Talking to themselves

On his feet

I’ve listened to the speech, heard the reactions – from the breathless enthusiasm of the younger activists to the not-even-faint praise of Barry Sheerman on 5Live earlier, having trashed Gordon yesterday too.

The most telling reaction was that of @BBCLauraK, who tweeted that she wasn’t sure what the big message of the speech would be. The main message is this - I am Gordon, your leader and I have shown in the past what will happen to people within the party who stand up to my authority. I will take your ideas and pass them off as mine, I’ll demote you and brief against you as necessary. I am here to lead you into the next election whatever you may think and the political career of anyone who dares challenge me will be over.

It’s not a message to the country, it’s a message to his party. What the country will see, I think, is a leader whose party has been in power 12 years and who should have done many of the things he is now talking about – addressing anti-social behaviour, finishing Lords reform, looking after the poor and ensuring proper childcare provision – although what low-income households will do with ten free hours a week is a puzzler. The public will give little credit for catching up with them on ID cards and the recalling of MPs is a silly Conservative idea that will lead to abuses. Everything in his speech was tired, rehashed, borrowed – it came from anywhere but him as he lamely looks around for something resembling a “vision”.

The BBC seems to have been keener on the speech than most but that’s not surprising. There were good things in it – a National Care Service isn’t a bad idea on the surface. But where is the money coming from? Brown has already spent and lent the country to breaking point and we cannot even service the debt on borrowing at the moment. Spending cuts and tax rises are inevitable – so how on earth does he expect people to take him seriously with these uncosted ideas?

More likely, they are things that an incoming Conservative government will have to “cancel” – even though they are not started – and opportunities for the Labour opposition to capitalise on. It’s politics, but it’s hardly statesmanship from the Statesman of the Year. Once again, Gordon has delivered a speech for his party rather than his country and as the Labour Party becomes ever more inward-looking, those looking outward – such as Peter Meddlesome – will seem ever more lone voices.

I would prefer a PM who can look beyond themselves and foster real reform. But the only way to do that is to take on the Civil Service (which is letting Brown “cancel” ID cards because they know he won’t be around much longer). The New Labour project looked at one point like it had the better of the Whitehall blockers. But the battle has now been lost and Gordon showed today that he simply doesn’t have the substance to fight on, even if the heart is willing.

I want to hear DC tell everyone what the plan is. Let’s hope he’s got one.

Luvvies, Labour’s Lost

Flawed but not floored - can he turn it around

It’s a bit early to define a narrative from the Labour Conference in Brighton just yet but so far the most interesting thing coming out of the proceedings there is the attitude of the BBC.

First, we have a surprisingly combative interview from the normally obliging Andrew Marr, who went so far as to raise with the PM the issue of his alleged medication. Predictably, Brown dodged the question and instead went for the sympathy vote over his eyesight, something that David Blunkett – a far more robust and substantial man – would never have done. Whatever the answer, it caught me (and quite a few of the Tory Twitterati that I follow) out – one wonders whether this is the last Marr/Brown interview.

It obviously irked Marr to ask the question as much as it did Brown to have to answer it. The BBC man’s pleading that it was a “fair” question was followed up by some serious feigned interest in Brown’s sob story. Obviously I’m sorry he has a sight impairment – but it was noticeable how much detail he was prepared to give up on this in contrast with the actual question about prescription drugs.

Then we had this from Laura Kuenssberg (@BBCLauraK) – she really is a gem on top of a compost heap. Not only was she prepared to tell viewers the actual mood of the conference on Brown’s arrival (ie pretty dreadful) but also to lob some real questions at him about his law-breaking ministers and then reflect that the party activists (the BBC usual calls them crowds as if to ignore their handpicked pedigree) were making so much noise that he couldn’t hear her. And she hinted, quite correctly, that this was probably deliberate.

But look at the story headline – “Labour ‘should expose the Tories’”. Clearly the online staff have gone seriously off message – or on message with PM. It doesn’t reflect the downbeat message from LauraK and about Labour – or indeed much about Labour at all. It’s just a pop at the Conservatives.

Previous to this, of course, was this beauty – again courtesy of online staff – suggesting that Brown and Barack Obama are, after all, the closest of chums and that Obama doesn’t see Brown as a washed-up political liability or “depressing to be around“, as one of his staff leaked to the press. According to the BBC, this official line “quelled rumours” of an Obama snub. No it didn’t – and who are they to report that as fact? Any moderately sensible person watching the polls will realise that the last thing Obama needs with his problems at home is to become embroiled in some tawdry scheme by a foreign political party to prop up their ailing government with lent popularity.

Obama isn’t my cup of tea but he’s certainly not a fool. And only a fool would consider anything other than refusing any more public airtime with Gordon than was absolutely necessary. Any suggestion to the contrary is completely counter-inituitive and total propaganda, which the Beeb is only too happy to repeat.

Going back to the polls, not even Obama could have found a way to spin a poll that suggests you are heading out of office positively. I can’t now find the link on the BBC website – maybe they’ve seen sense and pulled it – but this poll, which states 41% of people think Brown is almost certainly going to lose is bad, bad news. Instead, the BBC concentrated on the 48% of people who though Labour still had a “slim chance” of winning in 2010, along with the 11% who think he will win.

