A proposal for the BBC: can you get Andrew Neil to insist that he is interviewed by Andrew Neil?

Never respond when beckoned (unless it’s the Lord doing the beckoning) seems to me to be a fairly reasonable principle. I have always thought it pointless for Boris Johnson to submit to a frilling from Andrew Neil — and a senior Conservative source has indicated that, as things stand, such an interview is unlikely to take place.

Mr Neil, apparently, is the interviewer every politician is afraid of. They shouldn’t be. I remember him chairing a TV debate on the monarchy some years ago in which the late Christopher Hitchens left him thoroughly banjaxed.

Mr Neil is being treated by the commentariat as some sort of Renaissance Pope, with the ability to summon all heretics to audience. And the rhythm of assumption is this: that it is a duty of the media class to expose the obfuscations of the politicians, and it is the obligation of those politicians to submit to appropriate humiliation.

Let’s look at it in a different way.

There is such a thing as a law of false contrasts. This idea that the journalists stand ready to expose the lies of our elected politicians ignores the fact that everything has been changed by the failure of the political class to implement the will of the people, and by the complicity of the media class in that betrayal. Brexit, or the failure to do it, has made it clear that there is no media establishment that acts versus a political establishment. There is just the Establishment. Journalism and politics have become commingled via some act of dark alchemy.

Hence the myth of the “manifesto”. The media types insist that politicians be held to account by the commitments that have been put into print. The assumption is this: that a party manifesto pledges a post-election direction of travel. Do you actually believe that? The point of a manifesto, we now know, is that it expires on the day of the general election. Its purpose is to secure office, rather than to determine what happens the next day. It is the surfboard that glides atop a sea of lies.

So, if the Prime Minister had allowed himself to be “grilled” by Andrew Neil what could we have expected? A prolonged defence, by Johnson, of a set of pledges that we all know is not worth anything in the first place. Neil is from the Andrew Marr school of “gotcha” journalism. He’s just better at it because he’s actually good at the stats. He’s not interested in “getting to the truth”, there is no truth to be got to in this post-modern era.

Instead, we inhabit now a world of “narratives” and the narrative is not an attempt at truth but at power — at control. We should know this, given the narrative power plays that have become embedded in the national consciousness since June 2016. The day after that referendum result, the Establishment moved in to neutralise it, by systematic acts of linguistic appropriation: “deal vs no deal”; “crash out”; “nobody voted to be poorer”.

The failure to implement the will of the people as expressed in 2016 means not only that we don’t have, but that we should have, no faith in the manifesto pledges of 2019. Fool me once, shame on me; fool me twice shame on you. This is something that Neil might have weaponised in any interview with our Prime Minister. But he’d be open to the following reply: that the breakdown of trust, the shattering of the covenant between governed and those that govern, is also a consequence of a journalistic complicity in the coup d’état which the elite has launched against the rest of us.

As was made clear by yesterday’s three minute soliloquy to camera in which he lamented Johnson’s failure to submit to questioning, Andrew Neil is very good at being Andrew Neil. But he is, at heart, not a seeker of truth but of headlines. He is no more than a better energiser of “gotcha” interviewing than Marr.

Neil, of course, does not think he carries any prejudice into his work. But there’s only one way to find out whether that’s actually the case — he would have to interview himself.