‘This is not a war!’ – why politicians are turning on the media | with Gabriel Pogrund

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0:37Hello and welcome to Coffeehouse Shots, the Spectator's daily politics podcast. I'm Oscar Edmondson. I'm joined today by Tim Shipman and Gabriel Pogrant, who is the head honcho of the Times' new investigations team, Insights. And it is his probing investigations which have got him in hot water with a number of politicians. See the George Cottrell scoop. Which is exactly what we're going to talk about today. this sort of contempt that politicians seem to hold for the media at the moment. Tim, this is what you've written about in your column this week. Can you outline what you've observed? Yeah, I mean, look, it's not just politicians.

1:08I think there's a sort of really weird psychosis infecting large proportions of the sort of British governing class that are beginning to indulge views of the media that are frankly reminiscent of the Chinese who hacked me a few years ago when I was police clerk of the Sunday Times. They did a load of people in the building. As I say in the piece, frankly, I'd have been offended if I'd not been one of the people the Chinese were trying to hack. And if they really want to know what I know, for 99.9 % of it, they could have opened the pages of the Sunday Times or indeed got themselves a subscription to the Spectator.

1:42I think we're doing£12 for? £12 for 12 months. We can probably do Xi Jinping a deal, I'm sure. So, yeah. So this is the kind of behaviour you expect of autocratic states. But actually, it's increasingly kind of common here. We've seen the police not knowing one end of journalistic ethics and common sense from another. The Jason Arday situation, Jack Grove of Times Higher Education was the first across this idea that Arday's PhD thesis may have contained large amounts of plagiarism. and he asked, I think, three quite polite inquiries. And Arday and or Cambridge University then promptly reported him to police for harassment.

2:24And the Met, is there another public institution that more wants our opprobrium than the Metropolitan Police? Apparently not, because they spent four months probing Jack Grove for harassment, which is so beyond ridiculous that I don't even know where to start with it. And the Met commissioner, Mark Rowley, has now said, you know, we dropped the ball. No, you didn't, mate. You picked it up, you ran with it, you spanked it into the wrong net, and then you grabbed a stick by the shitty end and proceeded to beat yourself over the head with it. But we also see this a little bit, and that's why we've got Gabriel on, because he and other journalists have been doing some fantastic investigative work around Nigel Farage's finances, and that is totally legitimate.

3:03This is a man who not only wants to be Prime Minister, but has a realistic expectation of becoming one, and it's totally in the public interest to understand whether he's been withholding information from the voters. And some of the work that's been done would suggest that that is the case. And yet the approach of reform has been total fury about all of this. And I think actually to a degree doesn't really flow from Farage. I think it flows from a lot of the people around. And Richard Tice seems particularly hot under the collar at the moment, going around issuing tweets saying, you know, if these lefty journalists want to come for us, then it's war and all this kind of thing, which is sort of rather childish and completely pathetic.

3:37They don't seem to just have the sort of general grasp. and this is a point, it's pretty depressing after 29 years in journalism to feel I have to make, but press scrutiny is a good thing. It is good not just for the public, it is good for politics in general and it is very good actually for politicians and I quote in this piece one of my favourite aphorisms from a former Conservative spad who used to say to his ministers, if you don't want to read it on the front page of the Daily Mail, don't do it. It's just all a bit depressing and I thought it was worth saying, we are actually here to help.

4:08And there's a serious point about scrutiny as well. I mean, I've covered four US elections. The US election process is very good, I think. It takes two years, and everybody thinks it's ludicrously expensive and absurd jamboree with all these primaries and everything. But at the end of that process, you know pretty well exactly who it is you're electing. Frankly, we've had a lot of prime ministers in this country for a very long time and almost all of them have been brought low by revelations ultimately that came from the media and by that primarily but not exclusively the print press and frankly from no one more than the man who is with us today and bluntly he is probably the best investigative reporter in this country and going after him as some kind of lefty hack is absurd this is a man who I know he just wants to discover things and he's better at it than almost anybody and if you start going around trying to assume that you understand what people's motivations and politics are you don't understand reporters um yes we have a temperamental mischief making gene which occasionally gets us into trouble but for the most part we just want to find stuff out partly because it's fun and partly because it's exciting and partly because it's for our own glory but also the serious point is because it's of benefit to the public and what we do is virtuous and is necessary and if politicians don't get that they need their heads tested Well, Gabriel, on that.

