Willow - London

Personally I believe that in most situations in modern western life, there is nothing to fear but fear itself. Right now financial fear is a raging, infecting virus which makes the days of mere bird flu, terrorism and Vladimir’s grumpy lack of neighborliness look like innocent childhood fears.

Professionally, I know this is very good for my kind of business.

In recent days two troubled institutions - Gordon Brown and the Church of England - have been increasing their numbers - in polls and pews respectively - as everyone looks for God or man to lead us out of the trouble the self-styled Masters of the Universe got us into.

Let’s look at Gordon first. It may have taken him roughly a year to get around to it (because this crisis has actually been spiralling for that long in England, without any real government acknowledgement) but when he did he’s used it to his advantage with impeccable spin timing.

First, he used the fear to stave off numbers problems of his own. Labor’s new paymasters the unions believed him when he said this is no time for novices.

Second, the financial crisis, mach 356 (there’s a fresh outbreak daily) managed to take the focus away from the Tory party conference which David Cameron would have been hoping brought him another opportunity to talk directly to the voting public. David Cameron was unable to point out that it was this government, for whom Gordon Brown was the smug chancellor during the good times, that presided over unprecedented regulatory unravelling which has been a major reason for this problem. Cameron made the most of it by being united with the government to stand against the forces of the financial black hole, but he will be disappointed that he could not do more with his week in the sun.
All this, as a professional spinner, I can live with. It is the game, the business, of politics.

What I find egregious is that The Times on Friday ran a special editorial, by the PM, where he tells us that “Britain will lead the world out of this mess”

Sadly, we are all looking for a leader so badly, that he appears to be getting away with this twaddle. So much so that Tories I speak to, who just a few weeks ago were confident of success in 2010, now say uncertainly “I think we can still win the next election.”

Also galling was Gordon’s statement that he wants “cross-border supervisors” to monitor banks- implying that the “global problem” was caused by other, rogue countries with no rules. Actually, Gordon, I think you’ll find it is this country which has had the top ten worst supervision of its financial institutions. (In GDP terms, surely our 500 billion quid bailout is bigger than the US’s 700 billion quid one)

Even America’s banks had vastly better debt to equity ratios.

Gordon tries to make his bailout of the banks popular by stating how their wellbeing is vital to our daily lives. So why did he leave it all so late, leaving all the bankers to piss huge bonuses up against the wall, as my late grandmother would have said.

And why is he not being forced by journalists to answer as to why he hasn’t been regulating that wellbeing up until now.

Much more happily, the other spin-winner from all the gloom is that other previously-ailing institution - the Church of England.

The CofE, famous for its beautiful prayers, has posted a prayer for our dark financial times on its site, and it was visited 8000 times on Friday.

The church is also reporting lots of young, well-dressed financial types in its pews, no doubt searching for an answer to the chaos.

I wonder how sales of Richard Dawkins’ books are going.

When interim manager Joe Kinnear finishes up at Newcastle, I reckon he’s got a job media training a few AFL coaches…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2008/oct/03/newcastleunited.premierleague

This week Rove delivered an entirely unfunny and derivative diatribe against Sarah Palin; 90% of which was about how dumb she was, because obviously she is a female from Alaska and not Barack Obama. They had a go at her by playing a clip in which she pointed out that “oil is a fungible commodity, it’s not like there are little markers on the molecules telling you where they came from”.

Rove mugged to the camera like it just proved what a fruitcake she was, when in fact it’s a perfectly true point to make using jargon that you’d find in an Economics 101 class. So, effectively, he’s revealed what a moron HE is, and invited his audience to laugh at HER. If there was any criticism it would be that she talked OVER the heads of her audience. I hate it when second-rate writers (Rove has ten of them apparently) try and work the political space.

Gee, how desperate do you have to be to bring your sworn enemy back into Government, give him a seat in the Lords and a senior place at the Cabinet table?

Pretty f*cking desperate!

By bringing arch-Blairite and spin genius Peter Mendelson back from Brussels the embattled PM has signalled he is willing to eat any sized sh*t sandwich with all the fillings in order to steady the ship of state and win the next General Election.

Mendelson, who according to Alastair Campbell spent a lot of time telling a lot of people that Brown was gay, will be responsible for bringing the government back on message for 2010.

Is it all too late though? Will people be willing to trust this bloke?

And who can forget that Mendelson, while a master at the dark arts of political spin, is not that flash on other disciplines needed for a long life in his chosen field. He has after all been sacked/resigned from Cabinet twice already….and that was by someone who liked him!

The White House has asked the US media to stop using “bail-out”, suggesting these words with their negative connotations are the reason the plan is deeply unpopular… personally, I much prefer the honesty of something like this:

By Brian Boyd

By all accounts, former Australian Treasurer, Peter Costello, has written a memoir that is ‘turgid’, ‘selective’ and ‘truncated’.

Not surprisingly then, the $54.99 price tag has proved to be a budget blow-out in its own right.  Within 10 days of the launch last month, some bookshops had already knocked off $10 just to get some of the stock moving.

