The media are still fighting No. 10’s reforms to the archaic Lobby system, desperate to come up with excuses to keep their cosy club as they’ve always liked it. Today the Society of Editors published a “call on PM to review lobby changes”. Not quite the ‘war’ the Lobby were promising…

Their letter raises three concerns which, given Guido’s now attended a couple of the new briefings, bear no basis in reality:

1. Travelling to Downing Street twice a day will “hamper coverage of open government“. It’s at most a 5-minute walk from Parliament…
2. “Correspondents now have to negotiate the Downing Street security system before attending the briefings”. It is the smoothest, quickest security Guido can remember encountering – waved through in seconds…
3. “Correspondents… cannot take mobile phones”. This one came as a particular surprise to Guido given he’s been live-tweeting the briefings from his phone…

They voice these concerns especially for “regional titles and also smaller publications and websites”, yet smaller publications have been offered the option by No. 10 to ring the spokesman, receive the full readout and ask questions if they need to – even though they very rarely attend the afternoon sessions anyway. Ultimately this will all be fixed if Number 10 entered the 21st century and decide to #streamthebriefings…