When I started at the New Statesman in December 2010, we were six months into Britain’s first experience of coalition government since the 1940s, a surprisingly strong alliance between David Cameron’s Conservatives and Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats. Since then, we’ve had two more general elections, a Scottish independence referendum and a referendum on our membership of the EU. In both the general elections I’ve covered, as well as the 2015 Labour leadership contest and the US presidential election, the working assumption of most political journalists about the result has been wrong. That is not only embarrassing; it has grave implications for our trade.
Historians warn about “the teleological view of history” – assuming a fixed endpoint and then telling the story as if it was always heading for that end point. Something similar has happened, over and over again, in political journalism.
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