Of prime ministers and bent bananas

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Last week, the Western Mail’s Chief Bent Banana did a thorough and effective demolition job on the attempts by the Prime Minister and those around her to exercise tight control over the coverage of her so-called ‘whistle-stop’ tour to reunite the kingdom.  I find it hard to believe that she and her advisers could really have believed for one moment that four half-hour meetings with a small number of carefully-invited attendees coupled with rigid control over which reporters would be allowed to ask which questions could ever be portrayed as some sort of grand tour meeting the peoples of the nations which comprise the UK.  But what’s even more surprising is how little coverage there seems to have been along the lines of that delivered by the Western Mail.  Were reporters elsewhere cowed or overawed to such an extent that they simply regurgitated the desired message of a robotic Prime Minister as commanded?

Stunts – and it’s hard to see this particular grand tour as anything other than a stunt – have become the bread-and-butter of political campaigning in an age where the expectation is a 30 second sound bite on national news, and a whole day given over to travelling between 4 brief sessions is apparently considered a reasonable price to pay for that 30 seconds.  It takes no more than a moment’s rational consideration to dismiss outright the idea that such a stunt, involving no more than a couple of dozen individuals, could really have anything to do with ‘listening to the people’, let alone uniting the parts of ‘this precious union’, yet that it how it was, by and large, dutifully reported.

There’s more to ‘reporting’ than simply writing what the powerful want written, and for once the Western Mail managed to lead the way.  Clearly, the current Prime Minister struggles seriously to say anything ad hoc or unscripted and selecting which questions are asked is a wholly unnecessary step for someone who knows what ‘answer’ she is going to give regardless of what the question actually says.  The complicity of much of the media in reporting what she says as though she has in fact delivered answers is more reminiscent of what happens in a dictatorship than a democracy.

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Tweet There’s been something of a hoo-ha in Carmarthenshire in recent months about the vexed question as to whether people should, or should not, be allowed to record or film meetings of the county council.  Some councils allow it, others do not; Carmarthenshire is in the latter category.

Whilst the availability of better and cheaper technology has made the question more pertinent, it isn’t a new question.  It was one which was debated in the old Vale of Glamorgan Borough Council back in the 1980s, when I was a member of that council.

The ruling group at the time (Tories, as it happens, but it could equally have been the other lot) wanted to bar the recording of meetings and proposed a resolution to achieve that – banning the use of ‘recording instruments’.  It was aimed at the press, rather than the public – the idea that the public might want to record their goings on would have seemed more than a little strange to them.

When it was debated, I rose to my hind legs, brandished my biro non-aggressively, and announced that I was holding a ‘recording instrument’ in my hand.  Were they, I asked, going to ban the use of biros in the Chamber as well?  The motion was hastily amended to refer to, as I recall, ‘mechanical recording instruments’, and despite my own continued objections was duly passed.

The arguments for banning the practice then were much the same as they are now – and they have grown no more valid with the passing of time.  Despite what some councillors claim, it is no easier to quote someone out of context using a voice recorder than it is using a biro – but at least in the one case there’s a record to demonstrate whether it was, or was not, out of context.

There is an expressed fear about being misquoted, but I rather suspect that the fear is about not being misquoted.

I don’t think that I was the most articulate and coherent speaker in the council chamber (although I’m immodest enough to claim that I wasn’t the most inarticulate either), and anyone who does a lot of public speaking will be only too aware that sometimes things can come out not quite as intended.  I was often misquoted by the local press for things I’d said in the Council Chamber – but here’s the thing: what appeared in print was invariably an improvement on what I’d actually said.  All hesitations and slips ups were miraculously removed by the local journos in the interests of creating a readable story.

Could it just be the case that some councillors in Carmarthenshire (unnamed to protect the potentially guilty) are actually more worried about not being misquoted?