Britannia Radio

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This seems a perceptive and fair account of the pickle Brown has got himself into.  One only had to watch the spectacle of Brown alone with Boulton from Sky News in a deserted conference hall trying again and again to bludgeon Boulton into listening to a re-run of his conference speech when Boulton vainly tried to put some questions to him.  He hasn’t grasped the idea that interviews are run by the interviewer not a opportunity blandly to repeat what he’d already said - a second ‘go’ at the speech.  

Christina

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TELEGRAPH        1.10.09

The sun has finally set on New Labour's love affair with the media

Like John Major before him, Gordon Brown is now a leader at war with those who report him, says Benedict Brogan.

For most people, the details of which newspapers back which parties are about as interesting as the dusty weights and pulleys that keep the conference stage sets in place. What happens behind the theatre curtain is not meant to be noticed. The workings between press and politicians come under what Alastair Campbell used to deride as "processology", of negligible interest to voters perfectly capable of making their own judgments. But every now and then it is worth pulling aside the velvet brocade to understand why things are as they are.

If anything can be said about the Prime Minister's predicament at the end of what must be his last Labour conference as leader, it is that, like John Major before him, he is now a leader at war with those who report him. Not only is his message deeply flawed, but his best route to getting it heard is being closed off.

 

The Sun's decision to pull the plug on Gordon Brown, and on his big day to boot, is the latest spin in a downward spiral that was already well underway. The defection of the weathervane tabloid, although expected, has had a bigger effect in the Westminster village than it will have in the wider world. Although it compounded the already dire press reaction to the Prime Minister's speech, it also marked the final collapse of relations between New Labour and the media.

Now those around him wonder how they have let things go so wrong. One minister told me it was a consequence of Labour's deep-seated arrogance, and its belief that it could forever manipulate newspapers and broadcasters to suit its agenda.

As the media have grown more sceptical, with Mr Brown it has become dangerously personal. In some cases there is bitterness from journalists who were fooled by the spin. For others it is the frustration that comes when questions are stonewalled, ignored or responded to with misleading answers. Then there are the day-to-day encounters with a politician who has never learnt the art of smiling when inside you are dying.

Broadcasters who follow him tell of shouting matches, epic rudeness, and finger-jabbing lectures. "It's like going alone into a cell with a violent prisoner," one complains. Yesterday, Mr Brown accused Adam Boulton of Sky News on air of being a "political propagandist" because he is pressing for a series of general election debates between the leaders. I am told senior ministers have privately complained to the BBC that some of its journalists are operating as Tory propagandists.

Mr Brown, in turn, is a politician enraged by a media he believes are now wilfully mis-reporting what he says and does. His aides complain that we have made up our minds and now write to a Right-wing narrative that has his defeat as inevitable and a Conservative government as desirable. He remains bitter at the way the Telegraph opened its series on MPs' expenses with revelations about his own claims.

His mood hit a new low last week when it was reported that he had been snubbed by Barack Obama, after the White House turned down repeated requests from Downing Street for a meeting during the PM's visit to the United States. Whether or not there was a snub in Washington – and Mr Brown's aides insist US-UK relations remain strategically strong – it was his frantic orders to civil servants in London and Washington that a meeting be arranged at all costs that got him into trouble.

Yesterday's desertion by the Sun, even if it was at heart a marketing ploy designed to keep the mass-market newspaper always on the winning side, served to widen the fracture between Labour and the media. The party which had happily abased itself to the tabloid turned on it with a vengeance. When news first seeped out on Tuesday night, Peter Mandelson was attending the conference reception hosted by the Sun's owners News International. Witnesses claim he swore at gathered executives of the Rupert Murdoch empire. Afterwards he insisted the word he had used was "chumps", but it seems even this master of media relations could not manage his own reaction.

David Cameron did not need to see Labour fall out of love with its media friends to understand the perils of becoming dependent on an artificial familiarity between politicians and the fourth estate. From the beginning, when his leadership campaign struggled to attract the support of commentators, he learnt to do without. His experience in fact goes back to watching John Major allow himself to be consumed by the day's headlines. He prefers to maintain a professional detachment, leaving relations in the hands of his influential communications director, Andy Coulson.

Not that Mr Cameron is a recluse. He too has worked hard behind the scenes to build good relations with the main media players, and has gone further by allowing cameras into his house to record his domestic life. He is more at ease in the media salons of London than Mr Brown. But he has so far managed to resist the pressure to trade policies for headlines.

That may explain why he has yet to secure the kind of fawning coverage from the press that Tony Blair enjoyed in 1996. In public, politicians play down the importance of a single newspaper endorsement in the internet age, but Tories will certainly regret that yesterday's Sun proclaimed "Labour's lost it" and not a Cameron version of its 1997 headline "The Sun backs Blair".

The fighting retreat to polling day that Mr Brown launched in Brighton will be used to persuade voters to keep asking the questions that remain unanswered about the nature of Cameron Conservatism, about his plans for saving the public finances, and about him. They cling to the idea that doubts about the Tories will in the end count for more that Mr Brown's personal unpopularity. Younger Cabinet ministers even talk of producing lists of specific spending cuts to reduce the deficit and put Mr Cameron on the spot.

In turn, the Tory leader's plan is to spike the Prime Minister's guns in Manchester next week by offering those answers, and presenting himself and his party as radical Conservatives, distinctly on the centre-Right and separate from Labour and the Lib Dems, who used their conferences to veer left. Maybe that will be enough to win media endorsements that, unlike Mr Brown, he is happy to have but does not need. "It is the people who decide elections, not newspapers," Mr Brown said yesterday. You get the feeling that Mr Cameron has known that all along.