The Guardian‘s Decca Aitkenhead had an excellent interview with Chancellor Alistair Darling in Saturday’s Weekend, but with typical expediency, the newsdesk seemingly cut and pasted a few quotes powerfully adrift from their grounding context, added some scaremongering analysis and, wow, found itself with a front page story that was then barked all over the news as if Darling had gone and said something really stupid. He hadn’t, of course.
He actually spoke a lot of sense, and happened to echo the opinion of numerous economists, that Britain is facing very tough times ahead. That’s hardly news; Mervyn King said back in May, and again last month, that Britain was heading for recession. But that didn’t stop the frantic baying journalists desperate for a story in these late summer days from touting it from the rooftops, until finally, the Chancellor was forced into a pooled television interview to defend himself.
I am no closet fan of Mr. Darling, and indeed until this weekend cared very little for his public profile. But if you bother to read the original interview, everything he says makes sense. Even Decca admits it:
He is exactly what the public always says it wants: decent, straightforward, unostentatious. The ideological intensity of Brown unnerves voters, and they didn’t trust Blair’s showmanship – but if Darling has vanity it seems invested entirely in doing the job well.”
But that doesn’t really make a great headline now, does it. Aitkenhead’s only real criticism of Darling is that “he seems almost too straightforward, even high-minded, for the low cunning of political warfare”. You can imagine the hacks rubbing their hands in glee. Right, he’s straightforward and not great at warfare – GET HIM!
Accordingly the Guardian chose some ‘straightforward’ comments about the state of New Labour and our floundering economy – which, at their worst, simply over-egg what others have already told us – and dressed them up as Caesar-stabbing betrayal, cabinet weakness and personal incompetence. e.g.
His blunt remarks lay bare the unease in the highest ranks of the cabinet that the downturn is making it all but impossible for Gordon Brown to recover momentum after a series of setbacks… The chancellor’s remarks about the economy… highlight the nerves at the top of the government…”
Nicholas Watt, the Guardian’s chief political correspondent, even mocks the Chancellor’s motive behind the interview, painting the whole piece as a choreographed ploy to manipulate the public into feeling more sympathetic towards Mr. Darling:
Today’s interview was designed to show the chancellor in a more personal light.”
Well, duh, OF COURSE that was the point of the interview. Why would it be any different? Why do we read interviews with politicians? Not to get the details of their policy, or we’d be reading the latest Budget. How could the Guardian Weekend have otherwise persuaded Darling to give up two days of his holiday for a big interview piece, when, “For most of my political life,” Darling admits, “I’ve kept out of doing this kind of interview. You have to be quite careful – unless you’re one of those people who’s happy to give everything of themselves. And I, for one, am not“.
Faced with such life-long cautiousness, there’s no doubt the Guardian, in its original pitch to the Chancellor, must have promised him their exclusive interview would do his image good; they probably even used the phrase, “a more personal light”. Today no doubt the paper’s staff will be thrilled the interview has gained the momentum of a major celebrity scoop – being quoted directly in the Wall Street Journal, The International Herald Tribune and Forbes.com.
Darling has now been forced to backtrack on the interview’s bleak appraisal of the difficult times ahead – although, as Philip Stephens notes in the FT, the Chancellor did not say Britain was facing the worst recession in 60 years, but the worst “economic times”, which means something quite different. Certainly Darling may have been too severe in his outlook, but on the other hand he might have hoped that by laying it on thick, businesses would be better prepared for the coming slowdown. Or he might have been trying to answer the criticisms that came in August, from Shadow chief secretary to the Treasury Philip Hammond: ‘Instead of hiding in his bunker, it’s time Gordon Brown was straight with people about the problems we are facing”.
By now the wires are hectic with news that the pound has fallen to its lowest level against the euro ever; most commentators, following David Cameron’s gleeful lead, attribute this directly to Darling’s comments. Actually, the drop is more likely due to a phalanx of new data coincidentally released today: a Hometrack Ltd. survey revealing that house prices fell 5.3 percent in August, a Bank of England report that mortgage approvals are at their lowest level since records began 15 years ago, figures from the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply showing manufacturing shrank for the fourth consecutive month in August. All of which happened before Mr Darling’s interview was published.
As it is, a lower pound could actually help rebalance the economy. Certainly the self-perpetuating media maelstrom around Darling’s ill-fated interview will do nothing to help rebalance our political sphere. No wonder politicians learn to be dishonest, evasive and misleading. If the Chancellor had been any one of those, he might have been spared this week’s inevitable thrashing.
