There’s never just one bubble in your bath. There are hundreds of bubbles, washed hither and yon. Which, of course, is also the case with the Brexit bubble (angry northerners snub metropolitan elite) and the Trump bubble (Ohio raises two fingers to DC).
Basically, a political bubble involves one sector of society – geographic or demographic – failing to register what’s going on in the bubble next door. Cue mortification in Richmond Park. But what, pray, does that leave the Eurosceptic bubble merchants in the Mail-Express-Sun nexus?
They don’t much cover Europe on the spot. They rely on lobby correspondents sitting in Westminster to talk to similarly sceptical ministers who confirm what they thought in the first place. A few handwritten notes under a secretary’s arm as she walks into Downing Street sets them fizzing. They love beach holidays with sangria or spaghetti, but they’d only go (briefly) to places like Romania or Bulgaria to confirm the ideas they started with.
They exist, then, in a bubble of their own: one liable to pop whenever and if ever real negotiations start. For Europe isn’t the closed, tough, homogenous circle of sceptic legend. And the bubbles, for me, always blow high and wide at this time of the year as entries for the European Press Prize flood in by the hundreds, entries in all the languages of Europe from more than 40 nations (non-EU members as well as Brussels-centric ones, Russia and Turkey as well as Switzerland or Greece).
Journalism, this journalism, operates beyond a bubble culture. It crosses frontiers. It peers beyond Angela Merkel to the forces behind her. It looks for the whole picture: of gathering repression in Poland and Hungary, of bleakness in Istanbul, of aspiration in Albania and humanity along the refugee road. It deals in humanity’s complexities far away from those employees of Introversion Inc, forever blowing their bubbles.