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The Lobby in Transition: What the 2009 Mps’ Expenses Scandal Revealed About the Changing Relationship Between Politicians and the Westminster Lobby?

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The Lobby in Transition: What the 2009 Mps’ Expenses Scandal Revealed About the Changing Relationship Between Politicians and the Westminster Lobby? City Research Online City, University of London Institutional Repository Citation: Gaber, I. (2013). The Lobby in transition: what the 2009 MPs’ expenses scandal revealed about the changing relationship between politicians and the Westminster Lobby?. Media History, 19(1), pp. 45-58. doi: 10.1080/13688804.2012.752962 This is the published version of the paper. This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent repository link: https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/18258/ Link to published version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13688804.2012.752962 Copyright: City Research Online aims to make research outputs of City, University of London available to a wider audience. Copyright and Moral Rights remain with the author(s) and/or copyright holders. URLs from City Research Online may be freely distributed and linked to. Reuse: Copies of full items can be used for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge. Provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. City Research Online: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/ [email protected] Media History ISSN: 1368-8804 (Print) 1469-9729 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cmeh20 THE LOBBY IN TRANSITION Ivor Gaber To cite this article: Ivor Gaber (2013) THE LOBBY IN TRANSITION, Media History, 19:1, 45-58, DOI: 10.1080/13688804.2012.752962 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13688804.2012.752962 © 2013 Taylor & Francis Published online: 11 Jan 2013. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 187 View related articles Citing articles: 1 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cmeh20 Download by: [138.40.68.78] Date: 26 September 2017, At: 03:49 Media History, 2013 Vol. 19, No. 1, 45Á58, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13688804.2012.752962 THE LOBBY IN TRANSITION What the 2009 MPs’ expenses scandal revealed about the changing relationship between politicians and the Westminster Lobby Ivor Gaber The 2009 MPs’ expenses scandal was one of the most significant political stories of modern times. It raised questions, not just about the ethics and behaviour of MPs but also about the relationship between politicians at Westminster and the political correspondents who follow them on a daily basis, known as ‘the lobby’. For the significance of this scandal, in media terms, was that the story was not broken by members of the lobby but came from outside the traditional Westminster news gathering process. This paper examines why this was the case and it compares the lobby today with that which was described and analysed by Jeremy Tunstall and Colin Seymour-Ure in their respective studies more than 40 years ago. The article concludes that the lobby missed the story partly because of the nature of the lobby itself and partly as a result of a number of specific changes which have taken place in the media and the political systems over the past 40 years. KEYWORDS journalists; political correspondents; Westminster; parliament; politi- cians; MPs’ expenses; the lobby The lobby is dying. I find the lobby briefings so boring, so content-free, that I hardly ever go. (Nick Robinson, BBC Political Editor1) Introduction The Westminster MPs’ expenses scandal, which broke in May 2009, was one of the Downloaded by [138.40.68.78] at 03:49 26 September 2017 biggest, if not one of the most important, stories to have come out of the British Parliament since the war. And yet, despite there being more than 150 members of the Westminster Lobby2 the story did not originate there. This paper seeks to investigate why and asks if this symbolises a more general, systemic, failure in the functioning of the Westminster media/politics nexus?3 The scandal was triggered by the theft of a computer disk containing details of MPs’ expenses. The stolen disk was offered to a number of Westminster-based correspondents; some picked out the odd story to use (e.g. the expenses claim by the then Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, for the renting of ‘soft porn’ films) others rejected it altogether, but none saw its true import until, that is, it arrived at the offices of the Daily Telegraph, there the paper’s Deputy Political Editor, Robert Winnett,4 spotted its significance and thus began a series of front page exclusives which the Telegraph ran for over a month in May and June 2009 (Winnett and Rayner). © 2013 Taylor & Francis This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduc- tion in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 46 IVOR GABER Significantly, when the Daily Telegraph did set to work on the