Wordblog

Yesterday Tony Blair met Wallace and Cromit, welcomed the prime minister of Lithuania, welcomed the prime minister of the Slovak Republic and made a speech on the role of the media. His official spokesman held two press briefings giving Blair’s views on Iraq, Scotland, the EU constitution, intelligence, the 2012 Olympics, discrimination law, the BAe affair and Ford’s plans to sell off Jaguar.

We are entitled to ask whether he has given sufficient thought to any of them (or whether some should simply have been passed to other ministers). In his speech he talked about the pressures of 24-hour media and acknowledged his own "complicity" saying:

We paid inordinate attention in the early days of New Labour to courting, assuaging, and persuading the media. In our own defence, after 18 years of Opposition and the, at times, ferocious hostility of parts of the media, it was hard to see any alternative. But such an attitude ran the risk of fuelling the trends in communications that I am about to question.

He spoke about the tecnological change in media and continued:

These changes are obvious. But less obvious is their effect. The news schedule is now 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It moves in real time. Papers don’t give you up to date news. That’s already out there. They have to break stories, try to lead the schedules. Or they give a commentary. And it all happens with outstanding speed. When I fought the 1997 election - just ten years ago - we took an issue a day. In 2005, we had to have one for the morning, another for the afternoon and by the evening the agenda had already moved on. You have to respond to stories also in real time. Frequently the problem is as much assembling the facts as giving them. Make a mistake and you quickly transfer from drama into crisis. In the 1960s the government would sometimes, on a serious issue, have a Cabinet lasting two days. It would be laughable to think you could do that now without the heavens falling in before lunch on the first day.Things harden within minutes. I mean you can’t let speculation stay out there for longer than an instant.

This is the politician’s perspective. From the jounalist’s perspective it provides lots of copy and, often, grounds for more speculation. In the words of Blair coping with the media at times "literally overwhelms".

That is good for neither the government nor the governed. What would be the result if politicians refused to make snap decisions to placate the media? It would be hard to argue with someone who said: "This is difficult. There are a lot of issues to be balanced and we need time to think about it."

The idea of instant decisions has been driven by the technologies of transport and communication. For half of the 20th Century politicians took long holidays and travelled slowly to important meetings. This is from Roy Jenkins biography of Churchill on the meeting between the prime minister and President Roosevelt in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland in August 1941:

Churchill arrived in Newfoundland rested and relaxed. Prince of Wales had sailed from Scapa Flow on the evening of Monday, 4 August and arrived in Placentia Bay on the Morning of Saturday the 9th. Churchill had been more idle on the voyage than on any day since he became Prime Minister. He read C.S.Forester’s Captain Hornblower RN, he watched several films, including seeing Lady Hamilton (his favourite of all wartime films) for the fifth time and he lost £7 (£175 today) playing backgammon with Harry Hopkins.

Now the press castigates John Prescott, the deputy prime minister, for playing croquet after a meeting. We are putting politicains under too much pressure.

As Blair admitted yesterday, the Labour party decided that to win an election it had to go into rapid rebuttal of Tory arguments and increasing the rate at which fresh issues were raised in election campaigns. Then, in Government, Blair went in for a policy of spin.

The media is not now going to stop demanding instant answers. It has become conditioned to immediate response and failure to get it would inevitable lead to "fiddling while Rome burns" headlines. After a while they would wear thin.

I am not sure the heavens would fall in if the Cabinet spent two days deliberating on an issue. Few would find it "laughable".

The logic of ministers demanding thinking time and parliament (increasingly sidelined by Blair) debating issues would eventually restore some faith in the parliamentary process. Greater numbers of people might even start voting in elections again.