Editor’s View: Farmers need honesty from government, not PR
© Querbeet/iStockphoto There is an understandable obsession in modern politics with controlling the narrative.
Tony Blair’s government elevated media management to a near-science with its hallowed “grid” – the forward planner designed to ensure everyone in government was selling the right message at the right time.
Then came comedy show The Thick of It, where the machinery became satire, with ministers terrified of deviating from the line, advisers obsessing over tomorrow’s headlines and Malcolm Tucker permanently incandescent because somebody had said something they shouldn’t.
See also: ‘I knew nothing’: Zeichner lifts lid on IHT fallout in FW exclusive
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In 2026, parts of it almost seem quaint. Malcolm Tucker needed newspapers and broadcasters, but today’s politicians can bypass these troublesome intermediaries altogether.
Prime minister Andy Burnham can take out his phone and tell voters what his government is doing and why (while rating pub snacks for relatability points).
There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Good communication matters enormously – and farmers know that better than most, having frequently been on the receiving end of poor messaging.
But good communications cannot compensate for bad government.
Daniel Zeichner’s extraordinary interview with me this week offers a glimpse behind the curtain.
The former farming minister said he knew nothing about changes to agricultural inheritance tax until after they were announced.
And he also said difficult negotiations with the Treasury prevented him from telling farmers the full story about problems with the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) last year.
There is some irony in the fact that the Westminster machine is so concerned about information reaching the wrong people, that important information failed to reach the right people. But the consequences are serious.
Power has become concentrated in the Treasury and No. 10, ministers arrive ill-equipped to lead departments and Whitehall often appears institutionally frightened of openness.
Journalists experience another manifestation of the same culture – press offices acting as gatekeepers rather than facilitators, providing bland statements instead of answering direct questions, and perfectly legitimate requests for public interest information being rejected on flimsy grounds.
There is no magic structural reform that can fix any of this.
The Treasury has to control spending; government requires confidentiality; ministers cannot disclose every disagreement and journalists do not have an automatic right to every document they request.
But Westminster could rediscover the value of something much less sophisticated than the grid – candour.
That might start with being more upfront that the funding available for new agri-environment schemes will be insufficient to meet demand.
It might also mean retiring the description of the £11.8bn sustainable farming budget for this parliament as a “record” settlement.
That is debatable, as the annual farming budget has been broadly frozen for more than a decade and its purchasing power has been substantially eroded by inflation.
More fundamentally, minsters should be trusted with enough authority and information to challenge policies before they become crises they are dispatched to defend.
The lesson from The Thick of It was never really that government communications were absurd.
It was that so much energy was being expended managing the consequences of decisions that had not been thought through properly in the first place.
Twenty years later, Westminster could still learn something from the joke. After all, the best way to control the narrative is to govern well.