Crash Bang Wallace
The Website for Mark WallaceHas Gordon gone all Zen?
Posted on September 03, 2010Ed Balls has pulled some pretty outrageous stunts over the years, but this morning’s Today Programme interview took the biscuit.
In response to the question “Have you spoken to Gordon Brown since [Blair's] autobiography came out?”, he replied:
“I spoke to him the night it came out. I said I thought it was pretty one sided and unfair, and he shrugged his shoulders and said…you know…err…in life you should think about the future.”
Are we really meant to believe that? For a start, it even sounded like Balls was making it up on the spot. More fundamentally, when has Gordon Brown ever been known to shrug his shoulders, lackadaisically chalk something down to experience and counsel that you shouldn’t bear grudges? Bearing grudges is practically his only transferable skill!
Either Balls just made that up, or he phoned the wrong Gordon Brown by mistake.
Drowning sorrows in Salford
Posted on September 01, 2010Shocking news about high alcohol consumption today. It turns out that Salford now has the second-highest level of problem drinking in the whole country. How has this happened?
Wait, what’s this about a major social change in Salford that occurred recently?
“In 2007, it was confirmed that the BBC would be moving five of its departments to a new development on Pier 9…The departments to be moved are BBC Children’s, BBC Children’s Learning, BBC Sport, BBC Radio Five Live, and parts of BBC Future Media and Technology (including a small number from BBC R&D), involving about 2,300 staff. The move, expected to be completed by 2011, marks a major decentralisation of the corporation’s operations, and will represent the BBC’s largest presence outside of London”
I think we’ve found our explanation.
David Miliband’s facelift
Posted on August 31, 2010Every decent campaign has a theme and a strategy that are intended to run throughout every event, leaflet, speech and soundbite.
When you see a politician campaigning you’re not watching someone in their natural state, you’re watching them go out of their way to make up for their flaws, emphasise their strengths and answer any qualms you may have about them.
While this is an attempt at deception, the choice of personality they try to project can give us an insight into what they are really thinking in private.
So it was with David Miliband’s “Movement for Change” rally in Pimlico yesterday. Remarkably, the whole event was essentially the launch of an entirely new David Miliband with a totally new character.
Of course messages are normally updated in reaction to a changing campaign, but such a comprehensive wiping clean of the slate suggests that the people running his candidacy felt they had real problems with the product they were trying to sell.
From the new model, we can reverse engineer what his own campaign thought the old D-Mil Mk1 was like and why they wanted to scrap him.
Let’s identify the key themes.
1) The whole event had an obvious Obama theme - the use of the word “change” as a core message, the encouragement to wave placards, and the whipping up of an almost Beatlemania atmosphere.
2) The decision to make the event a “congress” of the “Movement for Change” rather than a David Miliband for Leader rally.
3) The heavy involvement of “ordinary people” to pour out their hearts on stage or sing ballads.
4) Most crucially, the declaration by the man himself that he had experienced a road to Damascus moment – reject the politics of “committee rooms” in favour of the politics of the “streets”.
At its heart, the event was shouting “David Miliband is an exciting, radical outsider who likes real people and has nothing to do with the old David Miliband.”
What does that tell us?
It suggests that the campaign finally got wise to the problems with a candidate who was perceived as an intellectual, establishment figure, divorced from real Labour Party activism and more comfortable in Whitehall meetings than Constituency Labour Party leafleting drives.
At best, as Jackie Ashley said in the Guardian, David Miliband was the “least kerfuffle” candidate – a geeky, predictable continuation of the general drift of the last few years. His was as a campaign of endorsements and officialdom, not of rallies and screaming crowds.
Given that you’d normally start a campaign by talking up the real persona of your candidate, it’s pretty damning that the DM4Leader campaign have decided to throw out their entire strategy and replace it with a new, artificial one. It’s tantamount to announcing that they consider their man a natural loser, so they’ve decided to build an artificial winner.
The question now is how Labour Party members, Trade Unionists and the PLP respond to the new David Miliband – the one who appeared yesterday like one of those odd American stadium-filling faith healers or firebrand preachers.
They might well like an Obama-style candidate like that. But will they believe this is a truly re-born man, or just the old one after some pretty radical cosmetic surgery to make him look better?
Lessons from St Kilda
Posted on August 29, 2010For those of you who, like me, are entertained by abuse of the English language, there was a great example on Radio 4′s Broadcasting House this morning. They were discussing the archipelago of St Kilda - which lies 100 miles off the Scottish coast and is now owned by the National Trust.
It’s an undeniably beautiful and fascinating place, volcanic islands sticking out of the North Atlantic in stubborn defiance of the storms that beat them about. There are many ways in which it can be praised – but the way chosen by the National Trust’s spokesman this morning was not one of them.
Before I tell you the words he used, let’s get a bit of background.
St Kilda is in the news because 80 years ago today it was evacuated of all human life after the islanders sent appeals to the British Government begging to be rescued.
