Monthly Downing St press conference… 238 days later
Dried off and back on solid ground, David Cameron announced he would return from the flood-hit south west to hold a Downing Street press conference. Is the event making a comeback?
The prime minister may well be thinking he just cannot win.
Accused of being too slow to get his wellies on as the country sinks deeper under water, with his ministers slinging their own mud at the Environment Agency before turning around and saying “I never said that”, the prime minister tweeted that he was going to hold a press conference on Tuesday afternoon.
“After a day visiting flood-hit areas, I’ll update the country on the latest plan of action with a press conference at No10 at 4.45pm,” he said.
Minutes later, Labour shot back with: “That’s your first press conference for 238 days.”
Was it? Channel 4 News dusted off some diaries and went back 238 days – to the banks of Lough Erne in Northern Ireland, 18 June, 2013.
Mr Cameron stood there, after his early morning swim in some freezing cold water, and relayed to the waiting press pack what the G8 had discussed on Syria.
This, Labour says, was the last time he held a press conference alone on UK soil.
After a day visiting flood-hit areas, I’ll update the country on the latest plan of action with a press conference at No10 at 4:45pm.
— David Cameron (@David_Cameron) February 11, 2014
.@David_Cameron That’s your first press conference for 238 days.
— Labour Press Team (@labourpress) February 11, 2014
It seems a pretty long time, so Channel 4 News asked Number 10 whether he had been up before the hacks at Downing Street at any point after that time?
He had, but their answer was not particularly redeeming. He gave a Downing Street press conference on 17 July last year with the Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta – 209 days ago.
The time before that was in March the same year, on Leveson, though journalists complained they had only been given half an hour’s notice.
Mr Cameron has been up before journalists after that date, including with the Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, in October 2013, and a short press conference at RAF Brize Norton with the French President Francois Hollande last month, followed by a pub lunch.
But the opportunity for journalists to put the prime minister on the spot in a regular, pre-arranged way on home turf has diminished compared with the Blair years.
‘News management’
Tony Blair was famously said to have adopted, even driven, news management. Monthly press conferences were just one part of this – specific journalists were nurtured, editors and proprietors wined and dined.
For some it worked. “At least with Alastair Campbell [former director of communicatins], you could really get inside the prime minister’s head, which you don’t get now,” one lobby journalist said.
Meanwhile, Margaret Thatcher “seems not to have given a lobby conference in her entire premiership,” according to Professor Colin Seymour-Ure, author of Prime Ministers and the Media: Issues of Power and Control. Yet she did, on most occassions, say exactly what she thought, and provided a constant source of copy, for numerous reasons.
Gordon Brown carried on Tony Blair’s tradition, though apparently with less zeal. Even Mr Blair was accused, in later years, of giving up on the idea, frequently refusing to answer questions until he found one he was prepared to answer.
When he came in, David Cameron did carry on his predecessors’ habit of holding monthly sessions at Number 10, for a few months at least.
But it did not last long. The last time he did that was on July 8, 2011 – 949 days ago. At that press conference, almost every question was about his relationship with his not-long-departed spin doctor Andy Coulson, who had resigned from the News of the World over allegations of phone hacking.
Daily questions
Does it matter? Clearly among the political lobby it does.
Among the questions on flooding, the funding and the Environment Agency, the prime minister was asked whether he might “do this [Downing Street press conferences] more often”.
Mr Cameron replied by saying he was constantly answering questions from journalists “every day” – whether he was home or away, or even in Downing Street. Evasive, the prime minister is not, was the bottom line of what he was saying.
He just appears to have little time for monthly Downing Street “pressers”, as they are known, the last one of which was in July 2011.
Sources at Conservative party headquarters gave no suggestion he had any intention of returning for the monthly Downing Street conference.
Will it be another two or three hundred days before he holds another?