If you’re one of those people, like the former prime minister (how strange it is to write that) who worries about the future of political reporting and the quality of debate in the House of Commons – fear not. You’re in good company.

If you want to see who shares your opinions, read on.

If a statesman now wants to impress the nation, the last place in the world where he will make his speech is in Parliament, because in no place will it be worse reported. Epoch-making speeches are nowadays all delivered on the stump. The public only cares for what it hears. No one knows what goes on after twelve o’clock in Parliament, and no one cares. Why? Because the newspapers do not report late sittings.

W.T. Stead, “Government by Journalism” (1886)

For years it was the proud ‘boast’ of the great London dailies in competition to give the longest, which means the fullest reports of the debates in Parliament. They maintained large staff for the purpose. It was also a triumph of beauty to set the report in close type, so that the delighted reader looked upon a broad page of dead black lead, broke only by the spaces required for the names of the successive speakers. That is all now changed. Where we sat down to six or seven columns of political rhetoric, we now sit down to two, and the story, moreover, is broken into paragraphs, headlines and notes of exclamation…Readers of the business class or the lozenge intelligence prefer to take their legislation and politics first in the homeopathic doses of a ten line summary.

Alfred Kinnear, “Parliamentary Reporting” (1905)

What has changed is the way Parliament is reported or rather not reported. Tell me how many maiden speeches are listened to; how many excellent second reading speeches or committee speeches are covered. Except when they generate major controversy, they aren’t.

If you are a backbench MP today, you learn to give a press release first and a good Parliamentary speech second.

Tony Blair, “On Public Life” (2007)

As you were saying…