How embarrassing for Gordon Brown – having let speculation run riot, egged on by his spinners, rearranged his diary ready to make the announcment, only to pull out at the last minute, citing a laundry list of excuses (wanting to show his vision, the staleness of the electoral register, foot & mouth disease, the postal strike, lack of public demand etc.) – none of which would have mattered if it was in the interests of the Labour Party to hold an election now.
Brown has fluffed his chance to hold a ‘mandate’ election and secure a new five year term. He and his spinners, with all their election hype, have squandered their ace card (choosing the election date) whilst also unifying and energising the Conservatives into the bargain. Not a good day for Brown or the Labour Party.
But the boys and girls in the Brown stuff aren’t the only ones who had a bad day. Not only does the Prime Minister get to pick and choose the election date to suit him and his party, he also, it seems, gets to pick and choose who interviews him to pass on the Dear Leader’s message to the nation.
If you were in Gordon Brown’s shoes – poor battlefield marginal polls, Cameron on a roll and an election steam train of your own making thundering toward a cliff edge, how would you explain yourself to the nation?
- Face the music live in front of the Downing Street press pack? Nope.
- Give a rigorous live interview to someone who can smell your fear and who owes you nothing? Not a chance.
- Or perhaps a not quite so rigorous recorded shuffle with Handy Andy Marr, for editing and transmission a day later? That’ll do nicely!
No prizes for guessing right – the answer’s more obvious than a premium-rate quiz question.
Gordon Brown’s favourite: Handy Andy Marr after interviewing
Gordon “Bottled It” Brown, plus a clip from the unseen interview.
The BBC should not dance to the tune of the government – yet colluding with Brown to let him choose how, when and who will interview him is dancing to the tune of the government. Even if the BBC can’t control the how and the when they can certainly control the who – and insist on equal access for other journalists (including those from other organisations) or none at all – Brown shouldn’t have been allowed to dictate the interview terms – he should have been given the choice of full access or no access – to do anything less is not serving the public who pay for the BBC.
This is in stark contrast to David Cameron, who was interviewed live in a pooled interview (conducted by Sky) responding to Brown’s announcement. A stark contrast that should be highlighted every time the Marr/Brown clip is shown – but don’t hold your breath if you’re watching BBC News.
Other journalists aren’t pulling their punches. Adam Boulton described Marr as a “sympathetic interviewer”, blogging:
As I write in the gutter opposite Number 10, the BBC’s Andrew Marr is inside interviewing the Prime Minister. It’s unusual to make such announcements on an exclusive basis – but it’s a sure sign of meltdown, as is the radio silence observed today by both Government and Labour spokespeople.
…laying in to Brown and Co. as best he can from outside in the Downing Street gutter (see full transcript at the CWO blog).
Participating in the government’s stage-management runs the risk of damaging Marr more than the Prime Minister is damaged, unless it turns out that Marr has given Brown the pasting of a lifetime (not evidenced by the clip we’ve seen so far) and has Cameron on after Brown’s interview to respond first hand to Brown’s performance. Even then, it’s clear who Brown’s first choice is to act as his mouthpiece.
Of course Adam Boulton wasn’t alone in that Downing St gutter, just beside him lay the reputation and the integrity of Marr and the BBC.
It ill becomes Adam Boulton to criticise Andrew Marr. At Boulton’s recent wedding all the Newlab politicians were there, they all eat out of the same trough. I have yet to see any of the ‘political’ correspondants give any politician a hard time
Watching the BBC reporting of this last night – do they criticise him for spinning when he (absolutely) promised that the days of spin where over? No. Do they take him to task for his apparent indecision? Hardly.
What they did do though was get on David Cameron and say to him ‘Come on! You didn’t really want an election did you? This suits you better.’
Now, it matters not a jot whether Cameron wanted an election or not. He’s not PM so he has zero control over it, he just has to ensure his party is ready to run a campaign at short notice. So why do the BBC think it’s appropriate to criticise him for appearing to be ready to face an election that they themselves done plenty to hype up?
