The journalism trade website Hold the Front Page has a story about the prime minister's visit to the East Midlands last week:
Regional journalists were banned from photographing or filming Rishi Sunak – with one even being denied access to the toilet – when the Prime Minister visited their patch.
Reporters in the East Midlands were subjected to the "genuinely troubling" restrictions during a visit by Mr Sunak to Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire.
Nottingham Post agenda editor Oliver Pridmore was shut in a football club changing room, along with three other journalists, for more than an hour while waiting for more than an hour to interview the PM in West Bridgford on a "baking" hot day on Wednesday.
They were then given one question each, rather than the total 10 minutes apparently promised to them, and were barred from taking pictures.
Sunak's official Twitter account gives the impression that it is run by 12-year-olds high on Monster, and it seems the team around him on official visits is no more professional.
Because treating the regional press in this way is not good politics, as you will learn if you read between the lines of Pridmore's own account of the day in the Nottingham Post:
It was a great shame, as we had also wanted to question Mr Sunak on what his response would be to the operator of Nottingham's trams, which has claimed in recent weeks that the Government's £2 cap on bus fares means it is operating on an "uneven playing field."
We were also planning to ask him for a response to our campaign to scrap all existing smart motorways, why his Government has delayed the full upgrade of the Queen's Medical Centre beyond 2030 and whether he could commit to East Midlands devolution being delivered on schedule.
And things had been no better in Leicestershire earlier that day:
There, despite the BBC's East Midlands Political Editor Tony Roe hoping to film the Prime Minister's answers for that evening's TV news programmes, he was told that Rishi Sunak would not be speaking to him on camera. He would only be interviewed on microphone.
3 comments:
Nottingham is one of the top 10 cities in England therefore is one of the most important places in the world.
One question - is that all Nottingham is worth to the Prime Minister?
He doesn't need to be in public life and no one will miss him when he becomes a footnote next year.
Leicester was a Roman city centuries before Nottingham was a collection of wattle-and-daub huts called Snottingham, but I endorse your sentiments.
I don't doubt that Harold Larwood, or indeed Torvill and Dean's ancestors were at one point less sophisticated compared those in Leicester or the jewel in the Roman era East Midlands - Lincoln. Sunak, however, can't use that as an excuse, journalists from the Nottingham Post and Leicester Mercury should be allowed a minimum of 50 questions.
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