaning commentators have railed against it, with even those journalists given privileged access walking (and tweeting) out in protest. It’s not just because shutting journalists out limits the ability of their colleagues and, by extension, anyone who criticises the government, to do their jobs. It its heart, Number 10’s behaviour will damage its standing with the public, and goes against the very principles on which this government was elected.

The Conservatives won on a simple platform: “get Brexit done”. Brexit was a vote for change, and one of the key areas people wanted it was in accountability. That is what we most people understood by “sovereignty”: power vested in institutions closer to them, which they could therefore scrutinise and change.

What they did not vote for was to repatriate power from one democratically evasive authority to a factually evasive one. The public are fed up of spin, of being taken for fools. This was half the reason Labour lost as many heartland seats as it did: people just didn’t trust them anymore. But as Boris Johnson has admitted, the Tories have not “won” the majority of votes in those seats in perpetuity; they have merely borrowed them. They will not retain them, however, if those same disillusioned voters feel like they cannot trust their new party, either.

Were it Labour preventing reporters from attending meetings, the right would rightly be up in arms, with cries of “Stalinist” and “Orwellian” flooding the airwaves. They’d be correct. The public has the right to information from its elected officials – and the media is how people they receive it. The media do not have the right to blanket access, but they have a right to access. The government has a duty to engage with journalists, even those who say things it does not like — repudiating misinformation, and trusting the intelligence of the electorate.

Locking certain publications out of briefings effectively locks the public out of their government. If not censorship, it could perhaps be called market manipulation. There is, frankly, no way that a conservative can justify it. What’s more, it makes it look as if the government have something to hide – which will hardly keep an already sceptical public on-side.

There are rumblings from within the Conservative Party that Nicky Morgan, the culture secretary, is leading the charge to bring this nonsense to an end. It’s not a united front, and seems to put her firmly at odds with Number 10. But this is a problem of their own making. To run a campaign for change, before reverting to a system of patronage, is wildly hypocritical. Conservatives should hold themselves to the highest possible levels of scrutiny. That means letting the press do its job, and taking it with a smile.