What it is like to be part of the Palace of Westminster media pack

There are many unusual things about working in the Palace of Westminster. The police officers with guns who guard the entrances. The building which has been patched and mended since 1860 – I once went past an open door that is usually closed, and glimpsed what looked like the set of a steampunk film.

Then there are the rules about what you can wear and where. One of the small but significant improvements to the quality of my working life happened last year thanks to Jared O’Mara, the Labour MP who toppled Nick Clegg in Sheffield Hallam. O’Mara cannot wear a shirt and tie because his cerebral palsy means he cannot do up the buttons. The speaker of the house, therefore, ruled male MPs were allowed in the chamber without a tie; after a hurried consultation it was confirmed that this applied to the journalists who watch proceedings from the gallery too.

However, I hadn’t realised that we still have to wear a jacket, so I was asked to go out and put mine on at one point during this hot summer.

The strangest thing about working in the Westminster media pack, though, is the Westminster media pack. When I started, in 1995, in a tiny office that used to house a photocopier but now contained The Independent’s five political journalists, I was told by Don Macintyre, the political editor, that someone had once written a PhD thesis about “co-operation and competition among parliamentary journalists”.

I never tracked it down, but Don explained it described the unique blend of fierce rivalry and mutual support that existed – and still exists – among journalists forced to work in close proximity to each other in the offices behind the press gallery of the House of Commons.

I don’t do news reporting so much these days, but the way Westminster journalists work is like that of most other journalists, only more so. They hunt in packs, or in the case of foreign trips, one large pack. The pack offers safety in numbers in fast-moving situations. I once overheard a journalist say, “We need to get this right.” A journalist on a rival publication said: “No, we need to get it the same.”

Journalists share stories, or “trade” them – if a journalist would annoy a source by publishing a story, they might give it to a “rival” who would return the favour later. But they will also steal stories from each other if they overhear something or can persuade a source they will write it more favourably than a competitor.

Not that I’ve ever done that.

Yours,

John Rentoul
Chief political commentator