Politicians go out of their way to avoid being captured doing something that makes them appear either unsympathetic or uncaring, knowing how much a single image can be damaging to their reputation.

Such an event happened at the weekend, when Home Secretary Suella Bravermann was ‘caught’ apparently laughing during a trip to Rwanda to see the facilities the government intended to use to process asylum seeker applications.

It turned out the image was not all it seemed and had been cropped to take out three other people, one of whom was apparently a Rwandan minister.

It is this kind of distortion that makes politicians increasingly wary of putting a foot wrong - knowing that social media will have a field day.

In this particular case, there was the added fact that only accredited journalists from ‘sympathetic’ newspapers or broadcasters joined the Home Secretary on her trip.

Those that didn’t get to go will have been possibly motivated to look for something negative to cover and a picture of the Home Secretary doing something like laughing fitted the bill.

Is this a problem? Access to political VIPs during domestic visits to the UK are increasingly shut-down to the media - including local and regional outlets.

'Politicians want to get their message across unspun but engaging in a game of cat-and-mouse only serves to stoke up resentment...'

A visit to Kent by the former home secretary Priti Patel came with her advisers firmly rejecting all interview bids and strict instructions that we were only there to “observe” events.

When the Prime Minister Boris Johnson launched the government's initiative on Rwanda, he chose Kent.

The only problem was 10 Downing Street did not alert the local media and were eventually persuaded to agree to a five-minute chat if someone could get to the venue in half-an-hour. They couldn’t and Boris evaded the interview.

Of course politicians want to get their message across unspun by the media. But engaging in a game of cat-and-mouse only serves to stoke up resentment.

DESPITE the fears politicians harbour about the media, there will be no shortage of applicants to become the Conservative’s next MP after Gordon Henderson announced he was standing down from the Sittingbourne and Sheppey constituency at the election.

With a majority of 24,000, it’s a plum seat - although nothing in politics is guaranteed. And Labour held the constituency for three successive terms under Tony Blair. Even so, this is a constituency that is hard to imagine changing hands at the next election.