Sod politics
Posted Colin Byrne on July 18th, 2008 | Filed under Environment, Personal | 1 Comment »
Sod politics, I’m off to the movies this afternoon, taking an afternoon’s leave and my eight year old son to see WALL.E . I am intrigued by how the first thirty minutes of virtually no dialogue will go down with today’s younger generation - just as ‘2001′ befuddled critics and Hollywood moguls in the sixties with nothing but panoramic shots of silent wilderness and grunting ape-figures for its first half hour.
Will WALL.E , with it’s ‘Too much trash - Earth covered’ message, do for pre and early teens what Al Gore’s movie did for older generations in terms of environmental wake up call? And cute with it.
Labour gets therapy, Cameron gets visionary
Posted Colin Byrne on July 16th, 2008 | Filed under Current Affairs | 2 Comments »
Two fascinating political developments today.
Firstly, for Labour, the unexpected but brilliant return of my old mate Derek Draper to the heart of Labour’s communications and strategy. His appointment by the new general secretary is already drawing flack and some sharp intakes of breath, but it is inspired and counter-intuitive.
The unions mutter. Let them. Always a sign that Labour is doing something right in my experience.
So Derek worked for Peter Mandelson - but Peter happened to be the best political strategist in modern day (or even longer) politics, so that’s a big tick for me.
So Derek once bragged about his connections when he was a lobbyist - show me one who hasn’t.
Derek is smart, funny, personable, tough, often visionary (Progress anyone?) and tells it like it is.
His spell training and working as a psychotherapist will have given him skills and insights which will frankly not be lost in politics or a party in inner turmoil.
He will be a breath of fresh air. I just hope they give him the scope to make a difference.
Secondly, for the Conservatives, there’s David Cameron’s interview in The Guardian. It’s heady stuff. Not just because it continues his mission to “detox” the Tory brand but it also shows his determination to push bravely on into key social issues that others have tripped up on.
But this is no Major-like “Back to Basics”. This is a head-on address of tough issues that trouble every parent or commentator or individual who looks beyond the day-to-day headlines or overnight polling data. This is not a Daily Mail agenda. This is our agenda.
Just as Blair looked to Clinton for ideas and “third way” inspiration, Cameron chimes with Obama on family breakdown and rights and responsibilities.
If you can leave your tribal party preferences to one side for a moment, you have to admit that, for our small island and political village, the rise and the breadth and depth and sweep of David Cameron is every bit as exciting as Obama for America.
Finally, another political sign-of-the-times. The PM of Belgium has quit after four months because he is stressed out. Clearly in need of therapy.
The Governor and the rules of blogging
Posted Colin Byrne on July 15th, 2008 | Filed under Current Affairs, The Media | 3 Comments »
Congratulations to Mervyn King, the Bank of England governor, for demonstrating at least a basic sense of street smarts that so many in public life currently lack.
Big Merv has turned down a whopping pay rise because he thinks it would be inappropriate given the difficult economic times many people and firms are going through.
There are a couple of hundred MPs who might like to ponder this example and they head off to buy their sofas and toasters at the taxpayer’s expense. Same goes for business leaders and regulators who screw up the job and their organisation only to pocket a fat cheque for failure.
On another matter, I have been amused and occasionally bemused by the reactions in the media and online to my recent posting on No10’s communications. It leads me to conclude, as my friend David Brain - see blog roll - hinted at in a post on Friday, that these are the rules of blogging in the UK (there are some honourable exceptions):
1 If you have an opinion, and it might just upset somebody, keep it to yourself.
2 If you have an opinion, and it might just upset somebody, blog hidden behind some ridiculous pseudonym
3 If you are an abusive little git without the balls to say things under your own name, blog hidden behind some ridiculous pseudonym (in which case f*** off back to the crappy student bedsit you occasionally emerge from.)
Follow these rules - which the Iain Dales and Guido Fawkes (a brand, not a mask) are honourable exceptions to - kiddies and welcome to UK blogsville.
