The revolution may be televised but it won't be spun
The Strange Death of Tory England was declared by Geoffrey Wheatcroft in 2005 and Matthew Engel saw no signs of rebirth in Norwich North:
“The voters of Norwich North could hardly have elected anyone who was more of an obvious recruit to the old politics”.
And Wheatcroft doesn’t think David Cameron has really woken his party from death. “There’s something not quite right about Cameron and his team, something fishy, something dodgy”, he argues. He continues:
“Looking back, Labour chose a silly line of attack when they banged on about Cameron’s background. “So we bombed the wrong Ira?” Ali G said to an American who explained that the real threat had been Iran and not Iraq. Labour got the wrong “on” when it sneered at the school Cameron had attended and the foolish club he joined at Oxford. But few choose where they are educated, and some of us would rather a veil were drawn over the things we did at 20. The really damaging “on” wasn’t Eton or Bullingdon but Carlton: Cameron’s choice of career, not as a barrister or soldier or even journalist, but PR man for a shoddy TV company”.
This work did not even instill in Cameron a proper understanding of what is done by Ofcom; the regulator of the sector in which he was working. That doesn’t seem a solid grounding for anything; least of all running the government. But PR is today so prevalent in politics, as Colin Byrne naturally seems pleased to note, that Wheatcroft’s suggested line of attack may not have occurred to Labour strategists.
Chloe Smith doesn’t herald a new politics and it isn’t clear whether the prevalence of PR in politics is moving us in this direction or whether, in tending towards the superficial over the substantial, it is delaying the re-assessment of the fundamental purposes of politics which will be required to truly produce a new politics. The revolution may be televised but it won’t be spun into being and the claim that Chloe Smith represents a new politics is a claim sadly typical of someone who chooses a career as a “PR man for a shoddy TV company”.
I don’t share your point of view, except that I dislike spin, too. I am thinking of pitching for the PR business of restoring trust in British politics, its MPs and its Parliament. Somebody’s got to do it. In the spirit of transparency, here’s my first draft of a pitch.
http://paulseaman.eu/2009/05/restoring-trust-in-parliament-and-mps-pr-proposal/
Thank you for the comment, Paul. May be I was being too harsh on PR but it created space for a not unjustified attack on Cameron and vast swathes of people my age who are involved with politics seem to be working in PR in one way or another – at least that’s how it seems to me. Politics always benefits from a wide gene pool of talent and backgrounds and the dominance of PR goes against this. Political PR is important but politics is more than this (or should be).
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