Way of the World Michael Deacon
Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing but respect for this country’s hardworking political correspondents. They do, however, have a habit which I find ever so slightly trying.
It’s the way they pointlessly bellow questions from across the street when a minister walks out of No10.
They don’t always do it. They mostly reserve it for when a member of the Government is under pressure to resign. Inevitably, therefore, we saw a lot of it on the TV news this week, after Sue Gray finally published her report on partygate. The deputy political editor at Sky News, Sam Coates – who is, I might add, a very nice man and an excellent journalist – spent the day stationed opposite the door of Downing Street. And every time it opened, he bellowed a question at whoever was walking out of it.
“WHY DID YOU TRY TO STOP SUE GRAY PUBLISHING HER REPORT, PRIME MINISTER?” he yelled, from about 30 feet away. And: “DID YOU
ENDORSE LAW-BREAKING IN CABINET, PRITI PATEL?” And: “IS PARTYGATE EMBARRASSING ON THE WORLD STAGE, FOREIGN SECRETARY? DID BORIS JOHNSON LIE AT THE DESPATCH BOX, NADHIM ZAHAWI? SIMON CLARKE, WHY DID YOU GET THE FACTS WRONG YESTERDAY OVER THE GRAY REPORT MEETING? WOULD YOU DEFEND ANYTHING AT ALL, GRANT SHAPPS?”
All perfectly good questions. But it was no use shouting them across the street. It never is.
In these situations, the minister never replies.
But then, the reporter never expects him to. Because the whole thing is completely artificial. It’s just a stunt. Purely for show.
Most of the time, political reporting makes for uneventful TV: after all, it’s just someone in a suit, droning away to the camera. Bellowing questions at a minister, however, creates a rare sense of drama. As a bonus, it makes the reporter look fearless – and the minister look shifty. Watch him scurrying off without answering! We’ve got him on the run! He’s dodging scrutiny!
In reality, of course, the minister isn’t dodging scrutiny. He’s just hurrying to get to his next meeting. And if the reporter really wanted an answer, he could simply arrange an interview, or ask the question at a press conference.
There is, I suspect, only one way to bring this silly charade to an end. And that’s for ministers to turn the tables – by shouting questions at political correspondents.
“MR JOURNALIST! DO YOU FEEL A BIT OF AN IDIOT, BEING ORDERED BY YOUR PRODUCER TO YELL QUESTIONS
FROM ACROSS THE STREET WHEN YOU KNOW PERFECTLY WELL YOU’LL BE IGNORED? ARE YOU AWARE THAT IT MAKES YOU LOOK LIKE SOME ESCAPED LUNATIC SHOUTING AT PIGEONS IN THE PARK? DOES IT MAKE YOU CRINGE WITH EMBARRASSMENT AND WISH THE GROUND WOULD OPEN UP AND SWALLOW YOU, LIVE ON AIR? MR JOURNALIST, WILL YOU RESIGN?”
After every school shooting in America, Republican politicians always say the same thing. The answer, they cry, is not fewer guns. It’s more. Give schools armed guards. Even armed teachers. Because, in the words of NRA boss Wayne Lapierre, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
Despite the horror in Texas, they remain opposed to a ban on semiautomatic weapons. Lauren Boebert, a Republican Congresswoman, ridiculed the idea. “When 9/11 happened,” she scoffed, “we didn’t ban planes.”
This is true. Equally, though, we don’t allow disturbed teenagers to fly them, either. A psychopathic loner can’t simply stroll into a store and walk off with his very own passenger jet, no questions asked. Nor, as far as I know, has Mrs Boebert argued that the only thing that stops a bad guy with an airliner is a good guy with an airliner.
Still, I don’t want to give her ideas. A rchaeologists in Hexham, Northumberland have made an exciting discovery. They’ve found that around 2,000 years ago, on the wall of a local Roman fort, someone carved a doodle of a penis and testicles. And carved alongside this doodle was a message in Latin. It read: “SECVNDINVS CACOR.” Which means: “Secundinus is a sh--ter.”
The story reminded me of one of the funniest scenes in cinema: the bit in Monty Python’s Life of Brian when a Roman centurion (John Cleese) finds Brian (Graham Chapman) scrawling anti-roman graffiti on a palace wall.
The centurion is appalled – because Brian’s grammar is all over the place.
Attempting to write “ROMANS GO HOME” in Latin, he’s put “Romanes eunt domus” – which, tuts the centurion, translates as “People called Romanes, they go the house.” In the style of a long-suffering schoolmaster, the centurion helps Brian to conjugate his verbs correctly. And then, once he’s finally got it right, he orders him to write it out 100 times.
I wonder whether this is what happened in Hexham.
R
IP Ray Liotta. Years ago a showbiz journalist told me she’d flown out to interview the star of Goodfellas, shortly after he became a father. At the end of the interview, she congratulated him on his good news – and asked whether he’d considered naming the baby “Tarka”.
Sadly, however, it seems that the works of Henry Williamson are not well-known in America, so he hadn’t a clue what she was on about.