There’s a lot that could be said about this weekend’s political entertainment, but the bit that stays with me is that I fear we’re losing the best thing about Ed Miliband, which was calm, sitzfleisch, and the ability to wait out stupid media bullshit. This really is something you want in a leader, and we had an example of it not so long ago in applying the Gina Ford strategy to his critics.
Rafael Behr described the position as being like the chess concept of zugzwang, where you don’t have any good moves but you’ve got to make one. But one of the ways politics isn’t like chess is that there is no timer. (Knowing him, he probably got the ten-buck word out of something by Martin Amis.) Doing nothing is usually an option, and it’s quite often a good one.
Similarly, filtering out the noise and focusing on the essential is a skill you want in a leader. It’s as good as nailed on that the whole period from here to election day will be nothing but stupid media bullshit pseudo-events; we can’t afford more pilot-induced oscillation.
Pilot-induced oscillations, as defined by MIL-HDBK-1797A,[1] are sustained or uncontrollable oscillations resulting from efforts of the pilot to control the aircraft and occurs when the pilot of an aircraft inadvertently commands an often increasing series of corrections in opposite directions, each an attempt to cover the aircraft’s reaction to the previous input with an overcorrection in the opposite direction. An aircraft in such a condition can appear to be “porpoising” switching between upward and downward directions. As such it is a coupling of the frequency of the pilot’s inputs and the aircraft’s own frequency
Thinking about that, I reckon what the Labour Party could do with is a nice big phase damper to ballast it. Like so.
(Also, did anyone else notice that the Sun literally put Dan Ware on its front page as a cover-mount freebie? They placed his face and the trail for the story in a box over the strapline that also contained a giveaway offer. Perhaps, if you renew your Sky Sports subscription before the end of the month, they’ll send you a free dickhead. Which reminds me that someone on twitter said, very wisely, that the best argument that Emily Thornberry did anything wrong is that she exposed an ordinary civilian to the newspapers, a horrible and exploitative process that ought to be reserved for the professionals.)
I think Marina Hyde had a good angle from her experiences working at the Sun. The press were so keen to read snobbery into that tweeted pic because that’s how they felt themselves…
If you a tweet a picture (without commentary) of a groups of UKIP folk in purple, with their dogs in purple, what are you expressing? Praise? Admiration? Contempt? Snobbishness? Or is it just a picture? If you a tweet a picture of Farage with a pint, are you expressing anything? Or is it just a picture? Ditto Michael Gove at Rochester railway station. As Marina said, what the picture says depends a lot about the viewers.
The problem of Miliband is that these days there is vast amounts of noise out there and precious little signal.