This journalist-banning government tried to defend the indefensible – and failed miserably

Poor Chloe Smith was sent to claim the mass journalist walkout from Downing Street had all been ‘standard practice’. It was nothing of the sort

It was, in the end, an MP called Chloe Smith who was sent to the despatch box of the House of Commons to account for the government’s behaviour on Monday afternoon, when journalists arrived at No 10 to find themselves being sorted on to separate sides of a large rug, and told which would be allowed into a special briefing and which would not, before they all walked out in protest.

You almost have to feel sorry for her. Not for the first time in her life, one suspects, a lot of names will have to have been crossed off the list before they got to her.

It should really have been Nicky Morgan, the culture secretary. But she’s not allowed in the Commons, because she stood down as an MP at the last election, having refused to serve in the government in which she now serves.

And she also would have been far too busy on Tuesday, getting ready to give a speech on Wednesday on “the future of broadcasting”, which is expected to pave the way for smashing up the BBC, because it dared to do its job and criticise the government she refused to serve in.

(Morgan, though publicly funded, should be grateful there is no Nicky Morgan license fee. If there were, Nicky Morgan would soon be having to give a speech about “the future of Nicky Morgan”, in which, having criticised the government, she would have to call for the scrapping of herself.)

When Morgan can’t come to the despatch box, which is, for the avoidance of doubt, every single time, she usually sends a nice young man called Matt Warman.

For Warman, no hospital pass can ever be more dangerous than the time when he had to spend an hour explaining that absolutely no impropriety had occurred when £120,000 of taxpayers’ funds had found its way into the bank accounts of various businesses run by a woman who likes to laugh and let out a gentle sigh whenever she is asked to deny that she spent several years as Boris Johnson’s mistress.

But on this occasion, Matt Warman couldn’t be found either. He used to be a journalist for the Daily Telegraph, you see, just like the prime minister, so sending a journalist to defend a ban on journalists wouldn’t really work.

And it would be no good sending Smith’s boss, Michael Gove, either, because he also used to be a journalist, and as he discovered on his morning media round, it’s quite difficult for a journalist to go on air to defend banning journalists. Gove is perfectly capable of arguing that the UK doesn’t need a trade deal with the EU, the thing he said in 2016, was “emphatically in everyone’s interests” and would therefore definitely happen. But criticising a walkout of journalists that he himself would definitely have taken part in is a leap too far, it turns out. At least we know the man has a limit.

So, Smith it was then. She got off to a good start, in the sense that it was at least 10 seconds before the House of Commons was hysterically laughing at her, and then it went downhill from there.

“This government is committed to the principles of media freedom and the events of yesterday were a very good example of that,” she said.

Cue hysterics. Smith struggled to know how to carry on. The last time she’d looked this ridiculous was in her genre-defining WTF-gasm Paxman interview of several years hence, when, her mouth became so dry that she appeared to start doing what she hoped was the ground’s job for her, and tried to swallow herself up.

The ongoing and uproarious laughter caught her somewhat off guard. Like a nervous father of the bride that hasn’t written into his speech the pauses for laughs he didn’t expect to get, and just ploughs on anyway. Except that this time the laughs were, very obviously, at her, not with her.

Oh well. Sometimes being laughed at is a good thing. Throughout the general election campaign, whenever Johnson was asked if he was a liar, and he said “no”, studio audiences could be heard descending into fits of the uncontrollable lols. On this evidence, Smith is headed for great things.

The rights and wrongs of the situation are not worth debating, as this debate proved. It’s not worth entertaining the woeful claim Ms Smith was forced to repeat. That this was “a technical briefing” for “special journalists”. That this stuff is “standard practice”.

Two of the journalists who walked out of the “specialist, technical briefing, on the UK’s negotiating position” were Laura Kuenssberg and Robert Peston. If they are specialist journalists, their specialism is politics. They are political editors. Other political editors, from The Independent and the Daily Mirror, were not invited.

If it was standard practice, it would also be standard practice for Kuenssberg, Peston and the rest to walk out on it in protest. It’s not. They haven’t. It isn’t.

Still, Smith batted on. “This is not a prime minister who avoids scrutiny,” she said, temporarily forgetting that the most memorable moment of an election campaign that was not yet two months ago was when the prime minister avoided scrutiny on live TV by hiding in a fridge.

As if to prove it, she went through the prime minister’s diary of the last 24 hours.

“Yesterday, the prime minister delivered a speech on the UK’s relationship with Europe, and took questions from journalists” she said. That’s true. He did. I had to write about it off the telly because, despite there being two empty rows of media seats, both I and the Guardian’s sketch writer had been told there was no room. That it was “strictly one journalist per outlet”. (Other, shall we say more Brexity sketch writers encountered no such obstacles, or limitations on numbers).

On Tuesday morning, the prime minister had been to the launch of the climate change conference. No political journalists had been told about it. The on-duty “pool” journalist has been given an unofficial bollocking for having the temerity to shout out a question, because the right to actually ask a question had not been extended.

“It is entirely standard practice for the government to hold additional, specialist, technical briefings, which the government did yesterday,” Ms Smith said. “And it is entirely standard practice for these specialist, technical briefings to involve briefing a load of non-specialist, non-technical journalists, and exclude anyone who might be hostile in response.” (The second part may not be entirely verbatim. It was difficult to hear above the laughter).

We moved seamlessly into some first-grade whataboutery. The Tory chief whip arrived, passing around pieces of paper to backbenchers, most of them two months into the job, with little questions written on them for them to ask. Brendan Clarke-Smith, the brand new MP for Bassetlaw, did his little bit and asked Smith “if she agrees with me” that Laura Kuenssberg had to have personal private security at the Labour Party conference, so who did the opposition think they even were to be asking about it.

Oh well. It’s their own fault. They signed up for this stuff. It’s people like Smith one feels sorry for. She first got involved in politics back when it was decent. One can only imagine she’s decided there’s no other life for her, other than to be handmaiden to the new politics, gently taking public life by the hand and guiding it down the toilet.

At one point, she even said: “This government has just been elected with a big majority and has the support of the people of this country.”

Oh right. That’s fine then. Of course we can’t do anything wrong, we’ve just won a big majority. To gently paraphrase Richard Nixon: “When Dominic Cummings does it, it’s not illegal.”

Later, the SNP’s Pete Wishart would be told: “He should look back to the days when Alex Salmond routinely excluded journalists from his own briefings.”

One day, in a future life, politicians will come to realise that when they accuse others of having previously committed the same misdeeds of which they currently stand accused, all they in fact do is make two admissions, clear as day. One that, yes, it is a misdeed, and two that yes, they’ve done it.

That day, alas was not today.

It won’t be tomorrow either. Tomorrow will be the day the government pulls the rug out from under the BBC for daring to do a flash more than just its bidding. Welcome to the future. It’s all standard practice. Just a technical briefing. You can walk out on it if you like, but it won’t change a thing.