It's been a while since I've counted interruptions and done timings, but today's The Andrew Marr Show tempted me to give it a go again.
- Despite being the shortest interview (7 minutes), UKIP's Peter Whittle was interrupted most often (14 times).
- Though getting a longer interview than Mr Whittle, the Conservatives' Patrick McLoughlin (10 minutes) was interrupted less often (11 times).
- And Shami Chakrabarti, though getting the longest interview of all (over 12 minutes), was interrupted no more often in total than Mr McLoughlin (11 times), thus enjoying a lower frequency of interruptions.
So, on the interruptions front, Mr Whittle got the worst of it this morning.
But listen to Marr's interruptions and questions to Baroness Shami of Whitewash. He was livid. Her pathetic excuses just got him angrier and angrier. He nailed her BS a couple of times (e.g. voting Tory is anti-Establishment), and she was at a loss for words several times, at one point even denying that she was dodging him.
ReplyDeleteAnd this was after Marr's intro telling her she'd better not pull that crap. He knows the game as well as anyone, and was begging her to do well. There was a moment there when I thought the Baroness was going to blame it all on Thatcher for replacing the old Whitehaven constituency.
On the topic of interruptions, but from Andrew Neil, not Marr, Neil just interrupted Kezia Dugdale so many times I lost count and am not going back to count. It was mostly because she was being mental. Because Labour has no reason to exist in Scotland, she has to claim that Labour is working towards some federal system for Scotland. Logically, this would mean England has to be broken up into federal regions as well, so Neil called her out on it by asking if it was Labour policy to do that. She couldn't answer of course, so waffled on about Labour policy being interested in investigating the question of giving people regional control, etc. It got really bad and Neil let her have it
ReplyDeleteThen he brought up the issue of Sadiq Khan saying that there was no difference between Scottish nationalism and racism, and some other Labourite said it even more strongly. Dugdale had to try and twist it around, but couldn't even do that right. She said what they really meant was that nationalism was divisive. "Together we're stronger." Yeah, that'll go over well in Labour's fight against the SNP. She then lied again about what Sarwar said.
Cue complaints about anti-SNP and anti-Labour bias.