The reason I rate The Spectator's Fraser Nelson as one of the best informed journalists in Westminster is amply demonstrated in THIS column today. It's a 2,400 word tour de force, looking at and comparing the backroom teams behind Gordon Brown and David Cameron. It doesn't make comfortable reading for Conservatives in several respects. Fraser says that Gordon Brown has recruited a highly powerful team in Number Ten, led by Jeremy Haywood and Stephen Carter, and that he's letting go of some of the levers of power. This compares with a lack of a Leo McGarry figure in CCHQ.This column is a much longer version of his column in this week's Spectator magazine. Imagine if the internet didn't exist. We'd be denied stuff like this.
11 comments:
You can have all the spin doctors you like, but you cant make a silk puse out of a sows ear.
Errrrrrr Correct me If I am wrong.
You are actually saying that Marly Lights has surrounded himself with better talented spin doctors than Brown.
Good Luck
Just seen the 10 O Clock News, Gideon and Dave, Migrant Boy, Davis in an Offy, looking at the price of White Lightening.
Were they on a research mission looking at the influx of cheap booze. Or rather cambo sent them out on a fag run.
Leo McGarry always looked frail and old and had an early vistit to the greate White House in the sky.
Unfortunate choice of character there.
What they need is a cross between Delia Smith and Machiavelli - someone who can cook the books and still say, "Come on, then, let's be havin yer"
I am going to stick my neck out and disagree with your view of that article. It has been perfectly composed and reached a predisposed conclusion prematurely on the back of what?
Brown has employed some very clever people and within weeks we have seen a miraculous change in the character and behavior of one of the most famously intransigent politicians in Westminster.
If I was reading this a few months down the road with visible results on show, I might buy it. But with Ed Balls just a couple of weeks ago behaving so badly that it became part of the journalists story over the Auschwitz school visits, I am not so sure.
The article highlights the fact that Brown and managed to *change* in a methodical way that ticks all the boxes on a list of media negatives which I am sure his new team see as their job to dispel. They should enjoy the glow of a job well done when they read this, spin is spin.
Over egging the expectation can be messy a few months down the road when the hype is not lived up too.
I believe that the Brownite inner circle go to great lengths to avoid being seen to be in a huddle controlling things, but they are still in control.
Jimbo - grow up, you sad git.
You should realise that one, or in your case 3 or 4, oh-so-funny-rolling-in-the-isles nicknames and catch phrases does not a resoned opinion make and don't make you clever either.
You have been watching too much Bruce Forsyth.
Oh and for what its worth Brown has been surrounding himself with all manner of clever people for the last 11 years, look where thats got us.
Brown looks so much unlike a competent prime minister it beggers belief.
Carter and Heywood: they sound like Nixon's henchmen Ehlichman and Haldeman.
I like Fraser Nelson, but I think he's gone over the top on this one.
Gordon's hired a couple of new spin doctors and he's allowing them to run the show. No more control freak? Very unlikely.
There is a serious point here: Labour and the Tories place too much emphasis on PR presentation.
Must the party with the most effective spin doctors win the next election?
I am getting fed up with “The Spectator’s” toadying to Labour Establishment apparatchiks.
Stephen Carter‘s “brilliant CV“ includes leading NTL, a complete and utter basket case with negligible service for its customers. In fact, it was so badly run that it didn’t even charge a large number of its customers. I sat next to a father of an NTL executive at an official dinner . I mentioned that I was a customer of NTL and he asked if I was being billed for my use of NTL. I said I was. He said I was very unlucky, as many customers were not.
This is not the first time that “The Spectator” has earned the OBN from the Labour Establishment . They wrote an extraordinary hagiography of someone I know very well. The person in question was a New Labour plant (masquerading as a model of independent rectitude) who is cynical, greedy, mendacious and incompetent. Yet, The Spectator gave a description which suggested that that person should join the calendar of saints. A modicum of investigative journalism would have shown that the person in question is no saint. I sent the offending article to a friend of mine who had been on the receiving end of ‘the saint’s’ activities, because she opposed New Labour’s ideas, which ‘the saint’ was trying to implement. My friend said that she felt sick when she read the article.
Only Peter Oborne seems to be taking an independent line.
The New Statesman is doing a much better job. Proper investigative journalism of Ken Livingstone. I hope Total Politics follows this latter tradition.
Fraser Nelson reveals himself to be far too close to the political establishment. He is taken in by this sort of guff. Read Peter Oborne, Iain and then you will understand.
A bunch of corporate stuffed shirts. Bet they know how to communicate with the average voter! Hardly Alistair Campbell or Andy Coulson are they?
A polished turd is a polished turd under all circumstances.
Pleased that others share the view that the new regime at the Spectator is not fit for purpose, namely the relentless excoriation of governmental patronage, mendacity, venality and incompetence.
The magazine is scarcely going to shape anyone's views about economics, transport, energy policy, transnational institutions, you name it, while the editorial team seem to be overwhelmingly preoccupied with niceties of political presentation and tactics for their own sake.
I hope I'm wrong but they (D'Ancona in particular) seem to think it rather chic to hold no strong views on anything at all. If so, they can (and in my case do) strike their postures at someone else's expense.
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