William Perrin has written a very insightful piece on local newspapers and the future of local news on his newish website.

One point which caught my eye, although he only mentions it in passing, is his reference to "the curious complicity of the Lobby", which I suspect is inspired by the Damian McBride affair and Guido Fawkes' complaints about the Telegraph supposedly colluding with Downing Street.

Nobody should get too hung up on the lobby. It doesn't really exist in the way people imagine.

The Lobby is the name given to the journalists who report on politics at Westminster. That's basically it. It no more has strange working practices or a special hold over the way news is reported than the education correspondents or crime correspondents. The only difference with the Lobby is that it has a weird name, while there's no collective noun to describe the nation's transport correspondents, for example.

This was illustrated when Alastair Campbell hatched a plan to end the power of the Lobby by ending briefings for them in Downing Street and, instead, having the Prime Minister's Official Spokesman hold press conferences which any journalist could attend.

The result was that exactly the same UK journalists attended the press conferences as before, behaving in exactly the same way as before. Because the people who attended were simply the journalists hired by editors to report on politics.

The one thing that did change is that some foreign news organisations, who did not have full-time Westminster correspondents, sent their staff along to these briefings. But I don't think that lasted long. Frankly, Lobby briefings (or whatever they're being called) are rarely very interesting.

Some organisations like the Press Association may have staff at Westminster who are not considered to be Lobby correspondents, but this reflects the role given to them by PA. They are Parliamentary reporters who report strictly on what is said in the Chamber of the Commons.

It's perfectly true that the Lobby tends to collude, discussing story ideas and angles to take. So do other journalists - education reporters may well get together in a huddle after a press conference to discuss what they've just heard.

It's also true that they can, perhaps, get too close to the people they write about. But again, that can happen with any other reporter.

Damian McBride did not send poison text messages to "the Lobby". He sent them to trusted journalists he was close to. Or at least, so I am told. I never got one, despite being a member of the magic circle.

The criticisms made of political reporting may or may not be valid, but to blame them on the Lobby is missing the point. The Lobby is just a name.

I also wrote my column, with a slightly sarcastic look at the hysteria surrounding the aporkalypse.

Tomorrow will be busier, as MPs vote on expenses reforms. . .

Checking out the West Midlands feed - which provides links to press releases from our local government office - I was surprised it only has three followers, two of whom are Nick and I.

Government press releases aren't always fascinating reads, but they're definitely worth watching for local political anoraks and West Midlands journalists covering health, education, transport or just about any other area of public policy.

Guido is ecstatic - the PM's spokesman told lobby journalists he "didn't recognise" the claims it made about Brown's behaviour, which is Westminster-speak for saying they're wrong.

I was teasing one of the authors this morning by telling her she was now the story, but she didn't rise to the bait.

Whatever you make of the Bloomberg feature, we should all be grateful to the writers for introducing us to the concept of the news sandwich. Supposedly, when Brown's PR people are telling him what the papers have been saying, they downplay the negative coverage by first telling him about a positive story, then describing the negative one before swiftly moving on to another positive item.

It's like something out of The Thick of It, which, by the way, I heartily recommend.