Thursday 26 June 2014

Has Labour reacted correctly?

Labour's thesis is that Cameron hired Coulson in spite of those warnings because he was desperate to get closer to the Murdoch Empire. The party is certainly right that Cameron was desperate: the Conservatives were not particularly worth joining in 2007 and so there would not have been an endless queue of former senior tabloid journalists desperate to join the team. Cameron is also a great believer in his gut instinct on people: he believes his convictions about those he meets are right, and he felt a good connection with Coulson. He sharpened up the Conservative brand and was instrumental in saving them from yet another existential crisis.

Those who dislike the Prime Minister already think he has terrible judgement, but are waiting to exact their own judgement on him until after the general election. As for whether Labour can make this electorally damaging for the Conservative party depends on whether the Miliband machine is running smoothly or whether it still has gremlins in the tank, as it did when the Labour leader managed to upset almost everyone by posing with the Sun and then apologising for doing so. The last few weeks have proven that quite a few people at the top of politics really shouldn't trust their guts so much.

Labour runs the risk of making sure the public loses the remaining confidence it has in politicians as a whole. You cannot selectively trash politicians when you use a hypocritical argument and the people know this. So if Harman, Prescott and others, back in 2007 knew that Coulson and the News of the World was phone hacking, what did them as member of the Government of the day do about it?

Miliband needs to be careful that his sanctimony doesn't get the better of him today, for Labour have serious questions to answer too. Cameron's judgement was poor but so is Milibands.

We need some statesmanship and leadership from our politicians, the public are tiring of this mindless petty points scoring which masquerades as 'policy'.

No comments:

Post a Comment