The Lobby system was born and has thrived.It suited both sides to have a conduit for informed, but unattributable, opinions and gossip. Anything that subsequently proved embarrassing to a politician could always be denied later. A journalist who kept his side of the bargain would be sure to receive more “inside” information. But it was a powerful display of the force of an unattributable briefing.

And an equally powerful reminder that, despite its rhetoric of open government, a future Labour government will not readily relinquish such a weapon.The rules governing the reporting of parliament and politics were devised in 1884 when reporters would talk to MPs in the Members’ Lobby in the House of Commons and then produce “considered” articles for the next day’s newspapers. Which colleagues? To whom were they muttering their doubts? It didn’t matter and it didn’t need to be true. The point was for the party machine to send a message to any other member of the Shadow Cabinet who might have individual views: “Do not speak out of turn.”.The story could have been killed by pointing out that her views, as she had made plain, were personal, and that policy, in any event, was made by the Shadow Cabinet. She had hardly left the studio before a media debate had begun about her “professionalism”.

An un-named source in the Labour leader’s office gave the following quote to journalists: “Colleagues are questioning her competence and professionalism.”. And the sharp practice is not confined to the government side.Consider what happened to Clare Short. During a recent television interview she said that she “personally, given the level of [her] salary, would not mind paying more taxes”. The source is never identified and, therefore, never challenged.The system achieved notoriety in the 1980s when Sir Bernard Ingham was Margaret Thatcher’s press secretary. He used the Lobby to undermine ministers, such as Francis Pym, who had fallen out of favour with the Prime Minister. That was one reason why the Independent, the Guardian and the Scotsman withdrew for a period.But the Lobby flourishes and is still used to deceive the public and undermine troublesome politicians.

Lobby correspondents are given information that the source wants them to have It is then filtered to the public. I don’t know whether it was ever served at 144 Coldharbour Lane.. At his farewell reception earlier this year Chris Meyer spoke about his interview for the job of John Major’s press secretary Major had asked him what he knew about the “Lobby”. Meyer, then a press officer at the Foreign Office, told Major that the Lobby had a “more pungent smell about it than diplomatic correspondents” To which Major replied that it was “putrid”. For those not in the know, the “Lobby” is the collective term for that select band of political correspondents who operate in and around the Palace of Westminster, surviving on off-the-record briefings and official nods and winks.
A Lobby correspondent at that Meyer reception told me the story on so- called “Lobby terms”, which means that I can’t reveal my source, but I can retell the story It happens every day.

Cranmer translated the Greek tapeinos in the Magnificat as “humble and meek” although St Luke probably just meant “poor”.
Such nuances matter little now, since the poor see no reason to be meek. Dickens did humble a disservice when he invented Uriah Heep, and bureaucrats made a nonsense of it by telling us they were humble servants. The old sense survives in humble pie, said by some to have been lately eaten in Florence, but this is a corruption of another word altogether – the now obsolete numbles, or deer’s offal. The Romans had thought of humility as contemptible; Christians thought it virtuous. While humble’s first meaning in English was “unassuming” (it was only later that it implied indigence as well), in Latin to be humilis was to be base, abject or mean, which shows the difference between the pagan and Christian cultures. For most of its career, however, this has been an ambiguous word. Did it refer to people’s incomes or to their characters?

Humus in Latin was soil (humilis being its adjective), and botanists who wrote about humble flowers were being descriptive rather than poetic; all they were saying was that such flowers grew close to the ground.