Politics of the media: what's Gordon Brown doing right?

by Stephen Foster Brand Republic 21-Apr-08, 11:00

Not a lot, on the surface of things, and events and the media are conspiring against him. The latest misfortune to hit poor old Gordon is the strike in his own Scottish backyard at the Grangemouth refinery.

If Scotland and the north of England find themselves without petrol for a month he can wave goodbye to the May local elections and, possibly, political life.

In the meantime, The Guardian, home of the Labour-voting chattering classes, seems to have declared war on him.

Columnist after columnist is queuing up to take a pop at Brown, Martin Kettle on Saturday said the party ought to dump him. Even Jackie Ashley -- old Labour royalty as the daughter of Labour MP Jack, later Lord, Ashley -- wrote last week that Gordon was losing it, although she thought he could still recover.

It's said that Brown wanted Ashley, who's married to Andrew Marr, as his spokesman at No 10, so this is serious.

Tony Blair used to treat The Guardian with contempt, they were (and still are) a bunch of lefties after all.

But Brown is still supposed to be a socialist (despite copious evidence to the contrary), so he actually needs them.

But he's always been scared to admit what he's about.

On Saturday's 'Today' programme Rory Sutherland, of Ogilvy and this parish, was involved in a discussion with Tory Oliver Letwin about Labour's approach to PR.

Rory observed, apropos PR, that it was always a mistake to try to "cadge" favours off media owners (ie, through PR). It was much better to advertise.

But Brown can hardly ask the COI to run an image campaign for him. In the same discussion, Letwin remarked that we were enduring "government by the Daily Mail", the obsessive need of Brown, and Blair before him, to square "middle Britain" before committing themselves to anything.

Now you can imagine Blair in a suburban golf club, chewing the fat at the bar while the wives are forced to eat crisps in the car park. Not so Brown.

His only chance is to forget all about squaring the media, as his old crony and now Schools Secretary Ed Balls seems to be doing, and just press on with trying to appeal to his core support.

Unfortunately abolishing the 10p rate of tax and introducing 42-day detention is not the way to go about it.

But banging bankers' heads together and forcing them to raise money from their shareholders so the mortgage squeeze can be loosened is exactly what Brown is good at.

When John Major was in trouble (and even more reviled by the media than Brown is now) in 1992, he quite literally got on his soapbox and tried to address people directly.

And it worked (although Neil Kinnock had quite a lot to do with that).

Brown's Chancellor Alistair Darling is already promising to unpick the 10p tax disaster in his next Budget statement in the autumn (without telling Gordon, interestingly).

If Brown dumps the 42 days detention nonsense and concentrates on beating up the bankers he may just give David Cameron's Tories (and the commentariat) something to think about.