The official launch date was buffeted by Liberal party leadership speculation.

Just like old times, Costello overtly allowed the speculation to play out. It was seen as good spin for sales.  Yet this ploy seems to have backfired dramatically.  A fantasy novel for children and a cookbook, both launched at the same time, have far outsold Costello’s long talked about tomé.

While claiming to be unabashed that he played a central role in the Coalition government’s 11½ year rule, the book documents the feud between Costello and Howard in restrained terms, as if it occurred on the fringe of the main game.

Howard’s failure to hand over the Liberal leadership to Costello as promised after the second term (1998-2001) is excused in terms of a particular political crisis on each occasion, such as the implementation of the GST (2000); eve of Iraq War (2002-3) and so on.  There are no real, honest revelations that Howard basically didn’t want to go or simply didn’t like Costello, even though their philosophical positions on key policies, the economy and IR, were identical.

The “Latham Diaries’ and even Barry Jones’ “A Thinking Reed” sold with more enthusiasm than the Costello Memoirs!  Everyone in the know is saying the book is about what “is left unsaid”.

Even though the bleeding obvious is referred to– Costello was betrayed and ratted on by Howard – it is a muted, almost courteous revelation.

A big mistake in the Memoir is describing the WorkChoices Law as Coalition policy at the 1998 federal election.  It was never a policy, but was enthusiastically created in 2005 after Howard won control of the Senate in the 2004 federal election, over six years later!

Recently, we have also heard various recollections from the likes of Minchin, Downer and Ruddock on smudging what happened under their government.  Simply, they were lucky they were not subject to more deserved scrutiny while in power.  A fairer history of the Howard years will have to be done by someone else as there are many exposés deserved:  children overboard, AWB scandal, secret CIA renditions of Australian citizens, just to name a few.

By Willow, London
Sorry to all you spin-artists who wanted to join our Save-Gordon’s-Bacon speechwriting competition but were foiled by technology> Please try again next time.

Anyway, even if our technology had been working, none of you would have done as fab a job as the PM’s own wife, a PR hackette who has shelved her paid career to support her husband. She might not get paid for it anymore, but she is still practising the craft.

Now as Richo already said, we were at an FM- playing roadside cafe when the speech was on, so we didn’t get to hear a word.

We saw Sarah though, and thought it was a neat little trick borrowed from America to have her standing by her man at a time when others were only because they had no choice. (I don’t know if David Miliband has a partner but if he does, he/she should be trotted out for next conference instead of that dreadful coffee cup he had both hands around. Ian Rankin called that way of holding a coffee cup shipwreck survivor position)

Sarah’s words in the speech were, Gordon’s PRs let it be known, just whipped up that morning, which I believe about as much as I believe that she whipped up her own eggs and bacon scramble at breakfast in the Hilton, but anyway….

So bad luck all, you were trumped by someone with a bit of an inside running. Better luck with our next comp.

Meanwhile, we’ll send the prize money to a charity on Sarah Brown’s behalf.

By Willow

Last week my union mate told me that the Big G was safe for now, because there were no alternatives.

Having watched the self-styled alternative David Milliband network his way through conference, one eye on the cameras the whole time, I now agree with her.

He was in hundreds of photos over the course of conference, not one of which did him any good. In one he lounged at the bottom of some stairs like a kid doing homework. It was all too tryhard.
The worst photo of all was the signature wannabee photo: shaking hands congratulating the leader on a speech. The rules of such photographs is this: each looking firmly at each other, each knowing that the other hates him, but smiling the whole time. First to look away is a chicken.

But either young David doesn’t know the rules or thought he was safe enough to flaunt them. He is photographed “shaking hands with the leader” - but turned away from big G, with a cheesy traitorous grin on his face, seemingly sharing a joke with the crowd. It was the political version of a pair of donkey’s ears behind Gordon’s head.

All Big G had to say was his standard “It’s no time for novices” line and we all knew exactly who he meant.

Speaking of photographs, the appropriately named Camera(n)s should give lessons. At London Fashion Week, Samantha Cameron asked to be moved away from the front row celebrity pit, presumably not wanting to be seen to be swanning in these harsh financial times.

Richo at the British Labour Party Conference…..

The ring of steel descended on Manchester this week. Roads were blocked off, drains checked and sealed and airport strength security to be passed through. The Party was determined. No way was any Labour backbenchers to get near the Prime Minister.

And even though their anti-backstabbing techno gadgets didn’t bring down any planes this week, like they did that time the PM was travelling near Heathrow, they made a much worse spin blunder.

They made the Mancurians tellies all fuzzy. All over town (except probably in that funny building that is the Hilton where the PM no doubt stayed)

So, deprived of week two of Dancing with the Stars, everyone had to actually pay attention to the goings on, which were about as flat as the atmosphere that lay the Liberal Democrats low in Bournemouth. And this lot actually have some power.

Everyone was harking back to the good times of last year, when the PM had triumphantly led the country through not one but two then three crises (floods, terrorists in Glasgow and foot and mouth outbreak respectively).

Alas those glory days are long gone.