They did the same thing to Portillo and also to the Tory pundit they brought in, again mocking them for Gordon Brown’s failures.
But! They got a guy called Nigel Griffiths from Edinburgh (maj. 400) in to tell us that if we HAD went to an election his majority would have went up to 2000, so we shouldn’t complain – Gordon would have won – all is good. He also claimed that if it was next year it would be 3000, and when it finally comes he fully expects it to be 4000. So his majority is going to increase 10 fold because of how good a PM Gordon is and will be over the next 2 years.
It was astonishing, at no point did the BBC get at him for this crap! And then he threw in a comment about the media bringing all this on themselves – apart from the BBC which he had the utmost respect for.
I pointed all this out yesterday. The BBC is a disgrace for sending leftie lackie Marr in to Brown nose Brown.
We shouldn’t expect any different of course.
This will all be forgotten in a few weeks wail the Nu Labour pond life. Wellif the BBC has anything to do with it, it will be forgotten by the end of today.
The BBC are scum. Harsh, but in my opinion as someone who is forced to pay Marr’s wages under the threat if imprisonment, SCUM is a suitable word.
I don’t think the Murdoch mob will be too happy that Gordon’s pet interviewer was handed the exclusive by Downing Street.
The BBC alludes to the “embarrassment” that the PM will have to endure at (seemingly) ‘bottling it’. But Brown’s McCavity-like tendency to go missing and opt out of tough political confrontations is not noted by the Beeb, even though most of the media (and blogs) have become increasingly aware of it.
Maybe I have just not paid attention, but Brown’s record – his ‘off balance-sheer’ games and his political manipulation of public spending figures and growth rates, for instance – has never really been scrutinised in any great detail by the BBC. In fact, one cannot help but draw the conclusion that Brown and his spin-machine know they can play a largely sympathetic BBC like a violin – Nick Robinson being an honourable exception, I should add.
Andrew Marr is not going to come out of this well either, I suspect.
Well Marshmallow did interview Cameron after Brown – but he was hardly given any chance to respond before being quizzed about the labour party’s fixation on the non doms and the supposedly ‘unfunded’ tax cuts.(what gross hypocrisy considering the billions Brown wastes with no questions asked). The labour party agenda was given more muscle when La Toynbee accosted Cameron on the sofa over inheritance tax. Altogther the BBC have surpassed themselves at acting as stooges for the labour party. I hope they get the gooey substance that passes for Marshamallow’s innards all over their shabby faces.
does anyone have a youtube or link to the interview, which was screened while I was still asleep at 9am this morning?
Matthew – please don’t ruin your Sunday lunch watching that nauseating exercise in spin.
Meanwhile the BBC must be gritting its collective teeth at the anti-Brown comments flooding into HYS and the hundreds of recommendations they are attracting:
http://newsforums.bbc.co.uk/nol/thread.jspa?sortBy=2&forumID=3645&edition=1&ttl=20071007114841&#paginator
Funny thing is, when you click on a comment to recommend it, you get transferred to the “Most Recent” comments page and then have to re-access the “Readers Recommended” page to carry on recommending comments there. That never used to be the case. Why the change? Is the BBC desperately trying to limit the number of recommendations since they are so frequently “off message?”
Jon Gregory,
Boulton’s marriage to a former Blair spin doctor was attended by Blair and a few other high profile Labour ministers.
Being chummy with the Labour party isn’t that simple though. If Boulton and his wife are friends with Blair and his minions, but not with Brown, there’s ample scope for Boulton’s indignation to be fueled by that.
Marr as Brown’s Journalist Poodle .
http://www.order-order.com/2007/10/marr-as-browns-journalist-poodle.html
BBC is increasingly irrelevant. I suspect that Mr Brown will come to rue the day he snubbed the Murdoch organisation on this one.
The impression I got on Friday was that Gordon would spend the weekend thinking about it and that there was to be a number of important announcements on Monday and Tuesday.
Which is a world away from Marr and Brown having a friendly chat on a Saturday afternoon. I guess such a comfortable ride was too good an opportunity to miss.
