I blame Hilary Mantel. Alright, that isn’t fair. The Booker prize-winner isn’t single-handedly responsible for the Tudormania which has gripped British culture for what seems like forever, but her three-book chronicle of Thomas Cromwell’s machinations in the 16th century court of Henry VIII only encouraged the trend. Don’t get me wrong: the themes and characters are compelling. I’d just rather so much of British political commentary didn’t read like it had been written to keep the country’s character actors in employment.

Picture the scene. An unsteady and changeable King is surrounded by evil advisers. He’s a fleshy specimen of humanity this monarch, fond of his food, flattery and fornication. Having spent years waiting to wear it, the crown still rests uneasily on his head.

He values his consigliere, principally, because they seem to have a sense of direction which he lacks. Their willingness to turn a dirty trick on his behalf also does not go amiss. Cynically, he also realises that an evil counsellor who works their way into the public imagination also has other uses: they’re lightning rods. Bolts which might have crashed down on the monarch’s head have the habit of deflecting conveniently into their nearest and dearest henchperson.

Others aren’t so sure. Around his court, various factions vie for the monarch’s favour, doing the dirty on one another to shore up their interests and side line their rivals. There are always the disgruntled and the resentful who find themselves frozen out of power by the new men His Majesty has decided to surrounded himself with. Worse, these new men make little effort to disguise their contempt for the wrinkled old retainers and traditional power-brokers who find their place at the King’s elbow supplanted by oddballs and parvenus who don’t even know how to dress properly. Above all: the old guard don’t care for the tone of voice.

Eventually, a woman will walk into our story with no official role but considerable private influence over the sovereign. She will increasingly come to be seen as herself a player in the political game. While this will win favour with some of her courtiers, it will inevitably earn enmity in the process too. She will acquire the reputation all such women in the history of politics end up with – of being manipulative and autocratic with an outsize sense of her own importance.

Earned or unearned, this reputation will increasingly haunt her steps. In the novels, all such women are eventually punished for their perceived ambitions. Henry VIII nationalised spousal murder. In the modern political saga, she’s just likely to be crucified in the media, once the hacks have worked through all the other viable hate figures the government can be blamed for. The frisson of the personal and political smacking into one another gives the whole spectacle an added cruelty. The narrative engine behind it all, usually, is just old-fashioned misogyny.

Fluttering around them all are the gossips and the informers which have infested every political system from the beginning of time, trying to read the political weather and trim their sails before the wind changes.

Sound familiar? The Tudors was effectively just a political soap opera in a doublet and a codpiece. In Westminster, many of our lobby correspondents seem to think politics works in the same way. This week, all the big names in British broadcasting almost burst their gallbladders with excitement at the opportunity to report from inside the bubble.

It began with the minor departure of someone you’ve never heard of, from a job you didn’t know he had, for reasons you don’t care about. As George Monboit said on the BBC this week, “putting the resignation of a Downing Street advisor as a top headline is political reporting at its worst. it’s court gossip masquerading as journalism.” Now, Dominic Cummings’s homing beacon has been activated. He has indicated he will be returning to his flying saucer and reporting to the Alpha Quadrant by Christmas.

Listening to the news reports this week, you’d imagine these personnel changes represented some kind of marvellous respite from earnest headlines about Britain’s “world-beating” tally of 50,000 dead as a result of this pandemic. The feel-good fratricidal bloodletting we all needed. A political pick-me-up to console those wondering whether the economy is gubbed and what kind of job their kids will be able to get in the aftermath of this wretched virus.

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In one light – the sense of unreality, of priorities lost and confused, couldn’t be more profound. Many mainstream lobby reporters see their responsibility, such as it is, to compose thrilling bodice-rippers out of Whitehall, tales of loyalty and disloyalty, of agendas, animus, of long friendships soured and old scores settled by off the record briefings, shadowy conversations and manipulated press releases. Politics, for them, is only visible in its truest and brightest colours in SW1.

Everything else – the dull work of actually giving effect to government policy in the rest of the country – the benefits cut, the kids left hungry, the opportunities not taken, the homes left tumbledown – how could any of that compare to the vanity struggles in flyblown offices in the greater London area over who gets to inflict their particular brand of arrogant directionlessness on the country? Americans call this kind of thing “inside baseball”. Esoteric, insiderish, self-obsessed.

But it is a good story, in its way. That’s the very devil of it. With a little imagination, you can understand why it is reported, and is reported in the way it has been. It grafts on to perennial themes and stock characters we’ve all encountered a hundred times before.

Question the real value of this kind of reporting, and you will get defensive reactions. Are you arguing that a free press shouldn’t report from inside Downing Street? Isn’t it newsworthy when the men and women responsible for steering the UK fall out, and why they fall out? And if broadcasters failed to give the story the profile it merited, don’t you think you’d be girning into your Drambuie about the lack of proportion in the other direction?

Of course this story should be told. But for me, it is the gruesome enthusiasm with which insider Westminster stories are pursued which exposes the wider problem here. It is the gusto with grates. Stories like this tell you a great deal about where and how the loudest voices in the UK think politics happens. It shines a harsh light on the news values and what is judged consequential and why.

Can we really blame the jobbing hacks, tasked with working up diverting copy for obsessing over political personalities? I’ve some sympathy with the idea that the fault isn’t in our stars – but in ourselves. Who wants to hack through arid tracts of government legalese to understand what’s going on? Who zones in to detailed briefings about substantial policy questions, when you have some diverting anonymous backstabbing to report from “inside No.10”? Ours is a political culture incensed by nonsense and which all too often shrugs at injustices. The circumference of our interests and sympathies can be remarkably limited. We should not be surprised to see those interests serviced.

A government sometimes gets the press it deserves. A gossipy government attracts a gossipy press. Johnson’s administration lurches between organised malice and disorganised malice. He’s a picture of power without an agenda, position without worked-out policy.

If the work of government isn’t going to be guided by ideology, or discernible principles, if ministers are going to take decisions based on their own petty rivalries, then gossip may well be the skeleton key which unlocks an understanding of what’s going on in the government and who’s driving it, and in the interests of whom.

If government policy is going to be substantially shaped by tittle-tattle, back-biting, willy-waving and interpersonal conflict between people who have no idea what they want to achieve with the power they’ve spend their lives chasing after – then by all means, send in the gossips. It may be the only way to work out what the clowns are doing.