Just over a year ago, at a meeting in Virginia during the Republican primaries, Donald Trump’s team threatened to remove me from the room because I had no press accreditation. For three weeks they had failed to respond to my requests, and the venue was open to anyone.

Even at that stage, Trump’s relationship with what he terms “the lying media” was toxic. Still, I hung in there, despite the menacing glares and the threat of ejection. A reporter from the New York Times told me: “Incredible. You’re lucky to be based in Europe, where something like that would be impossible.”

Impossible? Perhaps not. On the eve of the recent French election, reporters from Buzzfeed and Politico were refused entry by the Front National. But then, you expect that sort of thing from the extreme right. Given their mindset and the way they deal with facts and the truth, they see the press as their natural enemy. But it’s also exceptional. In Europe populist politicians win brownie points with their voters for sneering at the media, yet they do not uninvite them; and, by and large, they don’t try to stop the media from doing their job.

This week, however, my faith in the dependability of the elementary rules of the game was dented. The Conservative party might rhapsodise about traditional values, but hospitality, courtesy and respect for the press are apparently not among those.

Last Friday morning, I called Tory party headquarters to ask where Theresa May would be campaigning this week. I was told that if I sent them an email, I’d be briefed on the planning. Come Monday morning, when I still hadn’t heard anything, I started to get more insistent.

My emails weren’t answered. On the phone I was told the same thing as before: “Things are very busy right now, but someone will be in touch.” So I upped the pressure, not least because I’d heard from British journalists that they too were only getting information in dribs and drabs. The many complaints about the tightly controlled organisation of the May campaign – no debate with opponents, campaign appearances with a carefully screened audience of supporters – simply increased the feeling that I was being kept dangling.

Then, suddenly, a reaction. In fact it looked like someone had slipped up and forwarded a mail meant only for internal use: “I’ll leave this guy in your hands …” There was no smirking emoji with it, but it felt like there should have been. Eventually, after more than a dozen phone calls and emails, I got a reply: “There are limits to the amount of media we can accommodate at visits, and we have had a lot of requests from both UK and international media.”

That might sound like a reasonable answer. It isn’t.

The suggestion that May is besieged by hordes of camera teams and reporters from around the globe is nonsense. That media frenzy was last year, during the Brexit campaign. This year it’s France and Germany (and the madness in the White House) that are keeping the world on the edge of its seat. The UK is important, but not that important. The truth is that today only the usual suspects from the national media follow May on the campaign trail, which amounts mostly to nothing more than photo-ops.

I’ve been following foreign politicians during their campaigns for more than 20 years. Never has there been an accommodation problem, not even with Mitt Romney or Emmanuel Macron. Macron’s campaign managers constantly kept journalists up to speed and laid on a press bus if he visited a market somewhere. You might miss something for organisational reasons, but then you’d make up for it the next day. That’s the way it works in democracies, as it has since time out of mind. Except for Donald Trump. Except for Theresa May.

Is it that Belgium is insignificant? It’s still a neighbour, and De Standaard is its leading newspaper. Is it that De Standaard is based in the capital of the European Union (the enemy, thus, in May’s manifest strategy to portray herself as a 21st-century Boudicca fighting the continental imperialists)? Who knows, but the New York Times has the same experience of being deliberately kept at arm’s-length.

May’s campaign team emailed to say that there would be opportunities in the future for the foreign press to follow her. In the future. If it suits them. The media’s role in holding politicians to account has been reversed.

In modern democracies politicians invariably regard the press’s role as watchdog as a necessary evil. In recent years, political marketing gurus have put their stamp on campaigning. They are smart professionals who hate accidents and incidents – such as a woman who buttonholes the prime minister in the middle of the street to berate her about the consequences of austerity policies. For May, who seems headed for a historic victory but who tends to be a bit awkward in her dealing with common people, media attention in the run-up to the election is often a risk best avoided.

Moreover, in many countries fierce political polarisation means that all media get stuck with a label, even those that, like my own paper, seek the nuanced middle ground. Those that fail to prove loyal friends are potential enemies. As a result, access to politicians is increasingly less a right and more a favour, to be measured out and reserved for friends in the media, and – if it really can’t be helped – one or two others, at a safe moment. It doesn’t leave much room for normal news coverage. I was not surprised to hear that even well-established British media like Sky News are now complaining about being cut out of access to the prime minister’s events. You either belong to Theresa’s Team or you don’t. Which resembles the situation on the other side of the Atlantic a lot.

Let me make a comparison with football, one sport in which Belgians are welcome in England. Refusing to talk to your opponent is not very sporting but nor is it against the rules: it’s like a team that defends a lead without much creativity. But keeping out the media is rather like barring the referee and linesmen from the stadium. It may help to win the game, but the game will certainly not be the better for it.