If your name’s not on the list…

An amusing spat has broken out between The Guardian and Defra, the Department for the Environment, Food & Rural Affairs.

You can read the full details here if you wish, but the short version is that the paper’s environment reporter was left out of a briefing on the water industry.

Defra says it invited a Guardian journalist and that there is only one invite per publication. The fact that journalist is on holiday doesn’t seem to have dented its stance.

This smacks of cock-up rather than conspiracy, but it is not the first time it has happened lately.

The Guardian, Mirror and Independent were last month excluded from a Home Office trip to Rwanda to discuss immigration policy.

Guardian editor Kath Viner sees a “chilling” pattern of behaviour from the government.

There’s a professional — ethical? — conundrum here for the flaks involved in enforcing this sort of stuff.

They are mostly civil servants – they work for the public, not the politicians.

It feels like it is time for someone very senior to have a word with ministers along the lines of – my guys aren’t going enforce this silliness anymore.

For hacks, who get invited to 50 briefings a day they have no interest in, being shut out of the one they did want raises a laugh. And is strongly motivational in ways that hardly help Defra and the rest.