It’s a silly question – you can’t ever rule out that a party has a “slim chance” of winning. I’m not surprised so many people ticked that box rather than commit themselves but it doesn’t reflect reality. The BBC is supposed to be here to present facts not spin to us that 59% of people think Gordon is still in with a chance next year – of course he is, he’s taking part in the election. They are more aware than ever that politics is self-fulfilling and by buying into this silly poll (I though they didn’t report routine polls anyway) they are just playing PM and the PM’s game for them. At our expense.

I don’t expect the BBC to give DC a free ride. I don’t expect them to push through government PR work. But there is a bipolarity within the corporation at the moment between the political pragmatists that realise the New Labour years are 95% drawing to a close and the politically-motivated staff who desperately want to play a hand in upsetting the odds with sly journalism. It’s got no place in the BBC and they have no place on the public payroll.

The BBC is a service, not a political tool. I’m afraid quite a number of its staff work there for the wrong reasons – they should stand for election instead.

#welovetheenvironment

Having achieved a degree of success conning the media into following their vacuous Twitter campaign #welovethenhs, @KerryMP and the Labour e-coterie has now decided to run another silly season bandwagon, this time on the environment.

Enter Ed Miliband, the Environment Secretary now fully Twittered up, who Tweeted a week ago:

“@KerryMP totally agree on end of the line. Showed in my constit. did they give
out guide on fish to buy? Should be campaign on this.”

This particular piece of non-communication refers not to the end of the line for the Labour government followed by advice on having to buy your own fish (as opposed to getting it on expenses) but to the Bluefin Tuna boycott being pioneered by this organisation.

Now it’s turned into a wider campaign on the Road to Copenhagen, where in 104 days, world leaders will sit down and talk about the environment. They will discuss carbon outputs before India, China and the US refuse to lower their own emissions, instead paying for lesser developed nations to lower theirs in lieu. They will refuse to cut air travel, increase investment in renewable technology, lower oil consumption and take proper action over the destruction of rainforest and natural green space.

There will be no progress on population control (except in China where the sensible one-child policy is the most far-sighted thing about that nation) and instead we will get a series of headline-grabbing initiatives such as save the whale, hug the trees and re-glaze the icebergs – none of which will make the slightest difference to our environmental mess.

Still, if Labour really wants to push this charade as caring about the environment, that’s their problem. I’m sure a #RoadtoCopenhagen topic will appear soon, as well as some media coverage about climate-change denying Tories (which no doubt they will try and generate – Tory MPs/MEPs beware).

And after the environment, what will be the next campaign? It’s not as if Labour hasn’t got a huge mess that they’ve landed this nation in to try and sort out.

McCarthyism is back

There is one Labour MP whose media profile is being inflated by a concerted PR effort and that is Kerry McCarthy, the highly prolific Twitterer who in between tweets is also MP for Bristol East.

Having managed 4,555 updates in 36 weeks – that’s 126 a week, or an average of 18 each day – @KerryMP has now been “officially” appointed as Labour’s Twitter Tsar by Douglas Alexander, who was not only a very poor Secretary of State for Transport but will now look after Gordon Brown‘s general election campaign.

The very fact that anyone would be foolish enough to take on such a job is reason enough in my mind to doubt their judgement and to appoint a Twitter Tsar seems to institutionalise Twitter in a way that is the very opposite of its original intended purpose. That MPs have to be trained on how to use it is damning of the calibre of people that sit in parliament – most 14-year olds seem to pick it up in a few days.

So the thrusting of @KerryMP, willingly no doubt, into the limelight (she’s also in PR Week today as well) may seem like a good plan but I doubt that Twitter is going to win many votes at the next general election. Most people on Twitter are there, by their very nature, because like me they’ve already made up their mind and have something to say.

And Twitter is the perfect ether into which to spray their rants, prejudices and humour in the hope that some like mind will be found to appreciate it.

PS: @KerryMP ought not to spend too much time Twittering because her Bristol East seat is vulnerable. In 2005, neighbouring Bristol North turned yellow, overturning a Labour majority of 4,500 to give a majority of 5,000 to Stephen Williams. @KerryMP (majority 8,500) is facing ex-West Byfleet Tory councillor-turned Lib Dem PPC Mike Popham in the seat in 2010, which is packed full of students (ironically as a result of Labour’s accessibility programme). Will she hang on? Electoral Calculus predicts a Conservative gain of all things!

Cameron’s four-letter rant

Well, here’s the thing. DC went on Absolute Radio this morning and – presumably completely on purpose – used the words “twat” and “piss” (the latter as a verb) to get his point across.

Swearing doesn’t really bother me much; having worked in a newsroom for the former part of my career I got pretty used to it and even, I dare say, may have uttered a few choice phrases myself.

But there’s no need for DC to stoop to this kind of “Hague’s baseball cap” lowest common denominator. He’s a great interviewee and superb speaker with effective messages. He has a talent, like Tony Blair had, of capturing the issues that the public care about.

So I agree with David Hughes’s analysis in the Telegraph – it’s all a bit desperate and contrived. I thought Peter Mandelson had cornered the market there with his “underdog” confession on behalf of Labour. Sadly I was wrong.

More worryingly, this whole episode wasn’t spontaneous despite the immediate apology. The apology itself calls into question the tactic – did he mean to use those words? If not, why did he? If he meant to, why apologise? Is this a double bluff? Or a triple? It’s all a bit confused and DC, who’s normally spot on with this PR stuff, seems to have made a bad call.

The Telegraph Tories won’t like it and although they’ll probably vote for him anyway, it will leave a strange, unfamiliar taste in the mouth. That’s sometimes necessary – but surely not here?