The writers have no idea what is in the Prime Minister’s mind, or whether he indeed woke up this morning and mumbled “I’ve gotta try and wrest back control of this virus, Carrie” (to which “From whom?” would be the only reasonable response), but tell us his entire government (“No 10”) has been “stung by criticism” anyway. If I claimed to know what was in your mind and wrote it down as fact, how would you describe my behaviour?

That’s not the worst offence against decency in those 30 words. Look at the sentence’s end: the conjunction to link this intangible “criticism” with “the death toll rose to 35.” As though the death toll might have not increased, might been zero, had No.10 not been occupied by a man who drives a too-large proportion of the media into paroxysms of hatred.

When I gave up writing about politics and resumed my career as a statistician, lots of people asked me if I was sure what I was doing. The subtext: “If you just went for it harder, you could make it as a pundit. Why would you bury yourself in some faceless company doing that geeky stuff?”

It hit a nerve, because in 2017, at the end of a sabbatical year writing speeches for a cabinet minister, I did look at The Rest Of My Life, and asked myself the same question. Yet I made a deliberate choice to return to the pharmaceutical R&D outfit that had been my home since 1998. I’ve done well, becoming one of the company’s VPs for research-orientated statistics, and a large number of people depend on my strategic ability. So why was the media such an obvious wrong choice?

In 2011, I won an Orwell prize for my political writing. I never knew I could write, never had the desire, yet somehow I have a facility with words that sufficient people enjoy that makes the endeavour worthwhile. After the Orwell ceremony — the next day — I was offered a gig at the Daily Telegraph that lasted three years. Even when that ended (thanks for sacking me while I was on holiday!), I’ve never lacked offers for paid writing.

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Coronavirus is the wake-up call we need

By Tom Chivers

It was always obvious to me that the pay you get for a writing gig wouldn’t cover the mortgage. I asked my editor back at the Telegraph how anyone could possibly make a living from political writing. “You write a book,” he said – one of those books no-one reads, but which your friends in the Sundays review — “And you get a media profile.” The two are not unlinked.

So I tried that for a bit. I stopped ignoring the calls and texts from the BBC and so on, and turned up on Today and PM and tried to offer what I thought about issues like the licence fee and Scottish nationalism.

It was awful. I was awful, unremittingly so. I remember getting up in Brighton at 4am to do a BBC Radio spot about Scottish nationalism. It turned out that the BBC had also invited a former pop star who proceeded to shout whenever I spoke. I was furious, but because I’m a lower middle-class Tory I sat politely in the booth, listening to the pop guy screeching down the line from Glasgow. I picked my way back to our flat afterwards, avoiding the zombie-torpor of the early morning drunks and thinking “This is no way to live your life”.

But it is a way, a way of life for anyone who wants to make it as pundit. All those talking heads on TV, opining on this or that: a pop star screeching at them wouldn’t be a debasement of intellectual rigour: it would be an opportunity! He’s got a profile! Think what a Twitter-spat would do for your Likes! The singer himself tried to “reach out” to me on social media later on the day of our “interview”, fake-pretending to wish that our intercourse had been of more value. If he were less of an onanist he might note the irony; perhaps even write four rhyming lines about it to chunter over in some out-of-season caravan park on his next “tour”.

So don’t ever believe those talking heads are speaking for you. They prioritise themselves, always. Another Telegraph memory: I got off the Brighton train at Victoria, it was pouring, I saw a young intern from the paper. I offered to pay for a cab to a political meeting that I knew we were both attending. Ten years later, that intern, now a successful pundit, used my Toryism as an example of partisan stupidity in a blog. The kindness I showed counted for this much: it provided a name to use for political point-scoring.

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Coronavirus will break down our social bonds

By Polly Mackenzie

If this were just a time of Brexit, or the last election, my disdain for the British media might matter, but not that much. It matters now, because a virus is trying to kill us.

There is one useful group of people to talk to about coronavirus. They’re epidemiologists, cousins of statisticians. They’re careful and thoughtful and combine medical insight with statistical modelling to make predictions upon which policy-makers — such as the Prime Mininster — have to rely.

No epidemiological model is trivial and not one is obviously “right”. Uncertainty persists (the statistician’s maxim), and good modellers — of the sort I’m sure are advising Sir Patrick and Dr Witty — will make politicians aware of that. Those politicians then have to work out how to share that complex, dynamic message with us.

How much of that simple fact has been made apparent to you in the columns you’ve read this last week? How many epidemiologists have been given space to write columns, or front pieces on the BBC, or Sky?

In contrast: how many un-science columnists have written anything useful about anything? To what extent has their evident immunological ignorance modulated the authoritative tone in which they tell you what to think? “Who’s up? Who’s down? We decide!” At the best of times I find this reduction of politics to soap operatic cod-psychology irritating. At the dawn of this virological hinge-event, it should be unacceptable.