Explaining myself
Posted Colin Byrne on July 11th, 2008 | Filed under Current Affairs, Personal, Politics, Public Relations, The Media | 7 Comments »
My comments this week about what are perceived as communications hiccups by the PMs comms team as an attack on a Government and party I have supported through thick and thin. They are not. They were a comms guy with a deep interest in comms commenting on a comms story that is dominating the media and journalists’ conversations with comms people like me. End of.
This Government continues to come up with innovative ideas. Take Hazel Blears this week. Her ideas to turn the tide of political apathy and the opt-out from democracy that is becoming more widespread are imaginative, important and deserve to be heard.
They were also well communicated, even though some sections of the media tried to trivialise them, or stoke rumours that they were watered down by No10.
Just as much gang and gun crime is being connected to disaffected young people withdrawing from family structures - or having them withdrawn from them - we have to make sure that people feel empowered and that they see politicis as relevant to their lives. (The seemingly self-serving vote on MPs own expenses simply provoked more cynicism at a time when MPs should be helping ministers and opposition leaders to tackle it.)
I remember three big things when I hit eighteen. First, my birthday party where someone who had been drinking Cherry B threw up on the front doorstep leaving a red stain for years to come. Second my first legal drink in a pub. Third, my first vote.
So, two out of three significant memories of being 18 may have been alcohol related but the voting bit felt pretty good and important to.
We need to create a bit more excitement and interest about democratic freedoms that people are losing limbs for in Zimbabwe, and Hazel has made an important contribution this week. So less sniggers about iPod bribes and more positive debate is needed.
Making a meal of it
Posted Colin Byrne on July 8th, 2008 | Filed under Current Affairs | 15 Comments »
I blogged recently about the significance of timing in politics and communications. Today’s newspapers drive the mesage home again, with David Cameron ‘getting it’ and Gordon Brown potentially sinking further in public estimation - though today’s Populus poll in The Times suggests that, for now at least, Brown’s and Labour’s ratings have touched bottom. Cold comfort I would have thought.
Quite what prompted the incompetents - as they clearly are these days for all their fat salaries and big job titles and egos - in the No10 bunker to have the PM telling us to eat up our crusts one day and be photographed waving a glass of wine around the G8 dinner table as he tucked into the conger eel the next is beyond this simple communications guy’s understanding.
Meanwhile Cameron hits the nail on the head with his simple, Blairite, ‘good and bad, right and wrong’ message. He might think again on the issue of it being the poor’s choice to be poor - er, dont think so David, and I grew up in Salford not Eton - but in truth it is not the poor he is aiming the message at. It is the same Middle Britain and aspirational working class voters and commentariat that Blair and Thatcher before him messaged to. But overall it is Cameron who is winning the week and the war.
The one sobering detail of The Times’ poll for Cameron is that by two to one respondents think that he says what he thinks we want to hear rather than what he means - the same negative rating as Brown. But with the insult ‘loser!’ being the one that stings most in the school playground these days, he is rated a ‘winner’ by 60% compared to Brown being rated a ‘loser’ by 74%.
Glasgow kiss
Posted Colin Byrne on July 7th, 2008 | Filed under Current Affairs, Personal, Politics | Comment now »
Reading about the Glasgow East by-election and the claims in today’s Indie that (even more) knives will be out for the PM if Labour loses, reminds me of another (in)famous Glasgow by-election exactly 20 years ago – Glasgow Govan – in which I had a small and unhappy part. I feel for Labour in this one.
Glasgow Govan was a similarly safe Labour seat that suddenly came under threat, following the sitting MP’s resignation, from a resurgent SNP. Locally, Labour screwed up the selection, letting in a hard left trade unionist who had led a strike against Labour’s best friend in the Scottish media, the then Maxwell-owned Daily Record.
Good start.
It got worse.
The candidate had tattooed knuckles and had allegedly left his wife for a teenage beauty queen.
The late, great Donald Dewer was then Labour’s leader in Scotland. He assembled a by-election team - Wendy Alexander, then head of research for Scottish Labour and in the news again recently herself; Michael - now Speaker – Martin; Pat McFadden, now a trade minister, was put in charge of the diary; and one Gordon Brown provided the attack lines and policy initiatives from London.
