Beware the ‘sourdough effect’

As the joke goes, there are two ways to become a top judge. You can study law at university, then enter one of the Inns of Court as a trainee barrister, before embarking on a period of pupillage. If all goes well, you may be called to the bar. Play your cards right and you might take silk, and then as you reach your fifties, with a following wind, you may be invited to become a judge. Ten years later, with a few widely admired judgments under your belt, you may reasonably claim to be a ‘top judge’.

The alternative is to become a minor local magistrate and get caught in flagrante with a farm animal. At this point every tabloid newspaper will splash your photograph across its front page with the headline: ‘Top Judge in Goat-Sex Shocker.’

I never intended to become one of those tin-hatted nutters who obsess about the ‘mainstream media’. But it is increasingly hard to ignore the extent to which the media distort the world to suit their own ends: rather than what is important becoming a story, what is a good story is made out to be important. Hence ‘top judge’. Yet there is a world of difference between what is important and what is newsworthy. I spent the years after 2016 in a completely frustrated state, not because I was a fanatical Remainer or Leaver, but simply because I thought that leaving the European Union was perhaps only 5 per cent as important as the attention it received.

This is worse than it once was. For one thing, our rapid news cycle is increasingly in the grip of a bizarre feedback loop. If you visit the newsroom of a national paper, you will see lots of screens displaying Sky News.