ONE of the most charming things about the British media is that it generally predicts almost everything wrong.

It didn’t see the support for Jeremy Corbyn coming within the Labour movement and then more widely at the 2017 general election, and it couldn’t believe Donald Trump would really make it to The White House. And, as for Brexit – let’s just say our press corps would lose their shirts at the racetrack if asked to decipher a form guide.

Folks, it took a year for them to realise Boris Johnson and others were partying in Downing Street during the Covid lockdown – right under their noses – and then they still called it the scoop of the year when they finally found out.

Of course, it doesn’t matter how many times they miss the goal, the same faces will still be back in the media tents on College Green at the next election – and reviewing the papers each night in the guise as some sort of trends guru.

There’s always surprise when their vox pops culled from a few hours on market day in a town outside of London fail to give them an accurate picture.

Maybe they’d have more of a chance if there was a bit more diversity up top, in the lobby, and on the politics shows. As radical as it might sound, perhaps a range of backgrounds and perspectives could help.

So to a cheeky new Twitter feed – @journoschool – which is currently showing the paucity of any of this by relentlessly sharing details of the private education of many of our alpha reporters and columnists, and the thousands it all cost.

As we already knew, almost anybody with any influence over the national TV news and press and its messaging went to an exclusive fee-paying school as a teenager, and then more often than not went off to Oxbridge.

Ah, but… At this point in the debate, the state school-educated reporters who did make it rush in to explain how unfair such characterisations are because – look at them!

They had, we will be told, worked to be where they are, and didn’t have to rely on a family connection or a gilded pass to a well-paid column in The Times.

And yet as proud as they are for getting to be the deputy assistant to somebody who went to Charterhouse or Westminster, they possibly don’t realise their humblebrags are often as depressing because they illustrate just how many extra hurdles they needed to jump over compared to Uncle Nepo’s nephew.

Well done for cracking the maze and being brilliant at working those 80-hour weeks along the way, but it doesn’t mean this obstacle course is fair or leading to a more reflective media.

A few one-offs haven’t been enough to change how it all works.