What is the point of ‘anniversary journalism’?

Actually it can be a good way of measuring the passage of time and of sifting the parts of the past that are worth remembering, writes John Rentoul

Today is the fifth anniversary of the 'Ed Stone', Labour's electoral promises carved in rock (Getty)

I admit I used to think that articles about the 70th anniversary of the founding of the NHS (2018) or the 125th anniversary of the opening of Tower Bridge (2019) were a contrived form of journalism.

But it is different when I do it, so when one of my editors asked for an article about the 10th anniversary of Gordon Brown calling Gillian Duffy “a bigoted woman” in the 2010 election campaign, I said yes of course.

It is an artificial way of looking back at history, but it is the history, not the round number, that we are interested in. In that case, I thought it was interesting to look back at that incident in the light of everything that followed: you could see in Duffy’s resentment of EU free movement – and, just as tellingly, in Brown’s mistaking it for mere bigotry – many of the themes of the Brexit referendum and of the collapse of Labour’s red wall.