The new season kicked off with an unwelcome pill for political reporters. As Parliament reassembled after its three months’ recess, lobby correspondents hiked across St James’s Park to the Foreign Press Association at 11 Carlton House Terrace. This fine Nash establishment, hard by the Turf Club, has been the disconcertingly grand London base for a collection of mainly down-at-heel foreign journalists. Now it has been rudely commandeered – in the face of ineffectual Foreign Office objections – as the headquarters for the daily Downing Street briefing operation.
The location emerged only recently. But the general arrangement, with television cameras present and non-lobby reporters admitted, was announced last summer. Cabinet ministers asserted that this new method of dealing with the press was a move towards frankness and transparency. The line was swallowed wholesale by the new school of unctuous, pro-government columnists with no hard-reporting experience, of which Mr David Aaronovitch of the Independent is merely an example.
In practice the new system has nothing to do with openness, and was never intended as such.
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