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Jesse Norman
© Jesse Norman 2008
And so the media bandwagon rolls on. Did Gordon make the speech of his life? Was he bailed out by Sarah? What's Ruth up to? Who's up? Who's down? Who cares?
The government will get a small bounce in the polls, because you can't get that much free publicity without a bounce. But otherwise nothing has changed. People are losing their jobs, inflation is on the up, and the economy is on the brink of recession.
Labour successfully set expectations so low last week that a very average speech by the prime minister has been greeted with rapture. The media's structural interest in getting things slightly wrong means we now have reports of a government bounce-back, which they can in due course find to be built on sand. And so it goes on.
Back in the real world, we are in a financial crisis and the government's response has been manifestly inadequate. Anyone who heard the prime minister's interview on the Today Programme on 24 September will have been astonished at the brazen way in which he refused to acknowledge how unprepared the government was for the recent crash, or how his own actions had contributed to it.
Only the day before, Alistair Darling had called for an 'urgent review' of City regulation. Er, wasn't that supposed to be happening already? Northern Rock, anyone?
And let's not forget that it was Gordon Brown who made the original decision to remove banking supervision from the remit of the Bank of England in 1997, against advice: a decision which resulted in a disastrous loss of institutional experience, and a foolish dispersion of responsibility and knowledge among different regulators.
In his Today interview, Brown even had the astonishing cheek to denounce the banks' off-balance-sheet financing, when the UK itself has undisclosed off-balance-sheet PFI debt of well over £100bn. How about a bit more disclosure there, prime minister?
Meanwhile the Liberal Democrats have been busy U-turning on the only two things anyone ever knew about them - tax and Europe - in favour of a non-credible rightward shift supposedly designed to win more Labour seats in the north. It's not news that people are too heavily taxed; it's just news to them. Keep an eye out for the Maginot Line in their defence policy.
So what, then, for the Conservative conference next week? Call me old-fashioned, but I want the Tories to stick to their knitting. Focus not on the policy press release du jour, not on the polls, but on what people actually need: some way out of the social, financial and economic mess we're in. Get that right, and the politics will take care of itself.
Part of the Comment is free Soundings debate, first appeared 26 September
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