by Aneurin Ellis-Evans GQ’s decision to place David Cameron above Gordon Brown in their list of the most influential people in Britain is intentionally provocative. By distinguishing between being in power and being powerful, they have picked up on something much bigger – what it now means to be a political leader. Cameron richly deserves his GQ crown because he has grasped how to make spin a positive force in government. Cameron is unashamedly about PR, and this, I think, is a good thing in a leader today. A distinction has to be made between the kind of spin which covers up the flaws of a government, and that which a politician uses to gain leverage with the media. It is of course inexcusable to redefine corridors as wards to make it seem as if a hospital is reaching its targets for available beds. But this is quite a different thing to what Cameron has been doing. As editor of GQ Darius Sanai put it, ‘He is the initiator and it seems to many of us that Gordon Brown is only reacting.’Take his fact-finding mission to Svalbard in April 2006. I do not know how many ‘facts’ Cameron ‘found’ during the six hours he spent on Svalbard (which makes it more of a day trip than a mission). The next day in Oslo he told an audience that the glaciers were retreating (shock), and that they were doing so quicker than ever before (horror).My suspicion is that these were facts not wholly unknown to the scientific community at large. Indeed, one wonders how many of the ‘facts’ he ‘found’ were not already readily available on Wikipedia (here’s a clue – all). On the same day, Gordon Brown had been due to speak to the UN on the subject of climate change.
Not surprisingly, it was Dave of the Arctic driving a sled pulled by huskies, not dour Brown speaking to a room of suits in a glorified talking shop, which caught the media’s attention. On that day, and for that week, environmentalism went from the bottom of the pile to the top. It was a shameless PR stunt, but an incredibly effective one. Naturally, media attention has to go hand in hand with real action, but the two – style and substance – are not necessarily at odds. My dad, an environmental scientist, has certainly not complained since the ‘obstacles’ to receiving more funding miraculously vanished.We think we don’t want spin, but ignore those who don’t use the media. We want all-action politicians who see things for themselves, interrogate the experts in person and call all the shots, but complain when the impracticalities create a media charade.In a democracy, we cannot complain when politicians give us what we want. We should accept that a leader’s job today is to publicise policies. They are communicators and negotiators. In our sound-bite culture, political leaders are the shop windows of political parties. The media is an inherently shallow medium, and when using it politicians must be similarly superficial. But that does not mean the substance is necessarily lacking altogether. To anyone who thinks Cameron has no policies, I suggest you go on the Conservatives’ website where you’ll find a wealth of detailed reports from the task forces Cameron set up when he first became leader.The problem is not so much spin, as our inability and unwillingness to look past spin. Aneurin Ellis-Evans is the Political Officer of OUCA.
Comment: Cameron deserves GQ crown