5:26Sorry, that was a very long answer. 20 minutes later, welcome Mr Pogren. Yeah, well, Gabriel, you are one of the most prolific journalists in Westminster at the moment. And you're now Aaron Banks has hired investigators to look into you. Labour Together did before that. I wonder what your opinion is on all of this. Is that just the price now of good journalism? Well, I had this phrase which I kept chewing over and uttering to myself and to others around the Labour Together incident, which was that it would be kind of funny if it wasn't so sinister and sinister for it wasn't so funny it is actually quite difficult to make sense of it all because at its heart the central conjecture behind it was so utterly preposterous that I was a fifth columnist and aligned somehow to the Russian state the act of saying that's not true and mentioning that I am in actual fact banned from entering the Russian Federation feels like a concession that one has to make because the moment you're engaging with it, the moment you're in any way oxygenating the underlying...

6:26If you were a politician, we'd say we're accepting the premise of the question. Exactly. And if I was a minister for the Today programme or the SPAD briefing him or her, I'd say move swiftly on. But we're journalists, so we have to answer each other's questions. And what I'd say is, I think there are two possibilities here. And I think they may apply to what's going on with respect to reform at the moment. One is that people just don't actually understand the nature of reporting that with Labour together maybe it actually was the case it was easier for them to think I had something to do with the Kremlin than it was for them to dwell on the fact that they may be kind of screwed up a little bit it's like rather than thinking life is random journalism's based on serendipity and engineering your own luck if anything the greatest surprise is that this didn't come out originally let's think about what we wish to say publicly.

7:17In those moments, sometimes cognitive dissonance and vanity and expedience and human frailty leads one to genuinely believe that they're actually a conspiracy. So I think that's one possibility. The other is that people actually know, they do know that journalism is legitimate, but it's easier for them to engage in these acts of performative antagonism. So that word that Shippers referred to, war, this isn't war at all. This is society functioning. How can you possibly say it's war to approach somebody with questions or to disclose something about a senior politician's finances? There's no war.

7:58And that's not what it is. And I'm not sure. I guess rule number one of journalism is don't attempt to represent people's thoughts. You don't know what they're thinking, just deal with facts. So I don't want to say which is the case in this instance, but I think either there are people cynically deciding to treat this as this genuine form of antagonism between the fourth estate and reform, or they believe it. But I think the reality with this is that journalism is sort of random and messy, and this cultural story which people have asked us, when did we know we had it, and why did you decide to execute it after 5 million.

8:39It's like, believe me, I wish I was burdened with the luxury of being able to decide when to unleash one of my 15 different big scoops for the next year. It's not how life works. And I guess I've not actually addressed banks, which is funny enough what you asked about. So just to briefly mention that, he has responded to this story in the New Statesman by saying, live by the sword, die by the sword, which like the comment about war, I mean, it's not good for journalists to be intimidated, but I think that must be the objective, because also this so-called investigation, it cannot have yielded any genuine information, because Banks has also, in the same sentence, said that our information was hacked.

9:21As Shipper said, to the extent those practices were ever prevalent, the idea that in my company I would be permitted to do that, or I'd be so foolish as to do it, I mean, it is genuinely insane. it is so implausible I need to invoke a Johnsonian metaphor like the chances of it what is the correct verbiage shippers greater than the chance of being reincarnated as an olive you can't even put into words how preposterous that is and journalism actually is much more like the other Johnson metaphor which is that stories like balls occasionally pop out of the back of the scrum and guess what you pick them up and run with them because that's the job much as it was Boris's job you know to go back to your binary division earlier i i do think some of it is cynical but i think a lot of it is a process of belief and oscar you and i were talking earlier about you know has this got worse i think it has got worse and i think it's because so many people now live in political cultural and kind of ideological silos there are teams there is an enemy in a way that i think there wasn't really at various previous points in british political history You think of the period between the Second World War and Thatcher, there was a broad consensus then.

10:34There's been a broad kind of post-Blairite Cameroon consensus which is now being kind of torn up. And I think Brexit is a part of the reason for that and is partly a consequence of that. But this kind of very tribal approach to things, and let's be honest, the guys in reform are perhaps at the more tribal end of the tribal wars. They do see things in quite binary terms, a lot of them. And I think Farage actually individually is much more sophisticated about this than some of the people who surround him. I think he basically thinks that most of us are fair reporters and give him a fair shake. But some of the people around him, unless you're one of them, unless you're on side, they think you're the enemy.

11:13And that is a quite a small minded and silly approach to things because you can do quite a lot in collaboration with intelligent reporting if you have a decent comms strategy. but I do think that it's made everything more tense and everything more sort of heightened and everything more unpleasant and the assumption is that because some of these people are very ideological see everything through that prism themselves they assume everybody else must be I think that's right I mean one thing I wanted to say reflecting on Schipps's point about tribalism is there's been a lot of this like what's good for the goose is good for the gander Banks said that and he also said this thing about live by the sword by the die by the sword I just actually want to take the opportunity to say a private investigation in journalism are not the same thing.