I was working for Peter Mandelson at Labour HQ at the time. He called me into his office and said something like ‘I’ve got good news and bad news’, the good news being that Donald had been on the phone singing my praises, the bad being I had to go to Govan for the next two months.
It was a nightmare of a campaign, only made bearable by the company of Wendy and Pat and Michael Martin’s good humour about being the Catholic ‘minder’ to an Orangeman candidate.
The candidate himself was hardly a unifying force in the local party, the only story in town was a resurgent SNP with the charismatic Jim Sillars as their candidate, and The Proclaimers (then in their heyday) were driving round Govan on the back of a flatbed truck urging everyone to kick Labour where it hurt.
Which they did.
At the election night ‘party’ the well known Labour loyalist and total t*** George Galloway, then a local Labour MP, berated me for running ‘too English’ a campaign and shouted ‘this would never have happened if we’d had a Scottish press officer’. Given that the first time I was GG in the campaign was this moment, I entered into the political debate with something like ‘F*** you you f****** hypocritical m***********’ or some similar witty rejoinder.
However, then Labour leader Neil Kinnock didn’t jump or get pushed after this debacle. Indeed the following year Labour came back to win the European elections (but lose the subsequent 1992 election).
Twenty years on memories of Govan must be at the back of Gordon Brown’s mind too.
La La Land
I see the Daily Mail is reporting that Harriet Harman is pitching herself to be stand-in PM should Brown quit and be forced out. ( http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1032645/Harriet-Harman-pitches-stand-Prime-Minister-job-Brown-forced-out.html ) . In the immortal words of Tony Soprano’s uncle, ‘And I want to f*** Angie Dickinson’ but it ain’t gonna happen!
Snout like bad timing
Posted Colin Byrne on July 4th, 2008 | Filed under Current Affairs, Politics | Comment now »
No one doubts that public servants - including MPs - should be paid a decent wage for doing an important job.
Being an MP should not involve having to supplement your income with outside paid work which either diverts your time from doing the job well or gives rise to a conflict of interest. Nor should it be the preserve of those who can afford to take it up, like a hobby.
But for God’s sake, being in politics means you should be aware of the importance of timing, public perception and the need for transparency.
So when British consumers are reeling from escalating fuel and food prices, declining property values and a daily dose of dismal economic headlines, it is perhaps not the best time to inspire a clutch of “snouts in the trough” headlines.
It’s not just the sight of MPs preserving the right to sofas and toast racks on the taxpayer that will p*** people off, but resisting the sort of scrutiny that the rest of us face filling in our tax returns.
How can politicians with any credibility lecture us to pull together in the face of tough economic times and then appear to stick two fingers up at their electorate like this??? Do they not get the bad joke?
The reputation of Parliament and British politics just took another nose dive, and frankly the stupid sods deserve it.
Opinion polls may oscillate, but more and more the whole body politic looks insular, isolated, out of touch and in it for themselves and their own petty squabbles while the rest of society worries about everything from gang culture and street crime to affording a place to live, the weekly shop and filling the car up.
Voting is increasingly becoming something to kick a party or politician you don’t like rather than a positive democratic act.
Brilliant timing guys.
Oh happy day
Posted Colin Byrne on June 24th, 2008 | Filed under Consumer, Current Affairs, Politics, The Media | Comment now »
To the launch of the new ‘Total Politics’ magazine in Westminster last night. The first issue looks great. Full marks to the excellent Mr Iain Dale for envisioning it and to editor Sarah MacKinlay and her team for issue 1.
The mag’s stated aim is to take a positive approach to politics, rather than the diet of negative stories and personality-driven stuff we get from the mainstream media.
Its launch is really significant. I often arrive in the USA and look at the range of political journals and wonder why this cradle of democracy could only boast two – The Spectator and The New Statesman, both excellent in themselves – and a bunch of hyper-cynical political hacks.
Give it a try.
Cynicism and miserablism surface in Polly Toynbee’s column in The Guardian today, where she cites minister Tom Harris’ – slightly ill-timed – musing as to why we are all so bloody miserable when we have never had it so good.
