It is necessary only to point out the two biggest stories of recent political history. Both were missed by a lazy and mediocre lobby grown complacent in its proximity to power. The first was the expenses scandal, dismissed for years as irrelevant by the very journalists who are paid to bring this sort of abuse to public attention. It took the persistence of the Anglo-American investigative journalist Heather Brooke — such an outsider that she is not even employed by a national newspaper — to bring the whole sorry affair to light. The lobby only climbed on board when it would have been an embarrassment not to do so: a consistent strategy of this over-cautious, back-watching category of hack.
The second story missed by the lobby is the rise of the Lib Dems. There really is no excuse. Its vote has been rising steadily now for over a decade. If the lobby had spent any time talking to local politicians they would have known that we have been living in a three-party system for years now. But until the first debate of this election it was still the reflex of lobby hacks to throw every Lib Dem press release in the bin and delete every email from its HQ on Cowley Street. Maybe the rising yellow tide was so slow and inexorable that, like coastal erosion, we didn't see it coming until it was too late.
Attempts to fix the broken lobby system have always been doomed to failure. But it should no longer be acceptable for this select band of journalists to operate as a de facto arm of the Westminster machine.
The blogger Paul Staines (Guido Fawkes) and independent voices such as Heather Brooke have shown that it is quite possible to break stories from outside the system. Antony Barnett's recent Dispatches for Channel 4 did more in one hour to demonstrate the venality of MPs than the lobby has done in a generation.
As Clegg begins his time as constitutional-reformer-in-chief for the new government, there should be a parallel investigation into the operation of the lobby. Here I have a practical suggestion. A team led by Heather Brooke, with Staines and Barnett as her deputies, would make a formidable hit squad.
