Labour’s slow running-down of the media

Yesterday, after Jeremy Corbyn’s speech on Brexit, he moved on from press questions about the substance of his policy change to seeking non-media questions. It was presumably to show that Labour is more interested in the real questions of real people rather than the biased agenda of the press. That real question ended up being ‘please will you hurry up and be our Prime Minister?’

Corbynites would argue that even a question as pointless as this is better than the mocking tone that journalists take as they try to claim, on the basis of whispered gossip, that this is a result of some kind of Shadow Cabinet falling out. Why not focus on the real issues, they argue. But the problem is that politicians are the least able to gauge what a legitimate press question is. All too often, for them, a legitimate question is in fact merely one they can answer easily, or one that contains praise for them.