Tony Greaves is the ultimate beard and sandals leftie Liberal. Indeed, when he was made a LibDem Peer I half expected him to take the title Lord Greaves of Beard & Sandals. He is a thoroughly good chap though and runs an excellent second hand book business. This week he has a letter in LibDem News.Sir, There are two things to do if you find yourself in a hole. (1) Stop digging. (2) Keep your head down and stay out of sight until everything calms down. Could someone please have a word with Mr and Mrs Oaten?
Lord Greaves will be interested therefore to know that Mr & Mrs Oaten have ignored his advice and instead followed the excellent PR advice from Gavin Grant to appear on Channel 5's Matthew Wright Show tomorrow morning at 9am. It is a great blessing to all Conservatives that Mr Grant is advising Ming Campbell as well as the Oatens. What on earth do the Oatens hope to achieve by putting themselves through this constant saga of car crash TV interviews?
18 comments:
Who has the energy to be stimulated by thoughts of Mr Oaten's down-time activities - and at 9AM on a Wednesday. Won't be watching; will check in here for a precis if Iain is prepared to fill me in.
In a weird way, the fact that this issue keeps coming up is simply making it boring. Whether this is a cunning plan or not remains to be seen (the cunning part being to get everyone so fed up of hearing about his indiscretions that nobody will ever ask him about them again, thus allowing him to 'move on', as they say).
Or maybe he's just a fool.
I think it is sound of ex PR-man Oaten to go on TV sao when his constituents dump him he can advertiseequity withdrawal schemes and suppositories on TV
I have never seen anything more cringeworthy in my life than the way Mark Oaten has comported himself since a judge declared his activities too vile to be enunciated in court. I think he must be seriously mad to parade himself around like this.
As to his wife "taking him back", she must be as unbalanced and devoid of any sense of amour propre as he is. Does she know what he did?
Gavin Grant's pr manipulations on their behalf insult the intelligence. Oaten did not "have an affair with a rent boy" in a moment - or months - of madness. Nor did he "sleep" with a rent boy. We know what he paid the rent boy to do.
I don't care anything about this strange couple, but I resent Grant's lack of respect for our intelligence. I'm sure the notion that Oaten suffered a moment of mad infatuation with a pretty boy will be relentlessly hammered home. Oaten's post-scandal behaviour is clearly of a piece with the character of the man.
Verity - I generally your occassional contributions to this site with the pinch of salt they deserve and have no problem you levelling whatever criticism you like at Mark Oaten. But to do a bit of amateur psychology on a woman who has never sought to involve herself in public life... well who the f*** do you think you are?
In the end, it doesn't matter why you're famous, just that you're famous.
Sort of like a reverse 'failure rate' -- there are always some people who don't really care or remember what the man dines on in his private time, but they know his 'brand'.
What puzzles me more about this entire story is why Matthew Wright would want this sort of celebrity on his show.
in our celebrity culture this is a way of making a comeback (no pun intended!). We always like to knock pwople down and he did that himself but facing up to it has been shown to work. Hamiltons are fine example.
Main factor in this is that his politcial life is over and if he loses his seat he has no employment prospects really....so why not become a pundit a bit like a Lib Dem Portillo.
Mr Oaten's antics, at best, make most of his constituents cringe in Winchester and the surrounding villages. Little wonder that the Conservatives took control of the council there for the first time in a generation last May. It will interesting to see if Mr Oaten's constituency party focuses on self-preservation and de-select him. What is it with Winchester's MPs? - Oaten, Gerald Malone, John Browne and Morgan Morgan-Giles were all fairly um...unusual!
I am really sorry about this but I don't actually know what he did, and I am not sure you do either.
And who cares? I have tried to have pervy sex myself, but couldn't think of anything.
I think MO's playing the only game left to him.
Given the nature of the erm smear against his name, it is nonsensical to pretend that he could ever make a comeback - any return to the fray (even after years of keeping head down and nose clean) would be accompanied by endless snickering comments and patronising articles. Indeed, it is hard to see any sort of decent future for the chap, even beyond the world of politics, unless he considers emigration.
No, the only chance he has of providing a crust for family, retirement, etc is to maximise his media exposure and try to make a living out of it for as long as he can manage. At worst he'll have made a few quid; at best he may find a short cut to public acceptance as a member of the low rent commentariat through sheer presence and familiarity.
And if it doesn't work out, he's no worse off than he would have been had he headed off to do good works immediately.
Regardless of how it turns Iain Dale's stomach, I think on this occasion Mssrs Oaten and Grant have - on balance and quite cynically - called it right. Bless em.
Perhaps they're trying to emulate the Neil and Christine Hamilton success story. World Cup single for 2010 perhaps?
Perhaps Oaten is trying to break through the glass ceiling, but he should know what lies beyond it.
byker- Oh, yes we do!
annoyed - I didn't do amateur pyschology on Mrs Oaten. I expressed myself baffled and staggered.
Of course she involved herself in public life! She couldn't be an MP's wife and be a recluse! She'll have been prominent and active in the constituency for years and she will have benefitted from being an MP's wife. What is more, she has given newspaper interviews about this bizarre series of events, and now she is going on TV.
Leave Mrs Oaten out of this. She's an attractive woman. Quite tasty in fact.
Funnily enough Tony Greaves and Gavin grant have a long history of conflict dating from the old Liberal/Alliance days......
You cannot be a "thoroughly good chap" and a Lib Dem.
Mrs Oaten is nothing to do with this- maybe she was involved with Oaten in Parliament but on the other hand she didn't stand and standing by someone you've loved even despite their disgrace is to be praised not condemned- afterall who of us were we in a similar position would be desperate for such a friend in need. What Oaten did was stupid, probably wrong in that he used a prostitute to do it with.
I can't understand what Oaten thinks he is doing. The comparision with Hamilton is definitely apt. He is turning into a joke and should probably leave politics. A wonderful article by Frank Field points out the way he ought to go this week- I wished people like Oaten looked back to Profumo instead of to Neil Hamilton.
urfqyijThey Made Me,
Actually there is another course open to Mr Oaten, call it the Profumo Plan. Basically you keep your head down and work your arse off for a good cause without seeking publicity or credit.
It may not pay so well in today's celebrity obsessed culture, but it does have the benefit of demonstrating genuine contrition for his betrayal of his wife.
As for Mrs O; she certainly deserves credit if she is genuinely standing by the man she loves. However, her seemingly willing participation in her husband's campaign to cash in on his notoriety does call her judgement and character into question.
One also has to ask the question what effect this media addiction is having on the next generation of Oatens. Children being children, I doubt they are enjoying the taunts of their schoolmates everytime Mummy and Daddy feature in Hello!
Naturally, being of the old school, The Remittance Man would prefer it if Mr O had followed the custom of his father's regiment and simply put a service revolver to his head and pulled the trigger. Mrs O who, as Larry has pointed out, is not an unattractive woman, could then have got on with rebuilding to her life.
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