Abstract
What do you think is going to happen? As the shrieking violins get louder and louder and Mrs May's Brexit high-wire act becomes more and more improbable, it's the question even the politically disengaged have been asking.
The BBC's heroic Chris Mason famously announced with some chutzpah that, for all he knew, you might as well ask Mr Blobby.
Conceited sages confess that, for once, “do you know, I don't have a clue”, as if they had a previously flawless record of prediction. And the consensus is that we are in historically extraordinary times.
Which is precisely why we need a guiding hand from the experts.
Generally, the warp and weft of the last two years has been decently reported by the news hounds, but how many of the armchair pundits have stuck their necks out? Not with an expression of their preference (there's plenty of that), but with a prediction. I'd say too few have reached out to us and taken a punt. Instead, they have grown more cautious than ever. They stroke their beards and blind us with procedural niceties and the latest from some smoke-filled DUP meeting, but as to what's going to happen? You'll be lucky.
Of course it's difficult, but they are selling us short. In discussion programmes and in columns, they busk. In football parlance, they knock the ball across the back four, and (to squeeze a limp analogy dry) the presenters tend not to play a high press. They recycle the gems from their latest lunch, but the top line is too often a variant of “Mrs May faces difficulties”. The irresolution is catching, so a cartel of vacuity is formed. Outbidding is discouraged and the lowest common denominator is surmounted only by variants of blandness.
“One of the first things I learned in journalism was that you don't end an article with ‘Only time will tell’,” says The Independent's John Rentoul, who is one of the few prepared to take a punt. “There are various elegant forms of saying that, and the pundits who use them should be mocked for using them.”
Iain Dale, radio presenter and pundit, another of the plucky few, agrees. “There is no point in writing a column unless you have an opinion and that means coming down on one side or the other, and I think too many columnists now, particularly in broadsheet newspapers, seem to think they can do ‘on the one hand, on the other’ and let the reader make up their mind. I don't know why their editors let them get away with it.”
Quite so. To my mind, a recent exception proved the rule. On Radio 4's The Week in Westminster, three days before Christmas, Steve Richards invited three of the best-placed journalists in the country to make a prediction about how Brexit would play out, and they were all fascinating. Yet it was tacked on to the end of the programme and presented as a bit larky, as not real punditry. Richards was almost apologetic, as if lapsing from the customary high moral tone of motive-sifting into what he called “just a bit of fun”.
No! It's not just a bit of fun. Some of us want a succinct guide to which way the wind is blowing, and forcing this illustrious trio off the fence meant asking them what I suspect most people outside the Westminster bubble would like to ask.
Nobody said it was easy, but this hiding in plain sight has got worse. One reason is almost certainly the pasting that columnists get in the black-and-white world of Twitter when they get something wrong. “Nobody ever remembers when you get it right,” says Dale.
Yes, it is an excellent way to advertise your fallibility, and no one happily does that. But that is all the more reason why arms should be twisted.
Dale admits that Brexit raises the stakes. “It's quite difficult to see where things are going on a day-to-day basis,” he says. “I have found myself feeling a bit of a fraud because I can't say at the moment where things are going to go, but I will then follow it up by saying ‘This is my best guess’, but most columnists don't seem to get to that last bit. I think anyone who puts their head above the parapet has got to be prepared to have it shot off from time to time.”
Rentoul is a student of Philip Tetlock, author of Superforecasting and famous for saying that the average expert is no better than a dart-throwing chimpanzee. Tetlock says people who get good at forecasting tend to be those who go back and look at what they got wrong and find out why. Both Rentoul and Dale do a good deal of that, as does the New Statesman's Stephen Bush, and advertise what they have found. Rentoul wears his prediction that Jeremy Corbyn would come fourth in the Labour leadership election on his sleeve, and Dale has to live with some wild pre-2017 election predictions, but their learning processes always make good reading. Being wrong isn't the end of the world, and it is only complicity in ego-protection that allows other pundits a free pass.
Besides, a wrong prediction provides column fodder. And, as Rentoul admits, if he follows another Tetlock edict, which is to constantly review the evidence, it can lead to incongruous predictions. “I can generally point to a column which was sort of right,” he laughs. “It is the job of commentators to understand what is going on now and use that knowledge to understand what is going to happen.”
Sure, the smart-arses will laugh, but you'd need to be awfully wrong an awful lot to match former Times editor William Rees-Mogg, father of Jacob, whose record as a tipster earned him the nickname “Mystic Mogg”. One thing is certain. The future lies ahead.