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When the government is able to use blind quotes to regularly set the news agenda, something is badly wrong
The prime minister’s bonhomie with Leo Varadkar after their talks in the Wirral last Thursday took many by surprise. It must have come as a particular shock to readers of the Times, who just 24 hours earlier had been told that the taoiseach had “reneged on a secret deal with Boris Johnson to open the way to a Brexit compromise”. And the source of this story? An unnamed Downing Street insider.
It’s been quite a run for “No 10 source”. In barely a week, the increasingly ubiquitous attribution was behind reports that the normally stolid Angela Merkel had accused Johnson of trying to play a “stupid blame game”, and the news that European states seeking to stymie the prime minister’s Brexit proposals would go to the back of the “queue” for future trade deals. Continue reading...