Journalists should always be thinking about their associations with political parties

People who try to offer an audience their freely arrived-at opinions should do so and remain as immune as they can be from unconscious bias, writes Sean O'Grady

Jo Swinson's blunders made one former Lib Dem member relieved that he was no longer card-carrying (PA)

There are surprisingly few rules or even conventions about journalists being members of a political party. The usual practice seems to be that political reporters tend not to be, the better to demonstrate their personal integrity, disinterest and impartiality (even though the organisations they work for can be among the most venal weapons of propaganda around). Some lobby correspondents – in the past at any rate – have even gone to the lengths of not voting for the sake of their reputation.

Columnists, though, enjoy more leeway. Some describe themselves as boldly as “socialist” or “traditional Conservative” or whatever, and are seen at party conferences and rallies, as much participants as observers and commentators. Some can take things a bit too far, in my view. Some devotees of the cult of Corbyn fall easily into that category, but others too: some on the right have still not recovered from the end of the Thatcher era in 1990.

The reason I ask is that I’ve been tempted to rejoin the Labour Party after an absence of 38 years. For me it has a cyclical quality. I quit all that time ago because the left had got hold of the party and the SDP started up as a home for social democrat refugees. Since then I’ve been in the Lib Dems and worked for them briefly – but gave up membership for most of the time I’ve been a journalist. New Labour looked a healthy pillar of our democracy, but by then I was a journalist, and remained critical of some of what Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were doing.

Not being a member of any party helps to be that much more independent-minded, in all senses. Thus, when Jo Swinson made her series of historic blunders recently – giving Boris Johnson an early election, adopting Revoke Brexit as a stance – I felt at liberty to speak freely. I’m not so sure I would have, if I were a card-carrying Lib Dem. Then again, if I was a fully paid-up member I might have been even more distressed about her campaign.

On balance, I think people who try to offer an audience their freely-arrived-at opinions should do just that and remain as immune as they can be from unconscious bias – and be seen to be so. In football terms, it is impossible to be a player on the pitch and simultaneously to be on the touchline reporting on the match. It is tempting, though, to want to have a touch of the ball, and pass it to the new star striker.

Yours,

Sean O’Grady

Associate editor