Aside from Boris’s exhortations to George Osborne, one of the most ear-catching lines of
the day has been uttered by Jeremy Hunt. “I think the relationships between politicians and the media got too cosy,” said the culture secretary on Radio 5 this morning. He’s certainly not
the first to make the point, but he is one of the most prominent Conservatives to do so. The words, I suspect, were chosen to cool the heat rising from yesterday’s lists of meetings between ministers and media organisations. Hunt himself, it was revealed, has met seven times with News Corp types
since the general election.
Hunt’s admission also opens the prospect of a fevered struggle between the Tories and the Lib Dems to appear less cosy with the media establishment. It was, after all, Nick Clegg who staked this territory first, a couple of weeks ago, with his own claim that, “Different bits of the British system — the politicians, the press, the police — became too close to each other, too cosy.”
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