 The Owen Patterson Affair has shone our Tory government in an awful light, but it's not only Tory MPs who have come off badly. The past 48 hours has also exposed some of the worst tendencies of parts of Britain's press. Most obviously this pertains to the most senior journalist in the country, the BBC political editor Laura Kuhnsberg. Kuhnsberg, as this story was breaking, as this row was erupting on Wednesday and before the enormous public outrage which forced Johnson to U-turn, tweeted the following. Senior MP says they've just been ordered by Whips to back the ledsome amendment. This is a proper Westminster village story, but it's really important if you care about how MPs' actions and behaviour is monitored. That is a really embarrassing. This is someone who is supposed to have a real sense of what is and what isn't a big political story. That's literally her job. She saw what has become the biggest political story of the year. Obviously there are bigger stories, COVID, climate, etc., but the biggest political row of the year. And she said, oh, it's a bit of a Westminster village story, this one. You're probably not going to be interested in this unless you're a real politics bod. 24 hours later, it's set the public conversation alight and the government have been forced into an embarrassing U-turn. Kuhnsberg did this morning return to Twitter somewhat with her tail between her legs. Let's go to this tweet. Blowback to yesterday is intense. One Tory insider says, people are going absolutely mad at what looks to many like a terrible calculation. Turns out there are lots of politics bods in the country if we are to accept Laura Kuhnsberg's previous analysis. A certain newspaper also didn't shower itself in glory. Spot the odd one out in this morning's front pages. So you can see here the Guardian went with PM accused of corruption as rules on sleaze torn up. The Times went with Tory's rebel over vote to block MP's suspension. And the Daily Mail went with shameless MPs sink back into sleaze. The Telegraph, though, let's look what their lead story was. NHS staff won't have to be jabbed this winter. So the paper, which most slavishly follows the lead from the Conservatives and, of course, who used to employ Boris Johnson, entirely ignoring the biggest political scandal of the year. Ash, Neva Kuhnsberg, nor the Telegraph have come off at all well in this story. Do you think they're going to be both feeling a little bit embarrassed that they sort of tied themselves to the idea that this wasn't a big story, that it might just blow over? I think if obsequious lobby journalists and pravda for the home counties, i.e. the Telegraph, were capable of feeling any sort of shame, their practices wouldn't be as egregiously servile in the face of power as they have been for quite some time now. This is by no means the most embarrassing thing they've ever done. It's just the most recent in a catalogue of failures to live up to the most basic purpose of journalism, which is hold the powerful to account without fear or favour. I think that the Laura Kuhnsberg tweet, the initial downplaying of the story of this is a proper Westminster village story. This is really revealing either of a deliberate attempt to manage the public reception of what is quite a scandalous story, or indicative of being so bad at reading the public mood and bad at taking the political temperature that she probably shouldn't have a job as senior as political editor of BBC News. It's got to be one or the other because you could put it another way, which is the expensive scandal, which was what? I guess around 2010, 2009, 2010. Stories can be as big or as significant as journalists want to make them by how much they pop on about them. Brexit was a matter of sovereignty and fishing rights. It became the defining political division of the last few decades. So I don't buy when journalists say, oh, well, this clearly has no cut through or this doesn't matter to anyone. Either it means that they are so caught up in the herd mentality of the Westminster lobby. You know, they're so aloof and so distant from what people think that they can't actually access it, or they're deliberately trying to make what could be quite a difficult story for the establishment, the government, or whoever it is, trying to make that go away. And I guess I would just wrap up by saying this because I was talking to somebody this morning about, is there any other profession on the planet as self-deluded as the journalist of the Westminster lobby? Because I do think that they truly believe that they are noble warriors in the quest for truth, crucial intermediaries between the public and the powerful, and they are indeed holding the powerful to account. Now, to anybody with half a molecule of critical capacity within their brain, you can see that's plainly not what's happening. You know, if you are a political editor and you're singing Ice Ice Baby with Michael Govat, a Tory party conference, he's probably not that scared of you. If your instinct is to downplay the significance of stories like an egregious breach of lobbying rules and the attempt to then rip up those rules, well, then clearly you're not being that good at holding power to account. If you are writing what is considered to be one of the most important political round-ups every morning and you are the Prime Minister's son's godfather, you're probably not the predatory fourth estate that you think you are. And there is this gap between the self-regard of much of the lobby and their ability to actually carry out that function, which I just find on a daily basis completely stunning.