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In November, I was invited to speak to Cambridge University’s Varsity newspaper about why Byline Times is a necessary addition to Britain’s media landscape. That evening, I discussed values – something the students said no one ever mentioned when it comes to journalism.
Why do we become journalists? What are the ideals that propel us into a career so competitive and precarious? And who are the journalists we go on to become? What are the realities that test, and compromise, those ideals – leaving our internal compasses pointing in the wrong, or unexpected, directions?
To illustrate the point, I used the example of that revered spectacle of the media-political classes: the Spectator party – attended by a number of big-name ‘liberal democratic’ journalists and politicians, who would no doubt profess not to share the same politics as the right-leaning magazine, home to the likes of Douglas Murray.
Would there ever be an incentive for these journalists and politicians to stop attending the parties? I was asked by one of the Cambridge students. I responded by saying that I didn’t think so unless fundamental, structural, reform of the media took place. After all, these journalists weren’t ‘bad people’ for enjoying the Spectator’s hospitality – they were simply schmoozing with friends. It’s a social thing. A club.
Truly living one’s values and doing what is comfortable are different decisions, was my concluding comment to the students that evening.
It is a moment that has come back to me at several points in the weeks that have followed – during which the prospect of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK becoming a defining force in British politics is now being widely discussed as inevitable, while the Labour Government appears to have its head in the sand about the rolling political revolution that is happening all around us, too big to grasp.
In the middle of all this, a number of those journalists and Labour ministers I had been alluding to in Cambridge found time to attend the Spectator’s annual parliamentarian awards.
Farage picked up best newcomer.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting (the “guest of honour”) took a public dig at his colleague Louise Haigh, who had recently resigned as Transport Secretary.
Meanwhile, the magazine’s owner Sir Paul Marshall – also the funder of GB News – enjoyed the festivities alongside Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner (“politician of the year”), Labour MP Jess Phillips, Sky News Political Editor Beth Rigby, The News Agents’ Emily Maitlis, ITV News Political Editor Robert Peston, and BBC Politics Live presenter Jo Coburn.
All very cosy. But at what cost?
I am proud to be a young female editor of colour in the British media landscape. This matters. Why? Because to be clear: the prospect of a more extreme politics coming to Britain via the ballot box is a very real, visceral, concern of mine. I do n