Green Party spokesperson Natalie Bennett endured a car crash, or rather bus crash, interview on LBC Radio when she couldn’t remember her party’s own Housing policy. Her biggest mistake, her ‘humiliation’ say the forces of the right, was to try to answer the question in the first place. Most politicians don’t.
Listen to David Cameron in the House of Commons, squirming out of answering a direct question, asked several times over, by Ed Miliband as to whether the PM would agree that politicians should only have the one job. Cameron, once a PR man, always a PR man (and nothing else), didn’t even make a pretence at answering the question, instead launching an attack on trade unions who run the Labour party, thanks to their members who pay a monstrous 6p a week for the Labour affiliation. Mr Speaker cannot compel the PM to answer the question so why bother to try? Cameron has attracted no criticism for being as slippery as an eel – of course he won’t given that the BBC has all but given up with the very idea of impartiality and the written press is largely of the political right – so perhaps Bennett will now learn the lesson which is don’t answer the question. Just say what you want to say and don’t deviate.
I’ve done it on a much smaller scale whilst being a minor trade union official. I was interviewed on numerous occasions by the local media and whatever question they asked me, I simply said what I had written down before in order to further the aims of my members. No one ever picked me up for avoiding the question altogether, nor it seemed noticed that I had completely ignored what they said. Listen to the BBC (and most other news providing agents) and you will find that this is how they continue to operate today.
And Bennett’s meltdown, well, I feel for her. I have also appeared on live sports shows on BBC Radio Bristol and, years ago, on BBC Five Live, and I always sat there with a mountain of notes, rough paper and pens in order to make notes and to cover a series of issues on which I might be questioned. I knew that if I didn’t have that stuff to hand, I’d have ‘done a Bennett’, as this incident will become to be known.
And Bennett’s balls-up rather endears her to me, much more so than the slimy politicians (sorry, that’s you again, Dave) who are briefed to the hilt and have prepared for days, weeks and months to give answers, no matter how slippery, on every issue under the sun. She obviously knows what she stands for, even if she forgot under the media spotlight. That would probably happen to most ordinary folk. Perhaps we need more ordinary folk in politics rather than the articulate actors, shysters and charlatans we endure today?
