Posts Tagged ‘David Cameron’

David Cameron is THE great communicator in the new era of politics. His effortless performance on the Today programme earlier must have sent a shiver down the spine of the journalistic community. How will they get at this moderate, articulate, confident, unflappable and frankly relentless Old Etonian

OK, Dave is enjoying surfing on the bubbly froth of post-election hype and confidence, but frankly he is a fit-for-purpose, well-designed, media-facing PM. A shiny Middle England man in an M&S suit broadcasting his POV like a airline pilot transmitting a pre-flight weather forecast. Evan Davis could not get a word in edgeways . Instead, he was left covered in Cameron-slick as the PM steamrollered his questions.

Obviously Dave is briefed very well and is prepared for every battle; after all he is an ex #PR flak. But I detect a secret weapon lurking in his arsenal and I suspect has been trained well to apply it with maximum force. It’s a frightening technique I have not witnessed before – one that seems unique to Smooth FM Dave. Read the rest of this entry »

Clegg and Cameron are making a surprisingly good fist of unity thanks to the brand new and shiny PR machines behind the scenes, not to mention the PR machine that is Cleggameron. It’s working so well that even Rory Bremner admits to being unsure about how to satirise them.

I can’t help but feel a little unease at the way they present themselves, and the PR wheels running the Cleggameron image juggernaut. I wonder if this honeymoon period will last longer than the usual ones – remember Tony Blair amiably wandering down Downing Street predicting that by the time he left office, the gates Thatcher had installed to keep the terrorists out would have been removed? How ironic that seems now. Or Gordon Brown’s five minutes of popularity when he took over? Read the rest of this entry »

Most people in the country are worrying about the leadership of the country under the new coalition, and their concerns for the nation run to a number of issues, from what will happen with capital gains tax, what will happen with inheritance tax, will there or won’t there be cuts in public services, will the economy survive and will we have a stable government?

Not me. I have perceived a new threat. I am wondering nervously what the reaction will be when the nation wakes up and realises that they have, in David Cameron, an ex-PR man as Prime Minister. An ex-PR man, moreover, of whom Jeff Randall – quoted in the Mirror – said: “In my experience, he never gave a straight answer when dissemblance was a plausible alternative.” Read the rest of this entry »

Most people in the country are worrying about the leadership of the country under the new coalition, and their concerns for the nation run to a number of issues, from what will happen with capital gains tax, what will happen with inheritance tax, will there or won’t there be cuts in public services, will the economy survive and will we have a stable government?

Not me. I have perceived a new threat. I am wondering nervously what the reaction will be when the nation wakes up and realises that they have, in David Cameron, an ex-PR man as Prime Minister. Read the rest of this entry »

The failure of anyone to take meaningful control of the country in the wake of the General Election says a great deal about the hype that the media work up as a cappuccino froth of sound bites. It felt like going to a bad movie – the trailer was exceptional but the movie itself is overlong and a terrible letdown.

We may have had debates, but the analogue TV hype didn’t change voters’ hearts. We may have seen an upsurge of the digital agenda, but Twitter and the new transparency still doesn’t reach the soul of the country, doesn’t reach the grassroots. The election has forced us to question the people pulling the strings. Read the rest of this entry »

When I was 19, the publicist Theo Cowan – this country’s first pro celebrity PR wrangler, who created the Rank Charm School, an acting school run the Rank Film company that brought the world Roger Moore, Joan Collins, Christopher Lee, Diana Dors and more – granted me an audience in Poland Street. “Keep your clients’ feet on the ground,” he told me. “NEVER let someone believe a good review!”

This is advice that needs to be handed on to Nick Clegg, after last night’s second Leaders’ Debate. He appeared to have spent the week following his remarkable showing in the first debate positively wallowing in the good reviews. Certainly his people believed the good press enough to let Clegg give Brown and Cameron enough room to make up lost ground. That said, he survived pretty well mostly thanks to the MPs’ expenses scandal allowing too many people to see the puppet strings in this campaign. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re living in what Seth Godden calls “the century of ideas diffusion”. Last night’s historic TV debate was launched with a weight of expectation as to how it might change this perception. If it did, it was mostly for the political classes.

The debate was carefully, rigorously planned as an attempt to revivify politics, seen as a necessity now that all trust has been leeched away from politics and politicians. But if the people behind its gaffe-free polish thought that this would help re-engage the electorate, who have been drifting away slowly but surely for years, they were wrong.

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Given that an election tends to exist in a crowded little bubble all of its own and that there are now ever more ways of competing for attention, with iPhone apps, Twitter feeds, Facebook pages and the like being utilised by every politico going, journalists are going to have a harder time than ever getting to the heart of the matter – policy – and the election is likely to be run on stunts.

We’ve already had one hysterical moment, with David Cameron turning in a karaoke version of Obama when he rolled up his sleeves yesterday. He may have been trying to look hip, but looked more like the sort of embarrassing school teacher who apes trends remorselessly – two years after they’ve come off the boil. Unlike embarrassing teachers, Cameron made the news. Read the rest of this entry »

There have been weeks and weeks of phony electioneering and, finally, this morning Gordon Brown has told the world what we already knew – the election will be on 6th May.

From the negative electioneering of mashed up, satirical posters, to the dusting down of the old Saatchi creative team – to deliver up what Cameron’s mob hope to be a coup de gras to Labour (as was done under Thatcher) – its been a long and spectacularly phoney war; one that has, alarmingly, only focused on the media process. Read the rest of this entry »

A week is a long time in politics, so six months equates to an eternity. Just ask David Cameron who, six months ago, looked to be a shoe-in for the next Prime Minister.

I’ve been up in the smoke all week and the conversation, from left and right, is dominated by the possibility that the Tories might not win the election. It’s a simple case of making a couple of mistakes and watching confidence seep away. And the ill-advised Tory poster campaign, featuring an airbrushed David Cameron, is not so much a mistake as it is a PR disaster. Read the rest of this entry »