The departure of Andy Coulson exposes a weakness in this government’s management of the media.
The departure of Andy Coulson exposes a weakness in this government’s management of the media. Coulson was very good at sitting in on meetings of clever advisers and ministers and subjecting their ideas to the simple test of ‘How will this play with voters?’ His plain common sense is now absent. But even Coulson was not particularly suited to the much-maligned but essential art of ‘spin’. Because of the Blair and Brown years, this is now seen as the same as lying. It is true that lying has too often been involved, but the essential point is not dishonest. It is that the government must, always, everywhere, be explaining itself, distilling the political message from the mass of its actions and transmitting it through the media. In the present government, only George Osborne is good at this, and no one, elected or otherwise, sees it as his job. Now, into this vacuum rushes Ed Balls, as practised and evil at spinning as Shelob in The Lord of the Rings. A crisis approaches.
Following this column’s mention of civil servants who cannot write English (see last week’s Notes), I happened to be with some Tory peers as they received Blackberry messages from their whips about voting in the long-running parliamentary battle over the Alternative Vote referendum Bill. A ‘diversion’, they were told, was ‘immanent’.
Pity poor Mehdi Alavi, the small trader from Acton who is being persecuted by the Today programme. His offence, in the eyes of Today, is to have supplied lethal drugs to prisons in the United States which execute criminals. It is never explained what Mr Alavi has done which should put him on the wrong side of the law.
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