Disaster Sunday

I think Andrew Marr has gawn off his trolley. Where are the mental health services when you need them? It started badly, with the Guardian's Helen Pidd preemptively admonishing us to insist that the London Bridge ‘incident’ shouldn’t be politicised - as if terrorism in the name of Allah isn’t inherently political.

    

In his “Making us feel proud” post, Craig transcribes Marr’s weirdly ambiguous intro, which lays itself open to being taken out of context, fiddled with and misconstrued for our entertainment. 

If I were as badly behaved as the media and took things out of context and fiddled with their intended messages, I’d seriously query why a lethal act of terrorism should make us feel proud of where we live. Of course, we know what he meant. He was proud of the ‘have a go’ British public who tackled the soldier of Allah with a tusk and a fire extinguisher. Not that that's anything to do with where we live.

I think everyone in their right mind would agree that this was a car crash of an interview. In fact, the whole programme was a disaster. I’d say Andrew Marr emerged from the car crash with the more serious injuries.

As far as Boris is concerned, he might try pitting the efficacy and wisdom of attacking one's opponent against enthusiastically promoting the merits of one's own policies.  As far as I’m concerned, both party leaders are wrong on this. 

The Labour Party wastes considerable energy slagging off ‘Tory Toffs’, which just shoves the politics of envy into the spotlight. Not a good look. Yes, we know all about the class war, which nowadays comes across as dated and uninspired; concentrating on their fantastical spending spree, that’s where most Labour votes will come from, sad to say.

It might be necessary for the Conservatives to slag off Labour’s economic naivety, its racism, hypocrisy and downright nastiness, but arguably that would be would be best left to others. It doesn’t sit well with Boris somehow. I imagine he’s been advised to treat the public as a bit thick and is primarily trying to hammer home the folly of falling for Labour’s bribery and corruption, but we need to hear much more of the Conservative Party’s positives from Boris. What are they, apart from getting something done?

I wonder how Andrew Marr is feeling this afternoon? And the producers of the show? Do they think it went well? Do they think it was effective or even wise to let Marr talk over the PM, prevent him from speaking and to reiterate accusations about ‘ten years’ over and over? It reached new levels of appalling. The complaints will be pouring in to BBC HQ - how will they respond? Will they respond?

Why didn’t Marr mention anything about “ten years ago” - or even ten months ago - to the smug little Baroness? Yes, she was there to discuss the question of sentencing, but the elephant in the room was so pungent that even if Marr couldn’t see it he must have caught a whiff of the stench. Baroness Whitewash, what did you think of the Chief Rabbi’s intervention in the 'non-existent' antisemitism question?

I bet you a fiver she got the BBC to sign a ‘don’t mention the war’ clause before agreeing to appear. 

No showmanship

As mentioned by MB, here's Andrew Marr in The Spectator on the question of how to interview/how not to interview:

My Sunday job is to ask questions; but in this campaign there is a line of criticism of television interviewing which makes me pause. The rise of misnamed social media (mostly Twitter) makes it all too easy to clip and post ‘Gotcha!’ moments, when a politician appears to be gasping for air at a particularly pertinent question. Two or three such moments now win the wearisome accolade of ‘a car crash interview’. So (goes the criticism) interviewers are under increasing pressure to skew their shows that way — go for cheap shots, get them online, and hope they go viral. I admit it’s a temptation. But as compared with fact-primed, carefully planned and constructed interviews — of the kind Andrew Neil does — to go for ‘car crash’ moments would be folly and a disgrace. It’s a temptation (just wallow in the Twitter applause) which must be resisted. If I’ve fallen into it, I hereby apologise. And after all, the single most watched and damaging television interview of recent times, Emily Maitlis with Prince Andrew, contained no showmanship on Emily’s part whatsoever. There is nothing more effective than the right question at just the right moment, calmly put.

He's not getting a good response below the line, but then that's the "misnamed social media" for you again, eh Andrew?

nonuser: Then, as now, we were obsessed by Russian plots ...". "For millions of people, the real political issues are ... our behaviour in an age of global warming ...". Marr reporting from deep inside the bubble. 

The greatness whereof I cannot enough commend, comes with him

It's always pleasant to receive compliments from your work colleagues, but too many compliments from a boss towards just one employee can arouse envy. 

I though of that after hearing Andrew Marr call his colleague Chris Mason "the great Chris Mason" after that young man had finished reading the news on this morning's Marr show. 

Poor Ben Thompson didn't get any such praise last week, nor did poor Roger Harding the week before.

But back on 0ctober 20, Chris Mason was on again and, yes, after that young man had finished reading the news Andrew again called him "the great Chris Mason".

It's becoming a habit. 

If someone was feeling mischievous behind the scenes of the programme they might ask Samira Ahmed to read the news next week. If Andrew Marr fails to call her "the great Samira Ahmed", she might very well be tempted to take the BBC to the cleaners!

Shome mishtake

What do you think? I’m starting to think that anyone who has ever given up smoking has no business carping about hypocrisy over peoples’ past mistakes. Mishtakes.

(Since you ask, an impending consultation with a rapier-tongued obstetrician was the pivot that turned me into a non-smoker. Decades ago, that was, and I haven’t lit-up from then on. However, for years I was plagued with dreams that I had ‘caved’. These dreams were ‘real’, credible and devilish, as I definitely hadn’t.)

Anyway, I understand that the BBC is rife with coke-sniffing. I thought that was common knowledge, but it could just be malicious gossip. So it seems hypocritical, doesn’t it, that Andrew Marr would devote about 80% of his interrogation of Michael Gove to that topic when some of us might have been more interested in the detail of his plan to swap VAT for purchase tax. Anyone who has ever been unfortunate enough to be involved with the bureaucracy of completing those wretched VAT returns and the like will want to know. 

One might have spotted that Marr allowed his interview with that patronising Corbynite bore Gardiner to over-run, and consequently impinge on Gove’s allotted time.

Andrew Marr was so well-primed on Gove’s mistake and so unwilling to let his apology suffice, that one couldn’t help comparing it with that other abomination. Peterborough. 

It seems that Marr’s research on Ms Forbes’s ‘mistake’ was confined to her ‘liking’ the one offending Tweet. He didn’t show any interest in or knowledge of the rest of her shortcomings, namely the abundance of other indications that she is indeed as antisemitic as the rest of the Corbynists, and that she is thick as a brick. As we used to say of the BBC itself, it’s either ignorance or malevolence.

Why would Marr be so willing to take Forbes’s belated ‘apology’ at face value, when he stubbornly refused to accept the one he repeatedly forced from Michael Gove?

As for the leadership stakes, the jury’s out. 

I fear that the MSM has kiboshed Gove’s prospects, which (personality-wise) weren’t looking too promising from the get-go. 

Jeremy Hunt came across better than I’d thought (on Sky) but his opposition to Trump’s position on the Iran nuclear deal put me off, as I’d like to know why anyone would support Obama’s pro-Iran, anti-Israel fiasco of a temporary deal, which involved abandoning economic sanctions just as they were beginning to take effect, while funding Iran's terror by proxy and their nuclear development programme bound for fruition just beyond an increasingly imminent time window. 

I think Boris’s decision to lie low, media-wise, is sensible but not helpful - the media is so vicious and unreasonable that their meddling is the most negative force we’re facing, barring a Corbyn gov’ment.