For Polly – as ever – the culprits are clear: The Daily Mail, the media in general, focus group politics and useless government policies. I feel happier already. Must be because The Guardian’s office is just round the corner and the warm rays are reaching all the way down the Gray’s Inn Road.
Some folk who understand the answer to Tom Harris’ teaser are my friends at McCann Erickson, whose annual ‘Moody Britain’ survey – this year rather ominously titled ‘Moodier Britain’ - is covered exclusively in this week’s Marketing magazine.
McCann found that the rising cost of living and uncertainty over the economy are the biggest issues facing consumers in Britain today, and of far more concern than crime and other traditional worries. They make the point that in the face of economic uncertainty it vital that brands prove their worth.
Cue The Buzzcocks’ ‘Everybody’s happy nowadays’.
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World PR
Posted Colin Byrne on June 23rd, 2008 | Filed under Public Relations, Weber Shandwick | Comment now »
At the rather grandiosely titled ‘World Public Relations Conference & Festival in London today.
To be fair to the organisers, it is the first time in far too many years in PR that I have attended quite so international a PR gathering outside of global meetings of my own firm, Weber Shandwick. A lot of international learnings and case studies being exchanged.
But I guess the truth is that PR is like sex – great fun to do but a bit dull just to hear people talk about it (and if you don’t agree, I am sure there are many sites that will help you, but this family-friendly site isn’t one of them).
Anyway, in the spirit of sharing global learnings on PR, check out this podcast on the rise of advocacy-based public relations in China from my colleague Darren Burns.
A daft bloke, a clever girl and a cheeky girl
Posted Colin Byrne on June 13th, 2008 | Filed under Celebrities, Current Affairs, Politics, Public Relations, The Media, Weber Shandwick | 1 Comment »
There is a strong taste of humbug about David Davis’ decision to resign and fight a by-election in the name of civil liberties.
I know many in my network support the opposition to (up to) 42 days detention for terror suspects - I don’t. I think it is right given the dangerous times we live in, I think the PM was right to press for it in the face on internal and Guardianista opposition, and he has overwhelming support in the opinion polls (a rare thing for Gordon Brown these days.)
Humbug? Because past Conservative governments - whose policies were probably more in line with Davis’ personal views than some of David Cameron’s more enlightened “New Tories” policies - were hardly arch liberals on civil liberties. And mainly because, had they been in Government during the London and Glasgow terrorist attacks, the Tories would have done exactly the same or gone further, not least to show their core voters, The Daily Mail and The Sun, and the rest of us concerned citizens that they were tough on terrorism.
The decision to tell an opposition leader (Clegg) before his own is also odd in the extreme given the new discipline in the Tory ranks as Cameron smells future election victory.
Labour should not bother to put up a candidate and let this charade play itself out. Public opinion, and I suspect much grassroots Tory opinion, is with the Government on this.
With respect to David Davis and his unlikely bedfellows on the civil liberties left, when the Magna Carta was written the sort of sophisticated terrorism we face, and the Internet, was not part of the drafters’ thinking.
From Tory troubles to Tory talent, and I am delighted this week to welcome PR Week and New Statesman columnist, political and media consultant, journalist and former Conservative Central Office media staffer Tara Hamilton-Miller to the top team at Weber Shandwick in London as a non-executive director. Tara is one of the brightest minds and voices to emerge on the politics and PR comment scene of late and a very nice lady to go with it.
Finally I posted on the ridiculous Lembit Opik a few days ago and his car smash of an interview in GQ with the excellent Piers Morgan. More gory pix today of his engagement party - in which the luckless Mrs Opik to-be appears to be wearing two tightly stretched items from Opik’s grim tie collection as her sole party attire - which seems to have been staged purely for the snappers while his (political) party was supposed to be at the heart of trying to block the PM’s anti-terror legislation. Marina Hyde particularly funny on this in The Guardian. in her Lost in Showbiz column. Lucky for you the Guardian site will not currently let me link to the pic.