Friday 16 November 2007

Still undecided. But happy.

That's my position after watching Clegg vs Huhne on Question Time.

Undecided because I still have no idea who I'm going to vote for. Happy in that I would be happy to see either of them in the top position.

I was surprised at the hostility of many of the texts coming in to News24 after the show. Is it normally like that?

A lot of people said how boring it was. My feeling up till now is that it's not boring, it's just symptomatic of the fact that the LibDems are a relatively united party with a great deal going for it in policy terms. Both of our top guys are somewhere between 90% and 95% in tune with that (and both made the point that policy is decided democratically in our party, unlike the others), so of course there are not going to be great differences. I guess, though, that I have to accept that a lot of people find that boring and turn off it. (Equally we seem to have been nudging upwards in the polls, or did I just dream that?) But I don't think that matters. A week after the election of whoever it is, the leadership race (leadership jog?) will have been forgotten as we start to take on the clone parties about the things that really matter.

And a thought occurred to me about Charles Kennedy. Given the experience we've just been through with the media and Ming (60+ interviews at the party conference - 60+ questions about his age), we can see now that that is exactly what would have happened to Charles once the secret about his drink problem was out. We would never have been able to say a single sensible thing; we'd have been utterly swamped in media muck raking.

Still got to make my mind up though....

3 comments:

Joe Otten said...

I expect most of the comments on News 24 came from hostile partisans, saying whatever abusive thing they could think of irrespective of the content of the program.

Rob Parsons said...

I'm sure you're right. I'd be interested to know if the Tories and Labour get the same level of, er, constructive analyssi.

Joe Otten said...

I expect they would each get a little less because of the numbers. Also the beeb is a little warier of attacking them because they have a greater fear of subsequent revenge.