Dear prime minister, a word in your ear. It’s Groundhog Day. Again. Let’s start with the first tranche of Mandelson papers released last week. You should know this will go on and on: the beginning of a relentless media process of picking over the same mistake. And it needn’t have been so. It would, perhaps, have been better to have held all the papers back and to release them in one massive dump. A lot of stories would have been generated in one day – but they would have fought against each other and in some cases cancelled each other out. Still, we have the process we have – in that archetypal bureaucratic phrase “we are where we are”. So what is to be done?
The art of politics, like magic, is misdirection. Normally, media types work hard to fill the airwaves while you work hard on the medium- and long-term challenges. But right now, it’s not like that. At the moment, we have the gift of news events absorbing political discourse wherever you turn. Whether it’s Peter Mandelson, or the May elections, or the new forever war in Iran, we are surrounded by “news sponges” – topics that are discussed and rediscussed, generating all heat and no light. That opens up a space. Let’s use this time productively.
