“Labour’s relationships with the lobby has come on leaps and bounds in recent years…” Keir Starmer told a room full of political journalists this week.
“In 2017 the [Daily] Mail described me as weak and floundering”, he joked.
“But this year there was a notable thawing of the rhetoric when they described me as merely floundering.”
The drinks event, held by Starmer in his parliamentary office, was notably more packed than previous years, as reporters rushed to build relationships with the man overwhelmingly likely to become Britain’s Prime Minister.
Starmer too, was keen to ingratiate himself, joking about his “lads’ holiday” with the Sun’s Political Editor Harry Cole.
Yet the timing of the drinks, on the same week that the High Court ruled against the Daily Mirror group in the Prince Harry phone hacking case, highlights the sometimes fractious relationship between the press and the man who media executives at another big media group, still blame personally for it.
As one senior figure at a Murdoch paper put it to me recently, “he tried to put Rebekah [Brooks - News UK Managing Director] in prison”.
“Rupert won’t forget that”.
So will the Labour leader, who led the Crown Prosecution Service during the first wave of the phone hacking scandal, really turn out to be the man who finally grasps the challenge of reforming Britain’s dated and often lawless media industry?
Or will Starmer instead simply turn out to be just ‘one of the lads’?