The Lizard isn’t usually given to watching daytime television, but the opportunity to see our PM cosying up to Fern Britton on ITV’s This Morning was too good to miss. And what a different Gordon we saw – there he was talking about his kids even touching on the fact his son Fraser has cystic fibrosis.
Now for such a private man this seemed unusual, but given the drubbing he’s recently been given by the electorate it seemed his spin-doctors felt a new, touchy-feely Gordon was required.
Well apparently not a bit of it. Nick Robinson, the Beeb’s political editor, has broken the story on his blog (www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/nickrobinson) that this was not how the interview was meant to go at all.
Over to Nick: Far from wanting to discuss his family, in particular his son Fraser's cystic fibrosis, Gordon Brown thought that there was an agreement that he would not be asked such questions. Indeed, reports reach me of furious members of Team Brown complaining that the pre-interview agreement had been broken.
Now at Crisis Solutions, we offer media training and this is an interesting case in point. What could be better than for the PM to go on a fairly light and fluffy TV show to start the uphill struggle of connecting with the public?
His media people would have set up and agreed the areas he wanted to address only to have the presenter ask all the questions he didn’t want to answer.
So how do you handle a situation like that when you are on live TV? The Crisis Solutions media team has some answers.
Actually this reminds the Lizard of a story regarding the former Defence Secretary Sir John Nott, who at the time of the Falkland crisis was interviewed by Robin Day who called him a ‘here today, gone tomorrow politician’.
Sir John took offence, tugged the microphone from his lapel and stormed out. Not something our media team would suggest.
But the story had a happy ending as rather bizarrely when he came to write his memoirs Nott called them ‘Here today gone tomorrow’.
No comments:
Post a Comment