It was clearly never easy to live as a St Kildan. Over the last few centuries they were variously wiped out by disease, subject to famine and almost completely cut off from the wider world throughout.
Even in the late ninetheenth century, when the rest of Britain was setting about industrialising, enjoying improved standards of living and gaining the benefits of new communication technologies, the St Kildans were forced to float messages to the mainland in boxes tied to sheep’s bladders to alert civilisation that they were starving to death. Their infant mortality rate reached 80% at one stage.
After enduring that grim existence, barely surviving on a diet of sea birds, by 1930 they were unable to take it any more. They had heard how the rest of the world was living, and St Kilda was finally abandoned. Tellingly, all of them agreed to leave when the Government offered to resettle them.
That’s a remarkable story, and there are many ways to praise the resilience and stoicism with which the islanders bore their plight for so long. The National Trust’s spokesman, however, decided to go for possibly the most innapropriate term imaginable; life on St Kilda, he said, was “an example of sustainability as it should be practiced”.
Sustainability? I can’t think of a better case study of an unsustainable life than one where a whole population has to be evacuated en masse.
Strangely, given their enthusiasm for the islands’ traditional way of life, no National Trust staff have yet decided to take up a life of puffins for tea and influenza outbreaks for Christmas…
What “community” am I?
Posted on August 28, 2010Whilst pondering the concept for my latest ConservativeHome column, on the use and abuse of the word “community”, I questioned a friend who is closely involved in a number of political correctness and special interest campaigns. What “community”, as a straight, white, middle-class English male, do I belong to?
He thought for a while and replied
“Racists, probably.”
He was joking – I think. Read the full column here to decide for yourself.
The spy who fell off the radar
Posted on August 27, 2010The developing story of the murder of Gareth Williams, the GCHQ staffer who was on loan to MI6, has all the elements necessary to run and run. For a start, it allows headline writers to use the word “SPY” a lot, which is both exciting and conveniently short.
Then there is the awful way in which he died and was discovered, stuffed into a holdall. Add to that the competing theories and allegations about possible terrorism or foreign espionage, and the scrutiny of his private life, and you have a really big story.
What has truly gasted my flabber about this case, though, is that MI6, MI5 and GCHQ combined don’t seem to have noticed that he was missing – never mind dead – for around two weeks. My colleagues would probably notice a (sizeable) Wallace-shaped gap in the room if I didn’t show up for a day, never mind a fortnight – and I’m not in possession of facts pertaining to national security.
Spying (and spying on other spies, and so on and so on) is, I appreciate, a difficult business – but can it really be so hard to notice the disappearance of one of your own men? If it takes two weeks to notice one of your operatives or analysts has vanished from the radar, what is to stop them defecting to a hostile power or – like the unfortunate Gareth Williams – being murdered?
Thank you for voting!
Posted on August 26, 2010Iain Dale’s Total Politics magazine has just released its list of the Top 30 Libertarian Blogs as voted for by you, the blog-reading public. I’m delighted that despite having been running for just one month, Crash Bang Wallace has gone straight into the Top 30 at Number 21.
A big thank you to all those of you who voted for me! The full list is here, and there are some great other blogs on there that are worth checking out.
I’ll enjoy adding this to the sidebar with pride:
Spending cuts hit the elderly hard
Posted on August 26, 2010Anyone who’s watched the Ten O’Clock News or Newsnight in the last few weeks will be familiar with the story: impoverished, elderly pensioners are being hit hard by frontline spending cuts that reduce their income and strike at the few luxuries they have left. Worse, this is from a Government that claims to be “progressive” and acting in the interests of the poorest in society!
Of course the Left around the world are up in arms at such injustice….except they’re not, because these cuts aren’t being carried out in Britain by the Coalition, they’re being carried out in Cuba by a Communist called Castro.
Raoul Castro’s motivation is obvious, of course, to anyone with an ounce of common sense – the big state, anti-freedom, subsidy-junkie policies of Cuban communism have beggared that nation and left it a rotting, 1950s theme park. He hasn’t decided to reverse that foolish, oppressive policy wholesale, but even a Castro can’t ignore the bank balance forever.
But what about those who don’t have that common sense? What about those whose innate habit of screaming “Tory cuts” in Britain is normally just as automatic as their praise and affection for Cuban dictators? Will they be condemning this as a “regressive” measure and slating Castro as a Reaganite stooge who is going to devastate pensioners’ lives? Let me know when they make their minds up.
House of Comments
markwallace | No Comments » Posted on September 02, 2010For those of you who haven’t had enough of my opinions in print and want some in audio, I was a guest on this week’s House of Comments podcast – which you can listen to here.
Along with Mark Reckons, Stuart Sharpe and Anthony Painter the debate covered AV and the TaxPayers’ Alliance, Blair’s memoirs, NHS Direct, Crispin Blunt’s announcement and that blogosphere story.
Do have a listen.