Media

Michael Wolff’s portrait of David Cameron in the latest issue of Vanity Fair is well worth reading, even it it’s a weird kind of a beast. Wolff concludes – at the start of the piece, as it happens – that he’s “impressed” by the Tory leader. But then spends the best part of 2,000 words spraying out quotes and observations which will harden the attitudes of Cameron’s detractors, on both the left and the right. Cameron is a “toff”; Boris doubts his “intellectual bona fides”; the Tories have “anti-riffraff” policy on marriage, and so on. Wolff even quotes one Fraser Nelson, saying that he doesn’t “believe for a minute [Cameron]

Yesterday, Gordon Brown argued that he curbed defence spending to prevent the public finances from spiralling out of control – but added that he had still given the MoD everything they had asked for.  So, when it’s anything but defence spending, he boasts of all that extra “investment”.  But when it comes to defence, he suddenly grows a fiscal conscience, of sorts.  If we weren’t talking about our country’s ability to fight two wars, there’d be something crudely hilarious about it all. Today, various defence figures have rounded on Brown; arguing, rightly, that his tractor statistics avoided the fundamental point – that, despite increases in the defence budget, the military

It’s worth noting Steve Richards’ point

So, what did the newspapers make of Cameron’s Big Speech?  A brisk stroll through this morning’s coverage, and you’ll come across the whole gamut of responses: from wholehearted enthusiasm in the Sun, to wholehearted scepticism in the Independent.  But the general tone is somewhere in between: the mitigated praise of, say, the Times or the Guardian.  Which is, I think, fair enough.  The speech struck me as effective, perhaps elegant, without ever quite hitting the heights. But the Tories should only be concerned by the media response insofar as it’s a conduit for their own message.  What bits of that message have cut through?  Will that message resonate with voters? 

Frank Field was characteristically forthright on the Today programme this morning. “I don’t believe, given the strains (on the economy), we will be able to maintain an open door policy without serious unrest on the streets,” he said, and this brings me to a Sunny Hundal article on the media’s approach to the BNP. Hundal is extremely eloquent but his premises are ill-conceived. He aligns the BNP exclusively with racism and immigration, because it follows that a racist is illegitimate and can be consigned to irrelevance. He writes: ‘If you want to vote BNP and think people of different cultures and races are scary, why not just say so? Every

Cameron just got the question on Brown and bullying. His reply was well pitched, right tone of voice and all that. But it contained the suggestion that Sir Phillip Mawer, who polices the ministerial code, should be asked to investigate. This is the last thing No 10 wants, it just wants this to go away. But I suspect Cameron has just given the story a nudge along.

There’s an interview with Gordon Brown today in the Mirror about his relationship with his mother. As you might expect given the subject, it is hardly an interrogation. Indeed, it manages to make Piers Morgan’s questions to him resemble the final part of the Frost Nixon interview. But what caught my eye was this note at the end, “This article appears in Tesco magazine, published by Cedar Communications Ltd. The magazine is available in store from March 1.” Tesco magazine isn’t small beer. Its circulation is more than five and a half million and data shows that more women read it than any other magazine. To Brown, the attraction of

So what next for the new, more human, Gordon Brown (as seen on TV)?  Well, according to today’s Times, there are some ministers who want him to take the show on the road.  The idea is to let voters tackle Brown directly – but about the topics Piers Morgan kinda skipped over: the economy, MPs’ expenses, Afghanistan, and all the other big stuff.  And the hope, in turn, is that this “masochism strategy” will make the public respect Brown more. Would it work?  Well, just like the Morgan interview and its wider impact, that’s something which is difficult to pre-judge from the confines of Westminster.  Of course, dealing with anger

Brown is very lucky to have a friend in Piers Morgan. He did him a great service in the ITV interview tonight – and while it would have made CoffeeHousers nauseous (if they watched it), it will be the best television the PM will get this year and probably ever. Mark my words: the Labour Party will not produce anything that shows Brown in such a sympathetic light. It was powerful, I’d say, because it was not party political propaganda: Morgan genuinely likes Brown and did his utmost to project the human side of him. Those hours of coaching from Alastair Campbell paid off. He kept smiling in a credible

So, at the end of a hyperactive week in politics, we’ve got a pair of interviews with Brown and Cameron.  The PM chats with the News of the World, while Cameron appeared on the Marr sofa earlier. One general similarity between the two interviews stands out: neither is particularly confrontational. Rather than chiding Labour after Alistair Darling’s admission yesterday, Cameron adopted a more conciliatory tone, saying things like: “If [the government] … set out reductions that we think make sense we won’t play politics with it, we’ll say yes.”  And, for his part, Brown only nods towards the “big choice” to be made at this year’s election, and doesn’t mention