For shame on the media class of this country, incapable of raising its game, unwilling to change its politics-as-sport behaviour, more interested in rehashing its Boris-hatred than educating its readers about epidemiology and immunology: for shame. It’s true we get the government we deserve. But surely we don’t deserve this wretched media class, the blue-tick conspiracists who prefer paranoia to fact, factionalism to evidence, hot-takes to science. Coronavirus is a terrible threat to our health, but it’s the daily output of the British media that sickens me right now.

But, actually, that’s just a little too simplistic for the more sophisticated centrist. You see, one must allow for the fact that ‘to govern is to decide’ – and therefore that one must have options to decide between. In a democracy, that means giving voters a choice between two main parties or blocks – usually one of the centre-Left and one of the centre-Right.

Obviously, the after-the-hyphen tendencies of each block need to be kept in check; and unless some kind of national course correction is required, the centrist politicians of each party should be the ones in the driving seat.

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Would Frank Field fit in? The test we should apply to any new party

By Giles Fraser

Absolute centrists who’d rather not dirty their hands with direct participation in party politics can hold themselves above the fray – commenting on events from their perches in the ‘quality’ media.

These are the ultimate rationalists, taking a pragmatic view of the expediencies of democracy in action, but also conscious of what would ideally be done – if only everybody were as reasonable, knowledgeable and unprejudiced as themselves. Should they experience the occasional twinge of self-doubt, all they need do is behold the spectacle of life beyond the fringe of polite opinion. The absolute necessity of their continued moderating influence will be made abundantly clear.

And indeed, the most obvious weirdos tend to be out on a limb. Anyone who for any reason (or lack of reason) is fundamentally unhappy with the status quo is likely to find themselves off-centre in some fashion. After all, ‘eccentric’ literally means ‘out of centre’.

The favourite prey of the sophisticated centrist is the unsophisticated ideologue – preferably a politician or pundit who’s screwed-up a statistic or misinterpreted a bit of history. Setting their phasers to ‘patronise’, the sophisticates then charge in – mocking the minor error of inaccuracy to expose the major error of strongly-held belief.

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Would Frank Field fit in? The test we should apply to any new party

By Peter Franklin

But can they be so sure of their own inerrancy? They may regard themselves as unideological, but there is no such thing as a neutral worldview, no self-conception of rationality that doesn’t depend on irreducible assumptions. Just look at the ‘received wisdom’ of the past. Is there a single era of history in which the intellectual middle ground wasn’t convinced of things that we now see as nonsense?

This raises two further questions: How did these past establishments get away with it? And are we any different today? The answer to the first is that though the mainstream view may have been nonsense, it was at least high-functioning nonsense. Even when objectively wrong, it nevertheless served a practical end – such as not upsetting powerful people by disagreeing with them.

As to whether we’re any different today, in all likelihood we’re not. There are things that all the ‘right people’ say and think in the early 21st century that will seem utterly demented in fifty or a hundred years time.

All of which brings me, in a good way, to Margaret Sullivan in the Washington Post, who argues that the mainstream media is too mainstream. She attacks the “smarmy centrism that often benefits nobody, but promises that you won’t offend anyone”!

“Who is the media’s middle-lane approach actually good for?

“Not the public, certainly, since readers and viewers would benefit from strong viewpoints across the full spectrum of political thought, not just minor variations of the same old stuff.

“But it is great for politicians and pundits who bill themselves as centrists.”

She mentions the lavish publicity received by Starbucks founder Howard Schultz for his possible Presidential run – on a “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” platform. And also the moderate Republicans snapped up as commentators by the likes of CNN and CBS:

“You see it, too, in the supposedly daring, supposedly against-the-grain hires made by magazines and by newspaper op-ed pages. In their quest to run the full gamut from center-left to center-right, they are already well-equipped with anti-Trump conservatives.”

What’s the problem with this? It’s not the mere fact of being anti-Trump. Nor is there anything wrong with the journalistic ethics of fairness and rigour. As long as the mainstream media practises these virtues as well as preaching them, then that’s all to the good.

The problem though comes when balance becomes blinkered. As Sullivan puts it, “impartiality is a value worth defending in mainstream news coverage… but you don’t get there by walking down the centre line with a blindfold on.”

The great failure of the mainstream media is not its failure to give voice to Trumpism now, but its failure to see Trumpism coming. And how could it have, since it was staffed by people ill-equipped to have imagined such a thing, let alone understand it?

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Open vs Closed: The rise and fall of Left and Right

By Peter Franklin

Ultimately, the fatal weakness of the centrist punditocracy is not its elitism, but that they’re just as human as anybody else – and, just as anybody else would, they’ve found it hard to internalise the extent to which their people screwed-up in power.

Populists succeed when establishments fail. That’s why it’s vital that the media draws upon a wide range of perspectives, not just those that take the establishment’s wisdom for granted.