Category Archives: Politics

Change You Can Bereave In

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Nice, acerbic NYT OpEd piece by A.A. Gill.

These are not three of the most engaging or noble statesmen the nation has produced. Mr. Cameron, the Tory, is personable — your mother would like him. A fresh-faced character who tries, and fails, with emotionally winning oratory. He always sounds like the coxswain urging the rowing team to pull together and straighten their straw boaters.

We look at Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat, and try in vain to imagine him going toe-to-toe with leaders like Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel or even the Queen of Tonga. In any other decade, the best he could have hoped for would have been a post as a junior minister in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, an ambassador’s bag-carrier. He speaks five languages but can’t say boo in any of them. His children all have Spanish names.

Gordon Brown is a character from a tragic opera, twisted by ambition and a Presbyterian sense of fateful destiny. He has waited 13 years, mostly in Tony Blair’s shadow, for this poisoned chalice and has a pessimist’s luck. He wrestles with an Old Testament temper, and it’s said that he has no friends. Certainly, none of them have come out to contradict this. Last week he was recorded by an open microphone petulantly calling a respectable working-class woman he had just spoken to in the street a “bigot.” Off the record, his advisers say they are quite relieved — it’s usually so much worse.

Paxman’s nemesis

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For me, the most memorable moment of the election campaign so far was not Gordon Brown’s “Bigotgate” but Jeremy Paxman’s humiliation at the hands of the economics spokesman for the Welsh Nationalist party. Don’t get me wrong — I’m a great admirer of Paxo, whom I knew slightly (and liked a lot) when I was the Observer‘s TV critic. He’s one of the ornaments of the UK journalistic scene, and a great adversarial interviewer. His Newsnight interview with Michael Howard is one of the classics of the genre. He’s also — unusually for a TV professional — quite a good writer.

But he met his match the other night. At first, the interview appeared to be following the standard script. The Welsh Nats are a joke in metropolitan circles, of which Newsnight is the epicentre, and Paxo’s approach embodies this contempt. The question implied by his body language is “Who is this provincial hick and why are we bothering with him? Oh well, let’s get it over with.” And note the elegant sarcasm implicit in the reference to the “august position” of the interviewee, who is chairman of the Principality Building Society. I ask you — a building society!.

But then… Well, see for yourself.

The most revealing bit is Paxman’s exasperation at being asked to consult pages of tedious statistics, and his pique at being accused of not doing his homework. His interviewee is daring to hold him — Jeremy Paxman — to account. But imagine how his inquisitorial indignation would be stoked if a politician sighed impatiently when asked to examine a page of statistical evidence containing what Paxo regarded as clinching evidence of malfeasance.

Memo to future Paxman interviewees: master the detail and stick to it. Challenge him on statistics — the more detailed the better. Remember that grandees like Paxman don’t do detail. It’s below their pay-grade. And make sure the result goes straight onto YouTube — in case the BBC pulls it from iPlayer.

The polo-mint election

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[http://www.flickr.com/photos/lwr/5516949/]

Well, well. Someone suggested last week that this should be called the “polo mint campaign” because it’s got a large hole in the middle of it: the silence of all three parties on what they will do to reduce the deficit. I ranted about this the other day. Today the Financial Times, no less, wades in on the same theme. Its first Leader, “Winning office but not a mandate,” says, in part:

This week, the Institute for Fiscal Studies quantified the size of that silence. It revealed that the Liberal Democrats were the most forthcoming of the main parties, but even they had only told voters about one-quarter of the retrenchment that they would impose upon the country. The UK’s politicians are suffering some kind of pre-traumatic stress disorder.

Indeed, the parties are not only refusing to address the deficit problem. They continue to promote expensive hobby-horses. The Lib Dems are pushing a large tax change and the Conservatives pledge dear public sector reforms and tax cuts. The Tories, in common with Labour, also promise not to cut some large departments.

Little wonder that opinion polls show voters still believe that “efficiency savings” alone can rein in the deficit. But they are in for the shock of their lives – and will respond with fury when they learn the truth. Their anger, moreover, will not be directed at bankers or bureaucrats. It will be aimed at the politicians who hid their plans from the public.

Britain now faces a period of public austerity without any detailed consensus about retrenchment, and no broad public support for it. That will make the task of balancing the books more difficult and poses a risk to the credibility of any future plan to rein in the country’s gaping fiscal deficit.