12:00Critically, because the objective of journalism is to bring information into the public domain, which you hope most of the time is for the public good. The objective of a private investigation is not necessarily for the information to become public, but for information to be used or for the fact of the investigation to be used to depress and deter public interest reporting. But when you see everything in terms of this bare-knuckle fight between fleet streets and reform, then yeah, everything becomes justifiable. And I actually do, I think the bigger, more worrying trend is that it further erodes public trust in what we do, which, you know, journalists don't need to be liked.

12:40I don't think we really want to be liked. We certainly don't want to be liked by the governing class. but we wish for our profession to continue as a going concern and to exist and we think that that matters and i always found i mean maybe trump's changed us but i reported for the washington post for a time i found the average american far more positively disposed towards journalism far happier to unburden themselves and give you their name and profession and let you take their picture and write about them i've never felt like we are in a country where you know your average punter has endless affection for what we do.

13:11You walk into an American diner during an election process and they're all clued up on the talking points. I'm very happy to give you a quote. You walk into an English pub during a general election, you'll most likely be told to fuck off or maybe have a Rottweiler set on you, which in its way is also magnificently British and wonderful. The other thing I would like to say, because I think the only thing more absurd than politicians moaning about the media is a bunch of journalists sitting around moaning about politicians moaning about the media. This is not new. let's not pretend reform are massive outliers on this Peter Mandelson was not above phoning up people's editors if he didn't like what reporters wrote and trying to get them fired let's be absolutely clear about this Alistair Campbell played total hardball with people that he didn't like rewarded those that were prepared to write his version of events and mercilessly froze out those that weren't you know you only have to think back too far when Lee Cain Boris Johnson's director of comms was arranging reporters on different sides of the foyer into number 10, people who were permitted to go to his briefing and people who weren't.

14:11So there's, you know, to a degree, there's nothing new under the sun. But it does feel to me like a lot of that was happening kind of behind the scenes. And the fact that some of this is now public is more problematic. But you know, don't feel yourself special. Aaron Banks has never denied putting private investigators all over Dominic Cummings during the leave campaign when the two different leave campaigns were trying to vie to be the official campaign and Cummings is adamant that Banks had people crawling all over him and you know I've spoken to Aaron Banks about that I can't remember what his answer was but it certainly wasn't a denial and it was very much in the same vein as the comments he's made to Gabriel.

14:46Well Gabriel just to finish then I mean we're having lots of parallel conversations about media scrutiny and they do cut across both left and right I mean there's also Andy Burnham before he took over as PM very little scrutiny from journalists and since then seems to be content just speaking to podcasters although podcasters are great i must i must say but also i saw that you on twitter had a bit of a spat with i think it was samantha nibbler about the fact that yeah about how sort of staffers are no longer listed on the register of interest and you know there's a lack of transparency about what they do and who they are totally outrageous decision total madness and it is the reality is is like journalists have we are primarily entrusted with from time to time writing things for our readers but we also have to make the case for our profession, which is a kind of weird dynamic.

15:32And this is a classic example of what happens when journalists are not in the room, which was with nil meaningful debate or scrutiny at all. And as a result of some unknown parliamentary staff, GMB union branch intervention, Parliament has now indefinitely removed the names of who works for MPs, which is standard practice in many comparable democracies, is a basic failsafe against corruption and those staff having outside interests. But it's just insane, the arrogance of parliamentarians who've been challenged on it. And I don't actually want to accuse Samantha Niblett of that, but I will single out something she said, which was I pointed out that even if you think that we shouldn't be able to know who work for you which people are paid by the public to give effect to your instructions and frankly whether you're employing members of your own family as well is the other aspect well your own family or lobbyists whoever it might be even if you think we don't have the right to know basically who's running around the palace of westminster with a pass sponsored by you paid for by us the thing we can all surely agree on is there's been no actual process to get to this point which i know is a boring point to make anyway her response was just ask us gabriel will tell you It's like, no, that's not the point.

16:52Because funnily enough, number one, I kind of can't do that. I could possibly try and get ChatGPT to write 650 letters to 650 people, asking them on a quarterly basis to divulge to me the names of people that work for them. What a good idea. And then you can do a list if he refuses to answer. No one will answer. And those who do might lie. And I can't tell whether they are or not if I don't have an actual independent source of information. It is outrageous and I'm very pleased to be able to broaden the critique of the way the political cast treat the media. And as Shipper said, it is certainly not confined to reform at all and far from it.

17:30Well, lots for Coffeehouse Shots listeners to chew over there. Staunch defenders of media freedom, all of them. Thank you very much, Gabriel. Thank you, Tim. And thank you for listening.

18:16We'll be right back. Go to ShipStation.com and use code AUDIO and get 30 days free.