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Blair’s speech on the ‘feral beast’.
Posted Colin Byrne on June 13th, 2007 | Filed under Current Affairs, Politics
Whatever my personal political views these days – which tend like most folk to be centred around what’s best and safest for my family, my economic security, education and my kids’ future, the environment, my neighbourhood – I have always been unswerving in my admiration for Tony Blair (even after it went rather out of fashion), both out of personal loyalty based on old ties and for his ballsy leadership in transforming Labour and being the most significant  – along with Mrs Thatcher – post-war political leader in the UK.
But I can’t agree with all the sentiments in his speech on the media yesterday. In fact, of all the issues I would have been urging the PM to communicate on in his closing weeks, this would not be among them.
If you break it down he did make some interesting - but not really new – points.
Yes there is a 24/7 news agenda, yes there has been a dramatic fragmentation of the media and there is a very competitive media market e.g. with the UK dailies and Sunday newspapers, the digital broadcasters etc.
But this is hardly unique to politics, or new. Nearly 20 years ago when I was a political PR I had a bleeper which interrupted or denied me a social life at all hours of the day and night, and only this week I talked to a corporate PR friend who got a call from the press while he was hacking at weeds in his garden early Sunday morning.
It is true, as Tony asserted, that the media tends to report the actual business of the House of Commons less and the rows and personalities around politics more. But again that has been true over the past two decades and the cynicism about politics amongst ordinary citizens is not really more or less marked than the scepticism people increasingly feel about institutions and official sources of information in private business and across the board of public life.
You can’t blame the decline of young people’s participation in politics on the media for example – those same young people are not buying newspapers or watching television either.
Tony admitted that he had paid ‘inordinate’ attention to the media in his early days, pointing out – rightly in my view, I was there – that he and Alastair Campbell felt there was a long background of hostility to his party in certain sections of the media to overcome. (Though Harold Wilson had a virtual obsession about what the media were saying about him, and that was forty years ago.)
But many people will feel that if there is ‘journalistic excess’ the victims are more likely to be powerless members of the public rather than politicians with armies of minders and press aides, or celebrities who preen and pout for the tabloids to get their gasp of the oxygen of publicity, and only run for cover crying ‘press harassment’ when they have screwed up.
In politics, much more than in business, working with the media is like entering a pact or marriage of convenience. It is a symbiotic relationship, rather than a parasitic one as Tony’s speechwriters have tried to suggest.
But the ‘feral beast’ and ‘hunting in packs’ quotes were a mistake and devalued the speech. It gave the impression that, with all the unfinished business out there for Gordon Brown* or David Cameron to focus on, biting the hand that you have encouraged to stroke you (the media) was the wrong agenda for the PM in his last few weeks in office.
I understand how weary and p***ed off many of his aides are about the media, but personally I would have thought there are better issues to highlight as we move forward.
* For me the political PR scoop of the past week were those pictures of a ten year old Gordon, with his brothers, in the charity tuck shop they set up as kids to raise money for the victims of African famine, over forty years ago. Talk about a picture being worth a thousand words – here the unspoken words to some of his contemporaries were “You may like to hob nob around with rock stars talking about Africa, but I have been on the case before it became fashionable, pal!”
June 14th, 2007 at 12:43 pm
[...] pm Filed under: The Media, UK, Sport, Politics Tony Blair complained about the media this week and Mr Byrne has commented on it. I’ve been thinking and it reminds me of whenever someone like Sir Alex [...]