Gatekeeper anxiety: a new disease for our times

A general election looms, the outcome could go almost any way and those who normally offer themselves as experts are seized by panic. Parliamentarians, journalists and academics who previously exerted a degree of control over policy, debate and knowledge — or flattered themselves to think they did — worry their grip is being loosened. Behold gatekeeper anxiety: political and media elites locked in a feedback loop of despair. Sufferers’ symptoms range from anguish to hysterical anger.

The backlash against Boris Johnson’s decision to prorogue parliament is a good example. His move was political skulduggery — but the gatekeeper class hallucinated a ‘coup’ and imagined themselves as democracy’s last line of defence against tyranny. Shadow minister Clive Lewis threatened a Commons sit-in, while Nicola Sturgeon bewailed the arrival of ‘dictatorship’.

MPs have been up to their own parliamentary jiggery-pokery but, then, that is the birthright of people like Dominic Grieve: to run the country without the little people having to get their heads around the details.