The Westminster Correspondent Who Accidentally Got Everything Right by Knowing Absolutely Nothing

In the long and storied history of political journalism in Britain, there have been many correspondents who got things right. There have been fewer who got things right for entirely the wrong reasons. And there has been precisely one — exactly one — who got things right because he genuinely, sincerely, and without any trace of irony, did not understand a single thing he was writing about. His name is Barnaby Finch, and he is The London Prat's Westminster correspondent, a role he has held since the publication's inception, and one he was hired for despite — or perhaps because of — the fact that he had never set foot in Parliament, had never spoken to a politician, and had, until three weeks before his first day at work, believed that the House of Commons was a type of storage facility for municipal lawnmowers.

Barnaby Finch is not a stupid man. This point cannot be emphasised enough, because the temptation, upon hearing the above, is to conclude that he is, in fact, profoundly stupid, and that his career at The London Prat is a sustained act of cosmic comedy. He is not stupid. He is, by all accounts, remarkably intelligent in areas that have nothing whatsoever to do with politics. He holds a first-class degree in marine biology from the University of Bath. He can identify 340 species of nudibranch by sight. He once correctly diagnosed a problem with a boat engine by listening to it for forty seconds and humming thoughtfully. The issue is not stupidity. The issue is specificity. Barnaby Finch simply has no interest in politics, no background in politics, and no particular ability in politics. He was hired anyway.

The First Dispatch

Barnaby's first piece for The London Prat was filed from the press gallery of the House of Commons on a wet Thursday in April 2024. He had been given a press pass after Sandra Blackwood wrote a letter to the Parliamentary Press Gallery Association describing The London Prat as "a serious organ of investigative journalism with a circulation in excess of several hundred," which was, at the time, technically true if you counted Derek's mum, his dentist, and the man from the railway company who had asked them to stop.

The piece, titled "Parliament: A Review," was written in the style of a theatre critic attending a particularly confusing matinee. Barnaby described the Speaker as "a man in a very impressive hat who keeps shouting, which I found both alarming and oddly comforting." He noted that the benches were "surprisingly uncomfortable for a building that cost so much money to maintain." He described a heated debate on agricultural subsidies as "two groups of people who clearly felt very strongly about something, though I confess I lost the thread around the point where someone mentioned 'tillage.' Is tillage a person? A place? I suspect it might be a type of soil, but I cannot confirm this."

The piece was, by any conventional journalistic standard, a disaster. It contained no analysis, no quotes from sources, no context, and no discernible political insight. It did contain, however, a moment of accidental brilliance. In describing the atmosphere of the chamber, Barnaby wrote: "There is a peculiar energy in this room. Everyone seems to be performing for an audience that isn't there, saying things they don't entirely mean, in a language designed specifically to avoid saying anything at all. It is, I think, the most elaborate piece of theatre I have ever witnessed, and I once attended a six-hour performance of experimental mime in Shoreditch."

Sandra read this sentence, smiled, and decided that Barnaby Finch would be The London Prat's Westminster correspondent for the foreseeable future.

The Method (Or Lack Thereof)

Barnaby's approach to political journalism is, in the most generous interpretation, a form of radical naivety. He does not read briefing papers. He does not attend lobby briefings. He does not cultivate sources in the traditional sense, though he has accidentally become quite friendly with a Parliamentary janitor named Trevor, who knows where all the best biscuits are kept and who has, on several occasions, provided Barnaby with information about which MPs have been crying in the toilets, which Barnaby has dutifully reported without comment or analysis.

His reporting process is simple: he attends debates, watches what happens, and writes down what he sees, in much the same way that a naturalist might observe the behaviour of a particularly bewildering species of bird. He does not attempt to interpret the significance of events. He does not place them in historical context. He simply describes them, with the sort of gentle bewilderment that one might bring to watching a family of badgers engaged in an unusually complex territorial dispute.

And yet. And yet. The results have been, by any measure, remarkable.

