Duffing up Darling - why don't the political correspondents tell us the truth?

I don’t get it. I really don’t get it. Here we have journalists speculating for several days as to whether the Prime Minister of this country got his enforcers to brief against the Chancellor, Alastair Darling,  in 2008, when wee Ali had the temerity to tell the Guardian that the country was facing its worst economic crisis for 60 years.

Westminster has been positively covered in a snowdrift of dandruff as political journalists scratch their heads in puzzlement - did he or didn’t he? - before shrugging their whitened shoulders in bafflement.

Gordy and his dwindling band of loyalist toadies have been outraged at the very notion: he has done nothing but support his chancellor. After all, they’re friends! His wife tells us her hubby is a decent man. And, of course, the Kray Twins accused of trying to stitch up Darling are utterly appalled at the suggestion that they’d break off from inventing lies about Tories in order to do anything as ignoble - as downright mean - as to attack one of their own.

As Harry Hill might put it, political journalists like hired thugs who feed them vicious poison about senior figures in their own party off the record - and they like senior government ministers who, following a rush of blood to the head, actually tell them the truth - it all makes for great copy - but which is better? There’s only one way to find out!

And that’s to ask the journalists themselves who were the privileged recipients of the the briefings in the first place. You see, they don’t actually need to speculate: they know exactly what was said about who, by whom, and when. They were there. They wrote the stories undermining the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

So why all this ridiculous play-acting?

Because the corrupt - in fact, positively sordid - system of off-the-record briefings by the cronies of one useless politician against another useless politician suits the purposes of the journalists involved very well; it means that these members of a Magic Circle can bustle back self-importantly from vile whispering sessions and pretend they’ve actually done some digging - when all that’s happened is that they’ve listened to some snide gossip, which they will subsequently share with the rest of the country. Tee hee!

Now, lets put aside the question of whether the CAUC who “runs” this country ordered his minions to carve up his “friend”: let’s even park the issue of which particular knuckle-draggers did the briefing. Surely political correspondents can muster the teensiest smidgin of courage to answer this one question: did members of the Prime Minister’s entourage brief against Alastair Darling in 2008?

Or would that mean revealing that many political correspondents earn their money by writing down what various character assassins tell them, and then just spew it out, practically verbatim, like old-fashioned secretaries? 

And  bring me a cup of tea when you’ve typed your article,  Miss Jones.