Posts Tagged ‘nick clegg’

In his Today programme interview with Justin Webb yesterday, Nick Clegg’s intended, unflappable nice guy image was showing the kind of serious wear and tear that can only result from a shortage of publicity muscle and back room support. By turns repetitive and needlessly confrontational (over the question of Italy, for instance, he veered back and forth before tersely interjecting that noting the difference between Britain and Italy was ‘a statement of the obvious’), he answered questions like a man in HomeBase asking after a product he’s forgotten the name of.  When you’re getting rattled by Justin Webb, you know you really have a problem.

The conference as a whole seems to have been getting more coverage than any other party conference in recent memory. Journalists can sense the chinks and cracks forming in the lib dem PR armour. All this is fuelled by the #ldconf twitter discussion which is more overwhelmingly negative than even a cynic like myself could have predicted, with some particularly quotable intrusions from John Prescott, who recently responded to journalists irate at accreditation issues with the somewhat inflammatory tweet “Is the #LDConf accreditation crisis at a conference centre proof they can’t organise a p***up in a brewery?”.

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Another year, another PR Week Awards night. Winners love it, losers loathe it. My agency, Borkowski, ignored it for years. Truthfully, it’s a somewhat odd night. I met so many friends I just didn’t know I had. I don’t usually have the emotional stamina to stay the course and tend to slope off before the end. This has its dangers; especially when, a couple of years ago, Borkowski took the Grand Prix award. PR legend has it that my over-enthusiastic MD, Larry Franks, rushed the stage and entertained the crowd with his Shrek-in-drag impression.

Last night I mused that few of the gathered PR luvvies didn’t smile at the award for Communicator of the Year. The gong went to Head Prefect, the creepy Nick Clegg, Lord Smug of Camberwick Green. Does anyone else think he looks like the footman in Downton Abbey? Of course, he didn’t turn up. How could he?  Winning an award for his PR skills isn’t something he is likely to be leaping up and down about right now. 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 »

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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Nick Clegg’s been getting a great deal of attention in the press at the Lib Dem conference this weekend. What I’ve taken away from Clegg’s conference manoeuvres, however, has not been the substance so much as the style in which it is presented.

But then it’s been a weekend of style over substance: 30-year-old Alesha Dixon, the winner of Strictly Come Dancing, who was brought in at the expense of the previous judge Arlene Phillips (66) to “give the show some youthful glamour” failed to win the wholehearted approval of the viewing public that the BBC were hoping for in the wake of the ageism row that erupted after Philips’ sacking.

She was, it seems, brought in to make the old men on the panel appear to be a little more sexy, although the official story is that she was brought in to speak with the voice of the viewer. Dixon’s failure to connect with the Strictly Come Dancing audiences this weekend – the show lost out badly to X Factor in its first week of competition – is surely a sign that there are plenty of people out there who value substance over good looks. It is also proof beyond doubt that the voice of the viewer is perfectly well-served by the BBC message boards.

Politics has, in the last 20 years, followed a similar pattern. Clegg became the head of the Lib Dems because he is clean-cut, looks good in a suit and is prepared to pose for the cameras at the pier with his wife or standing on Bournemouth beach, skimming stones on the sea. He has been brought in to be the acceptable face of the Lib Dems; their very own Alesha Dixon.

He got the job at the expense of Vince Cable, the balding, middle-aged Voice of Integrity™ who is, across the political spectrum, acknowledged as the man with the ideas and the substance to make a difference for the party. Spin dogma suggests that “the voters” want an attractive, personable head of the party, that it will make the Lib Dems more electable.

What it boils down to is that one really shouldn’t judge a book by its cover – and that it’s really time to make changes when the media start inspecting the dust jacket for signs of wear as well.

The Strictly Come Dancing results may indicate that the Lib Dems could have gambled on Cable and met the mood of the nation head on. Clegg has certainly been trying his hardest – he’s a decent politician, trying to provide substance – but the tax increases he’s been proposing will be a bitter pill for the public to swallow. Cable may be considered too old to be allowed to lead the party, but he’d surely be a more likely, trusted candidate to convince a sceptical public to accept these tax increases.

It’s against the norm for such things to happen, however. Every politician who takes a position of power has to be younger and more thrusting than the last – the pasty-faced old Etonian leaders of the opposition, Cameron and Osborne, are proof enough of this – and it may not stop until, finally, a good-looking and youthful celebrity is elected president of Britain, in a bizarre mockery of the American system, to distract from the underwhelming looks of the people who actually run the country.

Unless the Strictly Come Dancing audiences rise up and prevent it happening, of course. An armchair revolutionary is much more powerful now, thanks to the internet.

Style is just no substitute for integrity and brand authority and that seems, after this weekend, to have been made a little clearer to the world at large. We’ll have to wait and see if anything comes of this realisation, however.