A few days after I started work as a political reporter, I was walking into the House of Commons with a fellow journalist. As we paused outside he looked at the press gallery offices just below Big Ben and overlooking Parliament Square, the limestone brilliant in the morning sun, and observed: “It’s not too shabby for the office, is it?”
It was hard not to feel just a little puffed up as you sauntered through the gates past throngs of tourists. The seductions continued inside. For any political reporter there is that frisson the first time you wander out of a restaurant with some especially recognisable cabinet minister. And then there are the friendly chats with politicians and officials. You deal with the same people every week; you get to know and often like them. And even though — in the words of Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited — you are old enough to know you are being suborned, you are still young enough to enjoy the experience.
I imagine it is much the same in Washington. This thought came to mind amid the row over the White House correspondents’ dinner, the annual festival of complicity between journalists, politicians and sundry A-listers. The proximate cause of the row was a vituperative speech by the invited comedian, Michelle Wolf, which broke the code of the evening by failing to sweeten the political barbs with the requisite urbane tone. It was a speech straight out of the Donald Trump playbook: angry, lacerating but wildly to the point.
