The pressure of the 24 hour news cycle has made it de rigeur for all politicians to sit down with close advisers before a big interview and decide what 'narrative' they need to create around an event. They then plot how the poor chap can squeeze in as many neatly packaged soundbites as he might reasonably get away with (irrespective of the question), in the hope that said soundbite is used on the 10 o'clock news. It's all quite depressing of course, but is often skilfully executed.  

But not always.  And when it goes wrong, the whole miserable system - of which all senior politicians are part - is exposed as the shambolic exercise that it is.  Yesterday, Ed Miliband gave an interview to the BBC about the strikes. The fix the shadow PM was in is of course self-evident, and clearly he and his team crafted what they thought was the least bad line possible in the circumstances: that both the government and unions are wrong (but the government has acted especially recklessly and provocatively) and that both sides should get back round the negotiating table. And so he repeated these lines. Again. And again. And again. And each time with the required emphasis and earnest intonation for a short news slot: 'Meanwhile, the leader of the opposition said both sides were wrong...[cue clip]' 

Miliband's performance was just a particularly bad example of from a vast collection of factory produced, vacuous bluster.  I'm always given to citing Orwell's essay 'Politics and the English Language' on such occasions, who wrote that mindless political orthodoxy was demanding a lifeless, imitative style: “a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy… who has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved, as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself.” 

New Comment