disk, they decided to base their operation away from Westminster, utilising a training room at their Victoria headquarters that was dubbed ‘the bunker’*this was partly due to concern that running the operation out of Westminster would not be secure (Winnett and Rayner 121). It is perhaps worth noting that the political correspondent who spotted the significance of the information on the disk was not in the mould of the ‘typical’ lobby correspondent. Matthew Bell in the Independent on Sunday described Winnett as: ‘The quiet, young, former personal finance reporter, known affectionately by colleagues as ‘‘rat boy’’ for his scoop-sniffing cunning’(Bell). Bell went on to note: It was luck that Winnett took the call when John Wick, the ex-SAS officer handling the disk’s sale, rang the Telegraph news desk. Wick had offered the disk to three other papers, but it was Winnett who, after being given the expenses claims of two MPs as a sample, immediately saw its potential. The importance of the scandal, in terms of the media, was not the story itself (although its implications for politicians and the reputation of Westminster were immense) but what it can be seen to represent*an important moment in the changing relationship between MPs and the lobby. This paper suggests that the failure of the lobby, collectively, not just to spot the significance of the information on the disk, but to have largely missed the MPs’ expenses story in the first place, was in part an institutional failure, built into the fabric of the lobby, but was also the result of trends and changes in parliament, politics and the media that have been gaining momentum in recent years and which, in retrospect, made what happened, if not inevitable, at least explicable. The last two major studies of the Westminster Lobby were published more than 40 years ago, they were Colin Seymour-Ure’s The Press, Politics and the Public published in 1968 and Jeremy Tunstall’s groundbreaking The Westminster Lobby Correspondents published in 1970. Both books painted a broadly similar picture based on a recognition that the lobby system was far from a perfect way of gathering political information, that it had many shortcomings but, implicitly, was still broadly carrying out the historic monitoring functions of the press as encapsulated in the phrase the fourth estate.5 Seymour-Ure said, of the relationship between MPs and journalists, that there is always ‘...mutual suspicion between Press and politicians is an inevitable general feature of our Downloaded by [138.40.68.78] at 03:49 26 September 2017 kind of society’ (Seymour-Ure 185). There have been no major studies since,6 so it is perhaps useful to look back to the lobby described by Seymour-Ure and Tunstall, and compare it with the lobby in 2009, when the MPs’ expenses scandal broke and to investigate those similarities, and differences, in journalistic practice that can help throw light on why the expenses scandal initially bypassed the lobby.7 Changing Composition of the Lobby One of the most obvious differences between then and now*and it is being argued here, particularly germane to this discussion*is the enormous change in the balance in the lobby between national and regional political reporters. Seymour-Ure notes that originally the early lobby correspondents were mostly from the regional press because the THE LOBBY IN TRANSITION 47 main points of contact between ministers and national newspapers were the London editors themselves, he writes ‘The need for a Lobby Correspondent, one might say, was in inverse ratio to the quality of an editor’s contacts’ (Seymour-Ure 199). When Tunstall studied the lobby in 1970 he found that of its 109 members, 54 represented regional newspapers and 47 represented the national press, radio, TV and the news agencies, 7 fell into a miscellaneous category.8 In terms of newspapers, regionals outnumbered nationals by 54Á38 (and excluding those representing Sunday papers whose presence in the lobby was far from daily) the balance was 53Á39 in favour of regional correspondents. Compare this with the situation, 40 years later9 in which the balance between regional and national correspondents had dramatically changed*there being a total of just 16 correspondents representing regional newspapers and 62 representing national and Sunday newspapers. Even if we add in the regional broadcasters*given that the bulk of regional representation at Westminster had shifted from the press to radio and TV*the change in the balance remains, with there being 86 national press and broadcasting representatives in the lobby as against 33 representing the regional media (Table 1). The significance of this dramatic change is simple. It is a statement of the obvious to note that most members of the lobby focus far more attention on the Prime Minister and his or her Cabinet (and to a much lesser extent the Shadow Cabinet) than back-bench MPs; and this is, and was, particularly the case for those working for national media organisations.
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