According to this piece in the Daily Telegraph the ten least trusted professions in the UK begins with teachers  who are trusted by 69% of the population and engineers (56%) and then the bottom position with 7% of public support are Journalists and Politicians. I confess that I know some great people who are members of these two professions and their competence and integrity is as great as myself (I am an engineer) and my friends who are teachers. However one of the shared roles that Politicians and Journalists hold is the ability to influence society and in the case of Politicians to make decisions on behalf of all of us. I confess I rarely read the Telegraph, however one of their journalists whose tweet is shown above, Christopher Hope who is the papers Assistant Editor and Chief Political Correspondent describes himself on the social networking site, Linked In as “I work from The Daily Telegraph’s lobby office in the House of Commons, reporting on politics daily and holding the powerful to account for our readers.”

I assume being the Political correspondent when he claims to hold the powerful to account, he is referring to Politicians as opposed to the owners of multinational businesses or people such as the Barclay Brothers who own his newspaper. However holding people to account when one is the Chief Political Correspondent must be fascinating at present with the looming impact of Brexit and the failure of the Government to have a plan for a departure that it is promoting, and on the Labour Party for having a clear position on whether we should leave or stay and on what basis. Of course its always useful when a Royal Baby is announced or a Marriage is being planned to fill numerous column inches in a paper. However such an issue is usually the domain of Royal Correspondents. If Christopher Hope thinks that his tweet above is holding the powerful to account he has either run out of ideas and perhaps needs a break from his role at the Telegraph or is trying to distract attention away from something much more serious, such as the damage that Brexit is doing to our nation. Bearing in mind that journalists can be as powerful as politicians, the question is who is holding Mr Hope to account?