Brexit is breaking journalism in the UK

When the politicians are just making it up as they go along, can you blame reporters for scrambling to keep up?

In his way the prime minister is grimly entertaining. The downside is the monotony (EPA)

One of the odder consequences of the many oddities of Brexit, which increasingly feels like an unending nightmare, is its effect on journalism.

On the one hand, like Donald Trump, it makes for great copy, as we say. The public never seems quite inured to the crises. Every defection, every lost vote, every scrap of speculation about resignations and early elections gives those of us in our rough old trade a boost – more sales of papers and mags, more traffic for the websites, more viewed for the rolling news.

Boris Johnson is especially good news, adding new layers of “human interest” to an already fascinating, shall we say, backstory. We’ve not had a prime minister, after all, going through a divorce, taking a girlfriend to stay with the Queen at Balmoral and adopting a jack russell simultaneously. His shambolic public appearances are compelling. We do not know what he is going to do next, and neither does he. It is grimly entertaining.

The downside of all this is the monotony. In their way, every component of the current Brexit story has happened before. The futile “renegotiations”, the snap election, the internecine party warfare, the splits, the elusive solutions to the Irish backstop. We’ve seen and covered variations of all of those, time and again. We’re going round in circles – perhaps the country can agree on that.

The one thing that has actually become much more difficult for the journalists is trying to explain, as much to themselves as a bewildered public, about what might happen next.

All the flow charts and “explainers” we produce are soon overtaken by events, rendering them redundant unless we constantly update them (which we do, depending on the story). We simply do not know, for example, what would fall if the prime minister refused to obey the law. Nor can we be sure what would happen if he just quit, either as party leader or as PM, or both. The journalists cannot explain such phenomena when the politicians are just making it up as they go along. Not even the Queen, in her 67-year reign, has known anything like it. I’d love to know how her conversations with her latest prime minister went over dinner. Maybe they tried to avoid talking about Brexit, as so many of us do now.

Yours,

Sean O’Grady

Associate editor