The Predictions That Weren't Predictions

In June 2024, Barnaby wrote a piece about a Cabinet reshuffle in which he noted, entirely without apparent understanding of what he was saying, that "the man who was in charge of the economy has been moved to a job that sounds less important but probably pays the same, which I suppose is what happens when someone breaks something expensive and doesn't want to admit it." This was, in fact, an extraordinarily astute summary of what had happened. No political analyst in the country had put it quite so clearly. Barnaby had arrived at this conclusion by simply watching a man carry a box out of a building and looking slightly embarrassed about it.

In September 2024, during a particularly tense parliamentary debate on immigration policy, Barnaby filed a dispatch that included the observation: "Both sides of this argument seem to be talking about completely different countries. I suspect this is intentional. If they were talking about the same country, they might actually have to find solutions, and solutions, I have noticed, are not nearly as useful in this building as arguments." Political commentators across the country shared this passage, some approvingly, some incredulously, and several, it must be said, with a faint air of embarrassment at having missed the obvious.

The Incident With the Prime Minister

The moment that truly cemented Barnaby Finch's reputation — and, by extension, The London Prat's credibility as a source of political insight — came in October 2024, during Prime Minister's Questions. The Prime Minister, in responding to a question about the economy, delivered a particularly convoluted answer that lasted approximately four minutes and contained, by one count, zero actual pieces of information. Every other journalist in the gallery wrote about the substance (or lack thereof) of the answer. Barnaby wrote about the Prime Minister's shoes.

"The Prime Minister's shoes," he wrote, "are very polished. This is the first thing I notice. They are the shoes of a man who has been told, repeatedly and firmly, that shoes matter. I wonder if they are new. They look new. They are the kind of shoes that say: 'I am serious. I am important. I have not, contrary to what you might think, just made up what I am saying.' Whether the shoes are telling the truth is, I think, the key question today, and one which nobody else seems to be asking."

The piece went viral. Not because of the shoe observation, though that was memorable enough. It went viral because, buried in the final paragraph, Barnaby had written: "I have been watching this man for several months now. I have noticed that when he is lying, he looks directly at the camera. When he is telling the truth, he looks at his shoes. Today, he looked at the camera for four minutes straight. Draw your own conclusions. His shoes, meanwhile, remained impeccable."

Nobody could prove this was true. Nobody could prove it was false. Several journalists attempted to verify it by reviewing footage of previous PMQs sessions. The results were, at best, inconclusive and, at worst, deeply suggestive. The Prime Minister's office issued no comment, which Barnaby reported with the single word: "Interesting."

The Question of Accuracy

Critics of The London Prat have occasionally accused Barnaby Finch of being inaccurate. This is, in a technical sense, difficult to sustain. Barnaby does not make claims. He makes observations. He does not analyse. He describes. He does not predict. He simply watches, and writes down what he sees, with a clarity that is, paradoxically, sharpened rather than dulled by his total lack of understanding of the political context.

It is a technique that has been compared, by media theorists at universities that have too much time on their hands, to "defamiliarisation" — the literary technique in which familiar things are described as though they were strange, thereby forcing the reader to see them anew. Barnaby has never heard of defamiliarisation. He has never heard of most literary techniques. He simply does not know enough about politics to treat it as normal, and so he treats it as extraordinary, and the reader, seeing politics through his eyes, is forced to confront the extraordinary nature of something they had long since stopped noticing.

Whether this is genius or accident is a question The London Prat officially does not care about. Sandra Blackwood, when asked, shrugged and said: "Does it matter? The column's brilliant. Leave him alone. He's happy. He's got his biscuits. Everyone's happy."

Barnaby Finch, for his part, continues to file his dispatches from Westminster, continues to befriend janitors, and continues to watch the most powerful people in the country with the same mild, amused bewilderment that he once brought to observing a particularly confused sea slug off the coast of Devon. He remains, by his own account, entirely content.

"I like it here," he told The London Prat in a rare interview with itself. "The biscuits are good. The drama is entertaining. And I get to watch very important people pretend very hard to be even more important. It's the best job in the world, really. As long as you don't actually care about politics."

Read more of Barnaby's Westminster dispatches at prat.uk.