“The relationship of a journalist to a politician should be that of a dog to a lamppost,” goes the old saying attributed to the American journalist and critic H. L. Mencken.
There is a necessary friction between those in charge and those reporting on them and scrutinising them.
But I was very struck tonight by several examples of spikiness in the government news conference.
The Health Secretary Matt Hancock pointedly praised the “excellent questions from the public. The next questions are from the media”.
And he stared down at his lectern when asked by Sky’s Beth Rigby about a trade-off between deaths and reopening the economy.
“There just isn’t a trade-off,” he said.
In a later exchange with The Guardian’s Haroon Siddique, he was pulled up by Mr Siddique for failing to pronounce his name correctly.
Mr Hancock apologised, and pointed out “my dyslexia got ahead of me”.
BBC
