At the start of the final month of the referendum campaign, the London newspapers are complaining about how negative, personalised and miserable the arguments have become. You would never have thought that the media bore any responsibility for the dreadful coverage, as well as the shocking failure of parliament to debate the government’s EU deal, which the referendum is based on; just as I predicted, the prime minister is not going to debate it at all. At least not in a confrontation alongside anyone who knows what they are talking about, as the Daily Mail points out in a splendid rebuke.
I’m not ‘blaming’ the media. Rather there is a single political-media caste in the UK with a shared responsibility for the political culture and its manipulation. I found it grimly amusing to be agreeing with someone I regard as a consummate member of the caste, one time editor of the Spectator and the Telegraph, Charles Moore, in his elegant complaint about the “deeper sense in which things are fixed”. He set out a convincing description of how the BBC collaborates with the government in shaping the agenda, playing down the important:
