It’s hard to believe that the exclusion of a cabinet minister from an MPs’ WhatsApp group occupied the attention of many people over the weekend. But this is where we are in the political world as 2021 draws to a close: obsessing about what a social media app tells us about who doesn’t like whom.

After years of copious amounts of evidence for the prosecution, social media has been to the discussion of politics what Covid has been to the hospitality sector: utterly ruinous. Its defenders seem willing to sacrifice all nuance, moderation and courtesy for the dubious benefit of being able to contact an MP directly and instantaneously, as if that in itself is some sort of profound advance.

Yet Twitter and its various competitors are where journalists eager to state the demands of their news desks spend an awful lot of their time in the hope and expectation — rarely dashed — that a politician somewhere will say something stupid. Hopefully, the politician in question will at first refuse to apologise, or even double down on whatever offence they’ve caused, before eventually succumbing to the inevitability of mob justice and issuing a grovelling mea culpa and the obligatory apology for “any offences caused”.

We’ve come a long way from the 1980s, when the contemporary understanding of “click bait” was a 30-minute long TV interview with a prominent politician — often broadcast at prime time on a week day evening — where issues would be discussed in detail and where the aim was to shed light on a subject rather than to play an infantile game of gotcha.

WhatsApp, admittedly, is a very different form of social media from Twitter, since it’s supposed to provide for private, not public, group messaging (although this definition demands review, given the number of “private” chats that have been leaked to the media in recent years). But ever since the advent of social media, with Facebook and then Twitter, politicians just haven’t been able to resist its charms.

Encouraged by the example of my parliamentary colleague, Tom Watson, I set up a blog back in 2006, at about the same time I was appointed as a minister (ironically, in a mini-reshuffle caused by Watson’s sacking following the coup against Blair in September that year). I thought this might be an opportunity to write publicly about the experience of being a minister and an MP that by-passed the mass media filter and presented the human side of MPs. I blogged about everything, from my love of Doctor Who and life with my young children to being summoned from the Commons gym to vote while wearing my running gear.

But a no-holds-barred approach to writing whatever thoughts came into my head had its downside, and I came a cropper when I wrote what I considered to be a thoughtful piece about the seemingly permanent state of despair that had descended on the country, despite historically high levels of disposable income. A serving minister asking people why they’re all “so bloody miserable” was too tempting for the national newspapers who delighted in highlighting how out of touch Gordon Brown’s government was.

The final straw was when I wrote a short but admiring column about my friend David Cairns, who had that very day resigned from the government in protest at Brown’s continued – and disastrous – leadership of the government. My tenure as a minister outlasted that one by about a fortnight.

It would be instructive to consider how political news coverage would look today if there were no such thing as Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp and the rest. Unguarded comments would still be made to journalists, but the reporting of such would take a lot more effort than is demanded today. Instead of scrolling through your phone while drinking a coffee at your desk, you would be obliged to actually talk to politicians, and not just report whatever random thought or joke they’d just circulated via the internet. 

Being quoted in a national newspaper would still be — as it was a couple of decades ago — the rare exception rather than the tiresome rule, so perhaps career-conscious politicians would think twice before speaking to a journalist. And we would be spared the tiresome party-approved sound bites about the prime minister’s “brilliant” demolition of the opposition benches, and the tedious descriptions of their recent meeting with a worthy constituency organisation that is “doing great work for local people”.

More importantly, MPs seeking to share their thoughts with their colleagues would do it in the traditional way, by talking to them, without anyone taking a minute of the conversation. It remains one of the most staggering evolutionary leaps in the body politic that so many ambitious people are prepared to write the most incendiary things in WhatsApp chats, even as they know that someone, at some point, is sure to leak it to that part of the media that ordinary people actually read.

It’s easy to see why the mainstream media are delighted with politicians’ obsession with writing down for the record all of their helpful and unhelpful thoughts, and then sending those thoughts to hundreds of other people. What’s not to like if you have a newspaper to fill? But what’s in it for the politicians and the parties? No time is saved: a phone conversation about the topic at hand would take less time than writing down all your opinions.

So is it an ego thing? Do they perhaps get a thrill to see their name on that tiny screen, announcing their views to an audience the writer imagines is breathlessly excited at the prospect of reading them? We know that such activities have only damaged their parties and will continue to do so; does the risk add to the frisson of taking part in such a group?

The biggest lesson of the relationships between social media and politics is that familiarity breeds contempt. Each day thousands of people get to exchange views and argue with MPs they would normally have no hope of speaking to directly. And that exercise in 21st century democracy has done absolutely nothing to reduce the contempt which electors generally (and historically) feel for those who govern them. The latest nonsense over a WhatsApp group will do nothing to repair that damage and will merely confirm the view that MPs, when left to their own handheld devices, will often resort to the behaviour of playground bullies, deciding who can and cannot play football with them. 

It’s time someone took their ball away from them.