Brown's confused media strategy
James Forsyth 12:40pm
I must admit to being slightly puzzled by Gordon Brown’s interview in The New Statesman this week with GMTV’s political editor, Gloria De Piero. It is a full of the kind of humanising detail that would work well in a to camera piece but looks slightly strange on the printed page. One wonders why Brown’s spin doctors didn’t go the whole hog and send him off to the GMTV sofa to talk about these things? Indeed, this interview seems rather typical of the half in-half out approach that has so come to characterise the Brown government: sign the Lisbon Treaty, but turn up late to the ceremony; have the Olympic flame paraded down Downing Street, but don’t actually touch it; meet the Dalai Lama, but don’t see him at No. 10 or in the Commons.
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Comments
John Page
July 10th, 2008 2:12pmIsn't that triangulation? :)
David C
July 10th, 2008 3:09pmI have said this before:
Gordon sees himself as an iconoclast.
He is destroying ‘the old order’, by whatever means, to replace it with his own invention.
Anybody with this outrageous degree of ego is not going to believe he is wrong at any level (his latest announcement is “I’ll leave when I finish the job”).
Consequently he thinks that if he can only explain; show how everything he is doing is for the best; demonstrate that he really does care then the public will understand what he is doing and follow where he leads.
Of course, his advisors know that the more Brown appears on the air and in print, the more people can see what a monstrous personality he really is.
Therefore you have ‘I Gordon’ at war with his own PR machine and the PR machine is falling apart.
TomTom
July 10th, 2008 3:41pmI thought di Piero was Laboiur from her days as a student politician anyway.
Tel
July 10th, 2008 5:50pmJames, totally disagree. All the parts of the piece where she quotes Brown sound exactly the same as the things he says when interviewed by Nick Robinson, Boulton, Tom Bradby etc.
Carol-Ann
July 10th, 2008 5:52pm'But when pressed, he insists: "I'm here to do a job and I'll leave when I finish the job. I'm not here for the sake of being here." '
No he flaming won't leave when he's finished, he'll leave when we the voters kick him OUT!
Alex
July 10th, 2008 6:04pmWhat a rubbish interview. She calls herself a political editor, don't make me laugh. She's another Brown/ Labour groupie. When are the media going to get some balance.
Tina
July 10th, 2008 6:42pmThis paragraph jumped out at me as summing up Brown's problem:
'Robert Yorke, the constituency treasurer, joined the party 13 years ago when Tony Blair became leader. "Blair could condense his arguments into a soundbite, but Gordon can't," he says. "People want leadership and Gordon needs to lead. When Blair was there, you felt safe."'