Show you believe in the free Press, Boris
‘WHERE governments fear freedom of expression they often try to shut down media and civil society, or clip their wings. This violates human rights and crushes creativity.’ The author of these wise words? Our Prime Minister, no less, two years ago.
So with Britain’s free Press under attack as never before, we should at least be able to rely on him to champion its cause.
A career journalist himself, Boris Johnson knows the essential value of an independent media to our democracy. So why this week did one of his functionaries plumb sinister new depths by banning certain journalists from a Downing Street briefing on EU trade?
Surprise, surprise, most of those excluded worked for publications that don’t like his politics. The Times, however – hardly a Corbynista rag – was barred merely because it didn’t send the approved correspondent.
We expect such bullying behaviour from Labour, which has long loathed the free Press. From Boris, we expect better.
Among his greatest qualities are his OneNation inclusivity, his optimism and his burning desire to make us freer.
And this paper is an avid supporter of all he is trying to achieve.
But we cannot be an uncritical friend. Freezing out journalists because they don’t agree with him makes a mockery of his message of openness.
Similarly, the ministerial boycott of the BBC – shamelessly anti-Tory though the Corporation often is – has gone on long enough. It’s starting to look childish.
Our free Press and media have always been richly pluralistic. That is their strength.
Their combined role is to explain the complexities of our rapidly-changing world to a diverse audience and hold the mighty to account. Any government preventing them doing so abuses its power.
This crude attempt at censorship is said not to have been Mr Johnson’s idea, but that of his abrasive senior adviser Dominic Cummings. If so, Mr Cummings should be put firmly in his place.
He may be clever, but perhaps he would benefit from some remedial tuition in the principles of open democracy.