Whoever wins this election will not be able to claim that they have a mandate to cut the state. That will, in part, be their own fault for choosing silence and short-term electoral advantage over outspoken courage. The public might not like hard truths, but they were barely given a chance to hear any. The next government’s silence in this election campaign could cost them the election. After this.

It’s not every day the Pink ‘Un and I find ourselves in agreement. So let us celebrate unanimity while we still can.

The Sun is looking for disappointed NHS staff. I wonder why.

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A copy of an intriguing email just popped into my inbox:

From: [redacted]
Sent: 27 April 2010 11:15
To: [redacted]
Subject: request from Jenna Sloan, The Sun

If you have relevant information for the media professional concerned
please click this link to reply:
jenna.sloan@the-sun.co.uk

Request deadline: Thursday 29 April, 2010, 4:00 pm

Contact me by e-mail at jenna.sloan@the-sun.co.uk

My request: I’m looking for a teacher and a nurse to be case studies in The Sun next week.
This is for a political, election feature and both must be willing to say why they feel let down by the Labour Government, and why they are thinking about voting Conservative.

We’ll need to picture them, and also have a chat about their political opinions.
We can pay the case studies £100 for their time.

Please do let me know if you think you can help.

Is this genuine, I wonder? If so, interesting, ne c’est pas? First of all in terms of the implicit journalistic ‘standards’, but also in terms of chequebook journalism. It just shows you what they think of teachers and NHS Staff — assuming that they’d be willing to pimp themselves for £100. Max Clifford’s clients wouldn’t blow their noses for that.

Quote of the Day

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“David Cameron will protect the BBC, he sees it as a very important part of his brand of modern conservatism. He loves the BBC programmes. He’s a huge fan of Top Gear.”

Tory Arts & Culture spokesman to David Hare, as
reported in the Guardian.

Roll on that hung Parliament

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Lovely, thoughtful piece by Alan Massie in the Spectator in which he dissects the Tory ‘arguments’ against a balanced Parliament.

Tory warnings of the dire consequences of a hung parliament are understandable but, I suspect, unfortunate. There is little evidence that the electorate believes that a hung parliament will be a disaster, far less than they can be cajoled into thinking that they’re letting Britain down if they don’t vote Conservative.

And that, my friends, is the underlying message sent by the Tories’ blitz against a hung parliament.

A hung election might not be ideal but it might also be a fitting end to this exhausted, depressing parliament. But it need not be the disaster the Tories claim. The PDF they released today – and the advert – is thin gruel. Essentially they argue that 1974 was a disaster and this proves that hung parliaments are and always must be a terrible thing. Secondly, they say that many city types worry about financial uncertainty if no party wins overall control. Thirdly, the Tories warn that anything that moves Britain down the road to proportional representation is a bad thing because it's a bad thing that always ends badly.

I particularly like the argument that we shouldn’t have a balanced Parliament because it might upset those nice chaps in the City.

Quote of the day

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If the iPad were a British party leader would it be:

a. Nick Clegg, because it’s new

b. David Cameron, because it’s shiny

c. Gordon Brown, because it displays the symptoms of severe control-freakery?

Answer: d., all of the above.

From John Lanchester, who has just bought an iPad.

Politicians and people v MSM

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Rory Cellan-Jones, the BBC’s admirable Tech expert has a puzzling post on his blog in which he claims that:

So far, it’s been a much better election for the mainstream media – or the “MSM” as they’re described by an often contemptuous blogosphere – than you might have expected. The bloggers hoped they would boss this campaign, breaking stories, setting the mood, and leaving the flat-footed old media types trailing in its wake.

But the newspapers, and in particular the broadcasters have proved far more influential, with the TV debates dwarfing every other aspect of the campaign.

He then goes on to tell a story about a Tory candidate, Joanne Cash, who took exception to an article about her in the Sunday Times by a journalist named Camilla Long. But instead of grinning and bearing it, Ms Cash hit back on Twitter. Rory also cites the way in which the Labour ex-minister, Tom Watson (a formidable twitterer btw) immediately rebutted on his blog an incorrect story about him in a national newspaper.

Rory thinks that these examples illustrate the way in which online media make things different this time. And of course, at one level he’s right. But IMHO they’re just trivial examples and suggest that he’s missing the bigger picture.

Also, on a pedantic note, I’d like to see some evidence for his assertion that denizens of the “contemptuous” blogosphere “hoped they would boss this campaign, breaking stories, setting the mood, and leaving the flat-footed old media types trailing in its wake”. I can’t remember any blogger expressing such sentiments. Or have I just been missing a meme?