TMP Online

TMP editor, Chuka Umunna, reflects on the fickleness of the media.

So Blair bows out and the Brown leadership campaign has started. Not a hint of razzle dazzle at the Brown launch, though there were the mandatory party workers clapping at appropriate moments. A welcome contrast to the glory and emotion of the Blair era, which sought to present the Labour Party as an American style jamboree, rather than a place for serious people to come together. The supposedly impromptu placard waving at last year’s Labour Party conference (on display again on Thursday) was, frankly, embarrassing.

Many seemed to have taken leave of their senses on the day the Prime Minister announced he was off. Nick Robinson, one time chairman of the Young Conservatives and now BBC political editor, demonstrated just how fickle the media can be when he proclaimed that Blair will “leave Downing Street after a decade in office without being forced out, and with a smile on his face.”

What utter nonsense. Blair was forced to announce his departure last September and would have stayed longer if he could. Robinson said as much himself when, last September, he said Blair had announced he would leave before this year’s Labour Party conference because he was “convinced that unless he personally promised that he’d be gone in a year, some in his party might conspire to have him out within weeks”.

Much as I admire what Blair has achieved in office, this fawning coverage of his departure was to behold, coming as it did from people who only months before had been so keen to slate him at every turn. In truth, as critical as some have been, Blair’s departure for them marked the passing of “one of us” - a fellow private school and Oxbridge educated member of the fashionable London chattering classes. It is these very people who have sought to make as much as possible out of Brown’s supposed personality failings, Robinson chief among them.

Robinson has trotted out the reported concerns about Brown’s style at every turn. Yesterday the Evening Standard’s City editor, Chris Blackhurst, even compared Brown to “a brooding gangster” because Brown dared to challenge him about things he was about to write years ago. I have never been very convinced that Brown is as dour and brooding as they claim, or that the man is all politics and nothing else. It seems more a case that Brown chooses not to shout about his life outside politics. For example, he has as keen an interest in sport as Blair (he was blinded in one eye because of it) but he has chosen not to display that interest in front of a bunch of cameras.

The problem these media commentators have with Brown is that he is not one of them. He is, like most British people, far removed from the regular London dinner party circuit. Robinson’s preoccupation with the positioning of autocues at the Brown campaign launch is perhaps evidence of this and just how out of touch those in the Westminster village are. He seems disinclined to give Brown a fair hearing.

What Robinson and others fail to understand is that readers of this site are far more interested in how Gordon Brown intends to tackle the poverty rate amongst Britain’s ethnic minorities, which is double that amongst white British people, than they are in whether some autocue partly obscured Brown’s face at just one of a plethora of events the Chancellor has spoken at. We want to know how Brown intends to tackle the 15% employment gap between ethnic minorities and everyone else, which the Work and Pensions Secretary this week admitted was “simply unacceptable”, rather than be told whether Brown is sporting a new haircut or what colour his tie is. Brown’s appearance and style simply have no bearing on people’s every day lives - it is how his adminstration affects the reality of our lives that matters.

So, though every politician needs to be media savvy and present themselves smartly, a return to substance and a move away from Cameron style guff is to be welcomed. But make no mistake; the media - particularly the right wing tabloids -are straining at the leash to do what they did to Kinnock, to Brown. Their unbalanced reporting of the recent pensions row and readiness to run with the Tory line in that respect are a case in point. Brown easily dealt with that assault but, as Prime Minister, he will have to deal with many more and on a daily basis; there will be plentiful supply of unforeseen events which will feed the attack dogs of the Tory right.

Chuka Umunna is editor of TMP