David Cameron has
raised the level of
the intellectual debate
Andrew Sanders
Playing into O’Leary’s hands
The principals won’t
like this report. So let’s
press ahead anyway
Life of George
An uncertain stream
Is Scotland to be
regarded as a feeble
child in the playground?
Angus Skinner
Boredom will win
Life of George
This is, in part, a response to a double-dare by my good lady during an unexpected lull in the ‘Antiques Road Show’ a few weeks ago. She asked, innocently, if I’d ‘made a living will yet?’.
She’s very fond of Miss Marple and seems to be on intimate terms with Poirot’s interior decor. A mere coincidence n’est pas.
Anyway, men are supposed to be keen on making lists of things they can never accomplish. In the same way everyone has written their eight records for Desert Island Discs. Here’s a few tracks I want played, before during and after a humanist ceremony, as if hosted by Roy Plomley.
‘And your first choice of music, George – (timed to coincide with quasi-serious undertakers wheeling me in) – is rather outré don’t you think? But here is, ‘Fire’ by ‘The Crazy World of Arthur Brown’. I’d be at the furnace before you could say safety matches.
No speeches by friends or family. No poems written overnight regretting missed moments. None of that pish, please. Leave it to the humanist talker to omit organised superstition and sentimentality.
‘Some mellow sounds before we go George,’ would say Roy, slouching in the beanbag, drawing deep from a hookah, ‘which one was Pink by the way?’. In would float ‘Us and Them’, from ‘Dark Side of the Moon’. Blended into Julie London’s version of ‘Cry Me a River’ to aid those awkward endings of, ‘who leaves first’ at every funeral.
The answer is ‘Me’ – I left first – so on your way towards those ubiquitous sausage rolls.
George Chalmers
Today’s banner
Glasgow by night
Photograph by
Islay McLeod
The first minister would
be well advised to
restrict his TV exposure
Ronnie Smith
Our first minister’s recent spat with the BBC over his non-participation in Scotland’s continuing rugby torture reminded me of my earliest political memory.
At the age of eight, in 1966, I spent many evenings watching the BBC News with my grandfather. Harold Wilson was prime minister and my grandfather loathed him with an unusual passion for one so universally wise. That is why he habitually yelled at the TV whenever Mr Wilson appeared, frequently: ‘My God, that basket’s on TV again! His mug’s never off it…’. He felt exactly the same about Dennis Healey, Roy Jenkins and George Brown but we saw rather less of them in those days.
You see, the problem was not just that my grandfather was the personification of the Scottish working-class Tory and a great supporter of Sir Fitzroy McLean, our MP at the time. He was also unfortunate enough to be around to see Mr Wilson become the first British prime minister to fully understand and master the power of television in electoral politics. Consequently he was always on the news opening things, making speeches, arguing with Robin Day and generally taking Britain by the hand through the ‘white-hot’ years of the post-war consensus.
So in command of the televisual media was Mr Wilson that he failed to recognise the moment when seeing his face in their living rooms every day began to annoy rather than inspire a majority of the British people. My grandfather, of course, had always been a lost cause.
Most people remember the moment when Mrs Thatcher’s voice became intolerable or when Mr Blair’s smile became a symbol of vacuous hubris
and not a source of national feel-good.
This is a lesson that I’m sure many political consultants try very hard to impress upon their clients. Every politician has a media shelf-life, a period of time when they can appear on TV and remain popular before suddenly being reviled. Some politicians have a longer shelf-life than others while some very unfortunate souls have no TV shelf-life at all. Most people remember the moment when Mrs Thatcher’s voice became intolerable or when Mr Blair’s smile became a symbol of vacuous hubris and not a source of national feel-good.
In every case, the public recognise when politicians over-estimate their popularity much quicker than the politicians themselves and the end of their shelf-life always seems to elicit shock and bitter resentment.
Regardless of all the other elements present in Mr Salmond’s rugby beef with the BBC and his attempt to use it to put the BBC on the defensive before the real debate begins on the referendum, he has started to weaken his position concerning media appearances. He has a two-and-a-half year campaign to lead before the referendum takes place and he really can’t afford to be seen to be reaching the end of his TV shelf-life at this early stage, particularly if the tipping point is reached over arguments about appearing on sports programmes where the public do not expect or want to see him in the first place.
The public do not like omnipresent politicians, not even in Russia. Mr Salmond’s political advisors should be telling him to restrict his TV appearances to the relevant, the appropriate and the necessary. And Mr Salmond should be wise and experienced enough to take this advice. The last thing he and his supporters want to hear from living rooms across Scotland are the words famously uttered by Father Jack Hackett: ‘Is that gobshite never off the television!?’.
Ronnie Smith was born in Largs and now lives in Romania, working as a professional training business consultant and communication coach. He is also a teacher of political science, a political and social commentator and a writer of fiction
