Coronavirus: How ministers are using the media during the pandemic

Those in power are employing the same tactics with the press that they used to defeat the Remain campaign and the Labour Party – but this pandemic can’t be downplayed, won’t be bullied and doesn’t require media management, writes Sean O'Grady

Spin is no good in a crisis (EPA)

The “black arts” of political communication have been around for as long as politics itself. Certainly such habits as off-the-record briefings, leaks and “trailing” controversial policies have been features even during this, supposedly apolitical, coronavirus crisis, but they’re nothing new. In the modern democratic era, coinciding as it did with the rise of mass-circulation newspapers in the latter decades of the 19th century, politicians have always attempted to manipulate the media, and the media has often been happy to act as a “sewer pipe” for the political classes. The parliamentary press gallery, the “lobby” or the “club” of political reporters was established in 1884 and the first leak, an unpublished draft of a bill, was delivered to a newspaper called The Standard shortly after. Its accuracy was swiftly denied.

What is more novel in the past few weeks is how unsatisfactory and self-defeating the current practitioners of the dark arts in and around government been. They did, after all, enjoy a formidable reputation based on the successful Leave campaign in 2016, and last December’s general election victory, which seems another world now.

Perhaps it is simply that a pandemic is not an ideal environment for spin. Things are too serious and frightening for the usual political fun and games. In mid-March, for example, and before the lockdown was announced, well-sourced reports suggested that everyone over the age of 70 (not just the frailest) was to be “shielded” in a “wartime-style mobilisation”, and not allowed out at all. Predictably this caused a good deal of distress and was dropped, but it seems like a pointlessly extreme idea in the first place.

Much the same, in the reverse, happened before the “road map” to relaxing lockdown was announced by the prime minister on Sunday evening. For whatever reason, the press briefings overspun the prospective extent of the easing, giving rise to wildly inaccurate (as it turned out) headlines such as “Hurrah! Lockdown Freedom Beckons”, “Lockdown Joy Next Week – Happy Monday” and “Magic Monday”. These delirious front pages may have been “right at the time”, to use the old journalistic excuse, and based on impeccable sources, but they did nothing for the government’s reputation for competence or even effective news management. They helped give rise to the narrative of “mixed messages” and the impression of a government failing to get a grip. That, ironically, may have been the truth, with policy being settled piecemeal and at the last minute, with a cabinet divided and the devolved administrations at odds with No 10. In the circumstances it would have been better to manage expectations down.

The Treasury was luckier, or more skilful, in reassuring people on furlough that their pay was not going to be slashed once again, down to 60 per cent of pre-crisis levels, though it remains to be seen how that will be achieved. A more recent story about tax rises and a public sector pay freeze was a more traditional one, testing reaction to various future policy options – crudely speaking testing what the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, will be able to get away with when the time comes to try and balance the books.

The misunderstanding seems to be that “defeating” coronavirus is a quite different task to defeating the Remainers or the Labour Party. There is no popular vote by which your version of the truth becomes accepted and in some sense true just because 52 per cent of people agree with it. A pandemic cannot be downplayed. A submicroscopic organism won’t be bullied by smear stories in the press or by social media trolls. The death toll is the death toll. The virus has no need for media management. Neither, in truth, should the government, because it is merely making things worse, not least for their own bungling image. Just for a change, ministers really do have better things to do than experiment with the dark arts.