Dealing With A Crisis

Today has been one of those days where many people are asking me the same question.

How does a man with a 'fearsome reputation' (The Times) and 'impeccable dress sense' (GQ Magazine) who 'wields significant power and influence in the corridors of Whitehall' (The Guardian) deal with a shitstorm like we saw today when the PM had a slight slip of the tongue, and called a 65-year-old widow a 'bigot'?

The reality is that a situation like this is very difficult to deal with. It's not like starting a war of dubious legality, or destroying the economy. In many ways, it is worse.

Obviously, this is the kind of thing that the media love. It's a gift wrapped in a little blue bow for the Murdoch press. I've not seen Sky News so excited since we all found out the enthralling news that Dave's dick is still working.

As an aside; Murdoch Jr and Wade - if you ever turn up unannounced in my office, you will find yourselves in Belmarsh quicker than you can say "The Sun is a horrible fucking rag, owned by a complete cunt, that I wouldn't wipe my arse with because i'd end up with more shit around my ringpiece afterwards than there was before."

Naturally, when you hear the Prime Minister of Great Britain describe someone as a 'bigot' you tend to assume he has good reason and look for ways to run with it. The tried and tested tactic in a situation like this is to tell all and sundry that said person is BNP.

This is obviously a brilliant way to kill the debate dead but has a similar downside to a Cabinet minister dressing up in women's underwear and banging coke up his hooter with a call girl; there are only so many times you can get away with it before you get found out.

A key problem in this case was that the woman seemed reasonably intelligent, and spoke in proper sentences. Those two factors can make it difficult to get people to believe she is BNP.

Raising the terror threat level is a vastly under-rated media strategy in my opinion. Of course, you have to get around a potentially stubborn Home Secretary, who thinks it is transparent, and makes him look like a cunt. Such worries are completely unnecessary. As soon as you raise it, the media completely shit themselves, and do a cracking job of making the rest of the country shit themselves too.

Everything else is then irrelevant. Angela from Leamington Spa is so worried about getting a face full of nails when the vaguely Arab looking bloke in the queue behind her at the local Tesco detonates himself, she's completely forgotten that the Chancellor has been caught shooting up on camera, and that the Secretary of State for Health has called a hospice volunteer a 'cunt'.

The beauty, of course, is that the terror threat level doesn't really mean anything, and it is therefore a travesty how little it is used in important scenarios like today.

The other option is to try and roll something like this back. I did toy with the idea of claiming it was a misquote and that he described her as a 'pig-headed woman'. This obviously does have it's advantages in that it gets away from the stigma of 'bigotted woman'. Unfortunately, the strategy is a little bit like using small explosives to clear an overflowing toilet; you get rid of the original problem, but you're still covered in shit.

This does bring us nicely round to what is arguably a bigger issue than calling a 65-year-old woman a bigot. The PM suggested that he doesn't like real people. This is a problem.

Every 5 years, a group of people manage to get themselves elected to Parliament by an electorate who they, by and large, really don't fucking like. This, as any of you readers who vote will know, is a two-way street, because you really don't fucking like them either. You're also free to let them know that at any opportunity.

For MPs though, this is that annoying bit where it stops being a two-way street. You cannot let the voters know that you don't like them. I cannot stress this enough.

Alas, the real truth is that there is very little that can be done about this. The news channels have replayed it every 12 seconds from 7 different angles, with all of your favourite terminally-boring political commentators offering their opinions. I'm half expecting a reconstruction with actors on Sky News at 10pm which culminates in the PM clubbing her to death with a stack of briefing notes and pissing on her corpse.

Thank fuck we've got a debate tomorrow.

Regards,
Malcolm