Gordon

Well, the Today 8:10 interview is usually the biggie; today it was Gordon himself. I forced myself to suspend my usual Today game, and to actually listen to the man.

Now, no reader of this blog will be surprised to hear that there was ever even the lsightest chance of him receiving a sympathetic hearing. But I tried. Honestly. And I think I can see why he is hated by so many.

He has a distinct style of discussion. The Spectator calls it his "tractor stats" mode, whereby in answer to any question he will reel off a pre-prepared list of statistics purporting to show how wonderful he is. They have a point, but there is more to it than that. Certainly, he does not regard a question as being something for him to answer, but as a prompt to say what he wants to say - that of course is true of any politician, although most do it with a degree of finess and skill that Gordon lacks. With Gordon, though, there is something more. There seem, to me, to be two aspects.

The first is that Gordon speaks with a steady, relentless manner that is redolent with the certainty that what he has to say is really really important and therefore he is justified in speaking over the interviewer and continuing despite their best efforts to ask another question. Evan tried valiantly to query several of the points Gordon made, but was just brushed aside by the steamroller. This has been, I think, an important factor in his success; it means that the utter fallacies that he often utters are not challenged, because it proves simply impossible to get a word in edgeways.

The second concerns the actual content of what he says. If the BBC post the audio of the interview, then do listen to it. Try to parse any one of the sentences that he produces. Sometimes, it rivals Prescott for the degree of convolution that it involves. Any message that he has is utterly drowned in a sea of subclauses, conditions and asides that are clearly intended to provide a fallback if challenged. The overall impression might be "yes", for example, but look into the sentence and there is support for every view on the spectrum stretching from that all the way to "no, absolutely not".

Take as an example one of the opening sentences of the interview. Asked by Evan what his Afghan strategy is, he explains that one might propose just withdrawing back to a fortress Britain, investing in our border defences, and (effectively) leaving Afghanistan to itself. He rejects that, emphatically. And well he might; that is a reasonable decision to take, and leadership is about taking such decisions.

Except that he didn't say that. What he said was more along the lines that one might propose just withdrawing back to a fortress Britain, investing in our border defences, which, he might add, we are, in fact, doing to a significant extent, and (effectively) leaving Afghanistan to itself. So when he rejects that, emphatically, he rejects something that he is actually doing. Why? Clearly because someone might hear the decisive version and think "But we should invest in our border defences" and Gordon wants to leave basis for defending himself on that score, also. This, though, is a tactic that cannot work; it is intrinsically indecisive, and it means that much of what he says sounds like waffle.

And there, I think, it the root of his unpopularity. Listening to their leader, and putting themselves in the position of his interlocutor, people hear someone who won't let anyone else into the conversation, who waffles on without actually saying anything meaningful, and who is obviously refusing to answer the question. That does not come across in the manner of a leader. It comes across as rude.