BuzzFeed News understands this a concerted strategy, with the intention that print and online journalists will only be given access to the Labour leader on a rota basis. This ensures individual outlets spend more time with Corbyn on each visit while avoiding the risks associated with having the same pack of journalists following the Labour leader every day.

As a result Labour hopes to secure friendlier coverage – based around set-piece interviews and profiles – without having to contend with a cantankerous rolling mob of journalists.



"We are using broadcast with our key messages each day, which tend to be based around our policy offer, and that's the way to reach the most people in the most unfiltered way," said a source close to the Labour leadership, explaining why they haven't been inviting journalists from most national newspapers.

The trade-off is straightforward: Corbyn's team are losing coverage in newspapers read by swing voters such as the Daily Mail – but at the same time denying reporters from such openly hostile outlets the chance to define the news agenda by asking questions that throw the campaign off its desired topic.

"The media tends to hone in on trivialities," said Matt Zarb-Cousin, who worked as Corbyn's press spokesperson until two months ago. "The solution often proposed is better media management, but there’s always something that allows the media to go off on a tangent. There are legitimate questions about whether it’s in the public interest to find these trivialities to distract from genuine policy scrutiny."

In short, if you invite 20 national print reporters on a campaign trip there's a high likelihood they will collectively spend all day chasing the same negative line and snarking on Twitter about an ill-judged photo opportunity. Why take the risk?

The downside is that there are fewer people there to cover what does happen. With the exception of a single intrepid journalist from the Mirror who made it to a soggy Clapham car park this bank holiday Monday, the coverage of the Labour leader's three visits has been a mix of TV clips for the evening news, soundbites for radio stations, and reports in regional media.

"It seems deeply pointless to invite the Sun, Mail, and Telegraph to events so they can sneer at you, distort what you say, and mislead their readers," said Tom Baldwin, who led Ed Miliband's communications operation during the 2015 general election. “I’ve some sympathy with it because they’re not going to get any positive coverage, any straight coverage in those papers.



"There is a problem with those three papers in particular in that they're not really interested in covering the election. They confused reporting with taking dictation from CCHQ."