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Go to spectator.co.uk forward slash voucher. Welcome to Coffeehouse Shots

for Spectator's Politics Podcast. I'm Fraser Nelson and in this episode we're going to be talking

not about the political news, but about those who bring it to you, the political journalists,

or as they're known, the Lobby.

Francis Elliott has been in the lobby for almost 25 years. The last 11 of them spent as political

editor of The Times. He's recently stepped down and has written an article in this week's magazine

looking back over his experience. James Kirkup is a former

political editor of The Telegraph, of Bloomberg, and, like me, of the Scotsman. They both

join me now. Francis, in your piece, you look at a fairly radical transformation in what

it has been like to be a political journalist in the

time you were there. What do you think the biggest changes have been? Lots of different ways.

I think the kind of the emergence of the journalist is a sort of sole trader in charge of their

own brand with their own Twitter feed has essentially kind of transformed the

relationship between papers, how they think of themselves. And when I joined the lobby in 98,

one of, one of Alistair Campbell's frequent rants was the blurring as he saw it between editorial

comment and news,

well, that's just continued and being almost completely rubbed out

so that, you know, it is rare now to find journalists who don't feel the need to opine, I guess.

Interesting. This is quite striking.

I remember I was in the lobby for almost 10 years, but at the time, there was a sort of

...