That’s a really interesting article, and has provoked me to put down some longer thoughts on the Dominic Cummings affair, so this is a long post. Sorry.
It’s not however a rehash of the rights and wrongs of the issue. We’ve all said our bit on that. Also, many people in this thread will already know my views on the rights and wrongs of the issue. I don’t want to deal with that in this post: I am writing this as objectively as I can about the journalism, and the process involved, rather than the merits of the issue.
I start with the Dominic Cummings press conference on Monday. I don’t know whether it was always the intention that DC would give his own press conference, or whether they hoped that Boris’ appearance on Sunday afternoon would put the story to bed. My guess there is there was a bit of ‘hope for the best, plan for the worst’ going on. Either way, David Allen Green’s piece in the FT makes it clear DC’s statement was probably professionally drafted, and with no little amount of skill.
I didn’t see the press conference live, I listened to it on the radio. So I have looked over the footage to see whether the press attending in the rose garden were given copies of the statement. I cannot see that they were, and I cannot find any reference to copies being handed out. I do recall speculation as to what he was going to say, the received wisdom being he wasn’t going to resign because it had been made clear he would be taking questions, and you don’t take questions if you are planning on resigning. Certainly, I have found nothing to suggest that the press had the statement in the half hour they were kept waiting for him for instance. My clear impression is that the media got this for the first time when everyone else did, ie when DC said his piece.
He then did something which is quite unusual in recent times: when taking questions he not only allowed each journalist to ask follow up questions, he allowed them to keep going. After Laura Kuenssberg (IIRC) had asked three or four questions DC asked her if she wanted to ask anything else, and she said ‘no’. I thought that was odd – different odd, not weird odd - at the time. On and on it went, with DC answering everything that was put to him. He kept going, basically, until they ran out of questions, and I have to say my first thought was ‘his answers are bullshit but fair play to him for sticking around to answer questions.’ I’ve come to revise this view.
Since then, DC hasn’t appeared anywhere to take any questions. Boris, you will recall, gave the regular press conference on Monday evening. He simply stonewalled, saying to Robert Peston I think they were all experienced journalists and had had every opportunity to put these questions to DC and he wasn’t going to dwell on the issue further. Boris was asked about it again during the select committee evidence on Wednesday, and again refused to answer questions about it. He said the same thing after the Thursday press briefing and famously stopped the scientists from answering questions on it, too. Matt Hancock also refused to answer anything, IIRC, about DC at the regular Wednesday briefing. Notably, they have stopped taking follow-up questions (at least the PM has) from journalists, too.
Why is this important? Well, the French have a phrase for it, l’esprit de l’escalier: the wit of the staircase. What you wish you’d said as you are leaving a function rather than what you actually did say. Or, in the Wesminster press-pack’s case, questions you wish you’d asked at the time but only thought of later. An example is Robert Peston’s question, which he raised on News at Ten that evening, which is why, if his work was so important for the government, they didn’t send a car for him given his impaired vision. Good question. Shame he didn’t ask it. There are a lot of questions, some of which we have discussed in this thread, arising from DC’s statement. Many have been asked since Monday’s press conference, none have been answered. Before anyone thinks too quickly ‘that’s because the journalists are useless’, its important to remember that most interviews involve very careful planning. Emily Maitlis’ book shows the planning that went in to her interview with Prince Andrew, and even then there were times she went off-piste. Its not always easy for you to come up with the killer questions, or even identify the killer issues, on the hoof without being given any real thinking time. And they were given very little thinking time at all.
The contrast between DC’s willingness to ask whatever the journalists threw at him on Monday coupled with the refusal of everyone else to answer anything at all on this issue strikes me as being far from a coincidence. To me, it looks like a clear strategy to give the journalists as little time as possible to think through the holes in DC’s story. The less prepared they are, the less incisive their questioning will be. Yet it also allows the government to refuse to answer further questions on this with at least a veneer of credibility (‘we’ve dealt with that, let’s move on’) without digging themselves into any deeper a hole than they are already in.
But while that may have got the government out of a hole, there may be lingering problems for DC. The Westminster press pack, in the main, (a) are intelligent individuals, and (b) have large egos. (You have to be to get that far in the broadcast media.) And Laura Kuenssberg, and Robert Peston, and Beth Rigby, and so on all know they’ve been mugged. They can’t come out and say ‘we’ve got a lot of questions to ask about this that we didn’t think of at the time’ because it makes them look stupid, and they don’t want to do that on national TV. The government knows this too, and that’s why I’m pretty confident it was a deliberate and co-ordinated strategy to give the journalists as much space as they needed - before they had had any real opportunity to think about the holes in DC’s statement - and then shut down all further questioning about it.
So if you’re part of the Westminster press pack, you know you’ve been had, but you can’t come out and say that. Not with their egos.
Where does the story go from here? I think the story probably goes away, over time, but I think this will do lasting damage. We all saw how quick Laura Kuenssberg was to repeat the downing street line on Friday night. Bet she feels like a complete mug now, and I thought it spoke volumes last night during the press conference that she went straight back to the Cummings story, only for Boris to shut her down. You can tell what she thought about that from her twitter feed, which also mentioned the fact that she had not been allowed a follow-up question. She had planned to ask, she said on twitter, whether Boris stood by his statement on Sunday that DC had done nothing wrong now that Durham Police had concluded that he had. She strikes me as being not a happy bunny.
So have the government out-thought the Westminster press pack? It seems to me that they have. But I’m certain they won’t forget that, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t forgive. I think the way they will cover PMQs next Wednesday will be fascinating.
