Friday, September 26, 2008


Are rumours of a media ‘ambush’ at the Tory conference true?

There is a growing feeling afoot that some in the media are winding themselves up to give Cameron a bit more of a hard time at conference this year, and I am bracing myself for some less than flattering conference coverage.

Labour managed to screw up what was beginning to look like relatively promising coverage with the Ruth Kelly affair unravelling on the last day; but even still they came out of last week looking stronger and marginally nearer making a convincing fight back.

On the other hand the Conservatives have been getting a lot of warm coverage during the summer and still remain an awfully long way ahead in the polls, even if not quite as unstoppable as some people have imagined. My gut feeling is that we will be ‘punished’ as a result.

Basically the media need a story, and ‘Tories wow at Conference’ is so 2007.

And we may have partly ourselves to blame, as a friend pointed out to me having read this blog recently there is a very fine line between being proud of our progress after all these years in the doldrums and becoming irritatingly triumphant before we actually have very much to triumph about; (looking back over the last few posts I think he probably has a point) and recent glossy profiles of candidates in magazines have run the risk of crossing that line – it’s an easy trap to fall into but a real danger for a political opposition.

So perhaps a bit of a slap down by the media pack could actually be no bad thing in the long run.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Don't vote for Marcus Wood.

Anybody but Wood

Anonymous said...

I am sure Anybody will be grateful for your support