EU Referendum: us "ignorant" bloggers

15/12/2015

In Mr Cummings's considered opinion, therefore, the story was merely "noise". The acceptable explanation of Mr Cameron's plans, rather conveniently, could only be found on the Vote Leave website. And then, in an obvious sideswipe at EUReferendum, he then declared: "Quite a few bloggers know load re EU but nothing re how news is made/why. Eg No10 spads briefed welfare story".

All this, of course, is about the reliance of the Sunday Telegraph and others on unnamed sources for its story on Mr Cameron's supposed climbdown over welfare benefits. There were variously described as "senior government sources", "advisers", a "senior British official" and a plain and simple "senior source".

In noting this, we are well aware of the propensity of government officials to brief the media, and also of the constant leakage from government departments, either directly by Special Advisors (spads) or inspired by them.

As so often though, Cummings misses the point. My first objection to the use of unnamed sources briefing on what amounts to official government business is that, when journalists do not have to put names to words, it is easy for them to fabricate responses. Except in very rare instances, therefore, the source of an official statement should always be identified.

For sure, a great deal of background briefing goes on but, traditionally, this was intended to give lobby correspondents details to support official statements that were not in the public domain, enabling them better to flesh out their stories.

The system has now widened out and is much abused, and more so since the arrival of large numbers of spads, who have access to privileged information and are wont to use it for political purposes.

If Mr Cummings thinks we are unaware of this, he must be on another planet. As I pointed out in my own tweet some of us "enraged bloggers" – as he likes to call us – have been working with the media (and government agencies) for longer than he's been in long trousers. And when I was writing Defence of the Realm, a huge amount of high value information came from unattributable briefings from a high-level spad.

In the particular case of last Sunday's stories, when I started writing the analysis, only one newspaper was carrying the story, on which grounds some of the material could have been made up, or come from dubious sources. And some of that remains true, as the Sunday Telegraph report contains comments which no other paper has used.

But only when two and then three papers published versions of the same story, which might well have been based on the same material, rather than one newspaper lifting material from another, did it begin to look as if this was an orchestrated briefing from government-related sources, aimed at projecting a very particular message.

This raises another crucial issue. Without names attached to the sources, we the readers have no means of applying our own judgement to assess the veracity and motives of what we are told. Who says what helps us decide the value of the information. Without knowing that, we have to take it totally on trust from the journalists writing the stories that the content is legitimate, and conveys real information rather than spin.

Without disclosing his own sources, though, Cummings would have it that the stories last Sunday came from "No10 spads". That is by no means clear from the description of "senior government sources" used in the newspapers, especially when the papers also refer to "advisers" as separate sources.

However, if this story was indeed generated by No.10 spads, then there is absolutely no reason why the material should be trusted - and every reason why it should not. Ostensibly harmful to the Prime Minister, it would support our contention that the briefing was spin directed at setting up a scenario to his advantage, as well as managing expectations.

But this now spills over into an allied issue - the timing of the EU referendum - as Cummings tells us that "No.10 spads are working now on options for summer referendum". Here we have Cummings supposedly relying on inside information to which only he is privy. This is a typical Cummings ploy. 

However, there are no reasons whatsoever to suppose that Mr Cummings has any direct access to No.10 spads. Currently, Mr Cameron's chief of staff and therefore his chief advisor is Ed Llewellyn. This is the man whom Mr Cummings once called very publicly a "a classic third-rate suck-up-kick-down sycophant presiding over a shambolic court", complaining that the "second-biggest problem" he had experienced while working in Whitehall was Ed Llewellyn.

At the same time, Mr Cummings was describing the Prime Minister a "sphinx without a riddle" who "bumbles from one shambles to another without the slightest sense of purpose". The department of education, he said, had been held back by Mr Cameron's "lack of support or sense of purpose".

This had Nick Clegg suggesting that Mr Gove's former spad had "obviously got a fair amount of bile with him" and had "some serious anger management issues" (so much for "enraged" bloggers). Clegg added: "I suppose the only good thing you can say about him is he spreads his bile around evenly across both sides of the coalition".

Now, Mr Cummings may or may not have been justified in his comments but it takes little imagination to surmise that Ed Llewellyn might be less than enthusiastic about feeding him with accurate information. And since Llewellyn is running the "renegotiation" strategy for the government, he might not be too keen about his staff leaking information to to a man who is campaign director of Vote Leave Ltd. 

In other words, there is no way that we can rely on Mr Cummings's claims, or his interpretation of events, if they are in any way reliant on Government sources. As a rogue ally, he is probably the last person in this world in whom No.10 would confide More to the point, Ed Llewellyn would doubtless enjoy shafting a man he loathes.

On this, Cummings is very vulnerable. He  is one of the many who has totally misread the legal situation on the timing of the referendum, having argued from the beginning that there will be an early referendum. He is now in the odd position of having to rely on No.10 giving the impression that they are preparing for a summer election, in order to bolster his own declining credibility.