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Diary

Jane Moore

Wednesday, 17th October 2007

Sun columnist Jane Moore on her week

Spurred on by the above Christmas shopping experience, I decided to set up a consumer website where members of the public review manufacturers, products and services. As a hardened Luddite, this is akin to Roy Keane casually mentioning he’s just designed a ladies handbag range. But www.youthejury.com is now born and appears to be thriving, recently claiming its first cyber-scalp by closing off the revenue stream to a dodgy website that was taking people’s money and failing to deliver promised football kits. The aim is to build up an enviable database where the public help each other to make informed decisions, but of course it will live or die by their input and needs publicising. Consequently, I’m on the promotional merry-go-round and it’s throwing up some interesting, instantaneous market research. Any mention on daytime television, most notably The Alan Titchmarsh Show, proves fruitful among the over-50s, who feel ignored as a demographic group and respond keenly to being asked their opinion. Predictably, a plug in Heat magazine — so powerful they have named a generation after it — yielded an impressive number of reviews, though unfortunately they were written in virtually unreadable textspeak. But the daddy of them all was my chat on Jonathan Ross’s Radio 2 show, prompting hundreds of exquisitely well argued, well written reviews that needed little or no moderation.

Like it or not, self-promotion is a necessary evil when you have something to sell and that goes for politics too. Gordon may have been contemptuous of his predecessor’s propensity for spin and hamming it up for the cameras, but he’s rapidly learning that quietly ‘getting on with the job’, as he keeps telling us over and bloody over, doesn’t cut the mustard these days. You need to blow your own trumpet, to be seen as leading, even if behind you there’s a team of civil service puppeteers pulling your strings. Hence the murmurs of ‘drift’ from within Labour’s own ranks. As Tony Blair might paraphrase the age-old saying, ‘Stand by Millbank long enough and you’ll see the body of your enemy drift by.’

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A child of our time

From the economic and psychological bedlam of the global downturn has emerged a particularly dangerous false dichotomy: namely, that there is somehow a choice for ministers over the next few years between economic reconstruction and the repair of Britain’s broken society, and that the government (whether Labour or Conservative) must prioritise the former at the expense of the latter.

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The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore

‘A money-financed tax cut is essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman’s famous “helicopter drop” of money.’ So said Ben Bernanke, now the chairman of the Fed, in a speech about how to ward off the ‘extremely small’ chance of deflation, which he delivered in 2002.