Brown’s confused media strategy

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.