There is a crisis in British journalism

It was hard to know where to begin when I was asked – along with Boris Johnson’s biographer, Sonia Purnell, Brian Cathcart of Hacked Off and Rebecca Vincent of Reporters Without Borders – to talk about the crisis in British journalism at last weekend’s Byline festival in Notting Hill, west London.

I whinge incessantly about my lot during these McCarthyite times, but Purnell – who worked at the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times – has had it a lot harder than me. She recounted the personal abuse and harassment she had from Johnson’s cheerleaders after her all-too-honest book about him came out. She later had to cope with the trauma of learning via an email from a nursing home that her mother had died alone of Covid during the lockdown of May 2020, when the subject of her biography was enjoying cheese and wine with pals in the No 10 garden.