I notice Sky are having a go at Brown. Did anyone see John Craig with the Bottle of Beer with Gordon Brown ugly mug on the side of it? Very funny. Don’t suppose the BBC will show it though.
Did anyone see Adam Boulton having a go at Jacqi Smith? He’s clearly very fired up about this whole thing with the BBC and “Andy Marr”
I also understand the BBC refused to “pool” the interview so other networks didn’t get a full copy of the interview.
Tomorrow will be very very interesting. Brown stain has to face the media pack. I just wonder if Brown will have the room full of BBC journalists to take the heat off him?
You know when a non BBC journalist asks a tough question, Brown can simply hop past it and point to a BBC journalist (they always seen to have about 5 or 6 there) who will ask him a nice easy question to hit the ball out of the ground with, something like “what do you think your biggest achievement has been in the last 100 days Gordon…”
Just watch and see it in action.
Amazing how no one at the BBC has yet asked the question we all want them to:
So Prime Minister you say you want to show your vision and improve things. Just WHAT have you been doing for the last ten years then?
(Apart from underfund the Forces and suchlike whilst wasting millions on your Labour voting welfare fatties who would vote for Willy Wonka if he promised them free chocolate)
“what do you think your biggest achievement has been in the last 100 days Gordon…”
It’s like going back in time to when BBC hacks would ask “So, Prime Mnister, what interesting things have you been doing this week?” Except back then the deference was equally applied. This lot only brown nose to their chum Brown.
Cameron gets the Rottweiler treatment.
Bryan | 07.10.07 – 12:06 pm Funny thing is, when you click on a comment to recommend it
I noticed that too. Now I CTRL “C” the URL of the page I’m reading and then paste it back after clicking “Recommend”.
Is this by design of just incompetence at the BBC?
Is this by design of just incompetence at the BBC?
Bob | 07.10.07 – 10:43 pm
Dunno, but I think it is design. From time to time they mess with the system. a few times I’ve seen them remove recommendations from a number of comments and then put them back again a day or so later. I have no idea what they hope to achieve by such fiddling.
Proving a negative is essentially an exercise in futility, but errors of omission can be significant and demand deeper consideration – and possibly answers – than is too often the case.
Especially when views are called for on open broadcast, but any replies then selected and printed at the whim of whatever policy and the person(s) who act upon it, and their own beliefs.
Take this morning’s BBC Breakfast. I don’t care what hue of pol we’re talking about, having a sanctimonious suit and tan or bob and scarf telling me what I am thinking based on them ‘listening’ (but do they ever actually hear/pay attention to the replies?) to ‘the people’ really gets me offside. Especially when such parrotspeek is a) trotted out across the board by all cabinet clones as briefed by the spinners and b) treated as if it were some kind of research finding, especially by mute interviewers.
So I wrote in, basically suggesting pols should quit this ‘I’ve talked with the British people’ mantra to try to project to a national opinion. And be hauled up by those they spout it via.
An MP accosting a few folk in the street has as much chance of gauging public mood as (and as it was again raised by Mr. Straw Poll – cred to Dermot M here) Mr. Brown had of grasping the situation of the ground in Iraq – with an oddly timed personal visit • in a few days whilst surrounded by flunkeys and security.
I do get the odd crack on air and so can’t complain that it didn’t get featured. Que sera. But I did of course watch to see if it might be mentioned. But, to the best of my knowledge, no other comments were either, pro or con.
It does make you wonder what is at work when you expect to hear at least something but then things simply move on.
I guess they just had more important things to do than share the views they asked for. But it makes you wonder if what came in wasn’t on message enough to use.
I don’t bother with HYS, but from what I read here it really isn’t worth the trouble of even bothering with.
Which begs the question as to what it is for, costs to run, etc.
HYS is fascinating to observe because on the one hand it can be quite open in terms of the number of comments it posts that contradict BBC spin and on the other it’s quite revealing to watch the BBC do a grotesque little dance as it tries to manipulate the results by such tactics as shutting a topic down almost immediately after it starts because the comments are not going the BBC’s way.
In this respect, the “editors” are very much like children. Problem is, this is not a game.