Most people will be familiar with the faces of Tom Bradby, Nick Robinson and Adam Boulton as they cover the news from Parliament on our televisions. Indeed some people will know the names of the newspaper and radio correspondents who write and report the latest political news. But how did this close relationship between Parliament and the media begin
In 1828, the historian Thomas Babbington Macaulay noticed something interesting going on up in the back row of the Strangers’ Gallery, where reporters sat in semi-darkness struggling to hear and record what was being said on the Floor of the Commons far below.
“The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm,” he wrote in the Edinburgh Review. “The publication of the debates, a practice which seemed to the most liberal statesman of the old school full of danger to the great safeguards of public liberty, is now regarded by many persons as a safeguard, tantamount, and more than tantamount, to all the rest together.”
How did they come to be there, those early interlopers who risked imprisonment or worse to report the proceedings of a Parliament that for the first half of its existence had sat in secret?
