…and I’ll Cry If I Want To…
When the snippet emerged of Allegra Stratton, apparently joking in December 2020 about a Downing Street office party held the previous week, in contravention of both government advice and the law at the time, I assumed, based purely on appearances (and not being a mixer in such circles) that this was a case of a young, pretty, over-promoted intern, giddy at finding herself gatekeeper of Westminster’s dirty laundry. As such, I felt rather sorry for her. I felt sorry for her that the world where everything is recorded and nothing deleted can be so unforgiving. I felt sorry for her because the furore over the footage focussed as much on her own personal insensitivity in the clip as on the more substantive issues of governmental double standards and prime ministerial po-faced denial of the blindingly obvious.
And then….
Next day, and here she is in person with a tearful apology. It’s one year on but she looks twenty years older and for all the world like a dishevelled middle-aged scrubber. Albeit with a very expensive front door. Wow, I thought, lock-down hasn’t been kind to you, has it? Of course, one doesn’t like to descend to such tittle-tattle but really; the lesson the nation urgently needs to learn from this sorry debacle is that TV-quality slap and lighting takes about two stone and twenty years off you. Aspire to look like someone on TV? Don’t – it really is a lie.
And then…
And then that led my thoughts to unfortunately digress a little and think, well, if TV makes you look great, then Boris Johnson, who looks like an albino blancmange on TV, must be an absolute flabbermonster in real life. And this led me to ponder his apparently incessant proclivity for reproduction. Now, I’ve never understood his appeal in that department but, considering matters further and in light of the above, the thought of his panting, gurning moonface looming above the headboard really made me feel quite queasy and regretful that such an image had ever impressed itself upon me.
And so…
And so I looked up Allegra Stratton because a couple of things did trouble me and they didn’t seem to be the things that were troubling other people. So, in descending order of triviality:
Really, how did you get that job?
Stratton’s job was to be the press officer / host of proposed daily televised Westminster press briefings. What the leaked footage showed was not, as I had thought, some interns messing about, but a semi-serious rehearsal of how Stratton would respond to awkward questions in her official capacity as the public face of the government. On that basis she did a pretty crap job: it’s really not that that hard to dead-pan some non-committal guff, I mean goodness, it’s just about all we get from so many people so much of the time. So just how did she get the job that apparently many others wanted? BJ’s choice apparently: and though she was a journalist in her own right, I couldn’t help wondering if her being easy on the eye might also have been a factor, or being married to the editor of the Spectator, who’s a mate of Rishi Sunak’s….
Obfuscation is the only game in town
At this point mind you, I did, and still do feel sorry for her; she was perhaps a bit thoughtless, but she wasn’t callous. She wasn’t laughing at anyone’s expense, let alone death. And she did have to go through the ignominy of a TV ‘before and after’ makeover in which the episodes seemed to have been switched.
More seriously though, I feel sorry for her because she was being lambasted for not being able, or wiling to, lie. Her coyness was about being caught between an inadmissible truth and an unpalatable denial without being able to come up with a plausible alternative (or a dead cat) on the spur of the moment. As above, she was crap at her job and probably should never have got the job, because what the leaked snippet showed was that the primary skill required by the job was to obfuscate the truth where that truth might be inconvenient to the government.
Honesty equals ineptitude
Being the public face of government appears to involve either saying as much as possible about doing very little, as in ‘we’re putting in place a number of measures in addition to a review of funding, taking forward this vital initiative to bla bla bla’; or about saying as little as possible about rather a lot, as in ‘no parliamentary rules were broken’, or ‘I have been assured that no party took place’. This assumption is so shared and accepted by us all that it goes all but unremarked until, such as in this case, perhaps someone messes up. It ought to be to Allegra Stratton’s credit – both personal and journalistic – that lying doesn’t come easily. That this is, in part, the reason she finds herself in pillory, is perverse, but also indicative of the age. More pertinently, what it makes clear is that the government’s planned daily ‘briefings’ were never intended to be briefings, as in ‘informative’, and ‘communicative’, but were always intended to be about dissimulation; about what goes under such labels (themselves dissimulations) as ‘damage limitation’, and ‘managing expectations’.
For a moment – indulge me for a moment – let’s instead imagine an alternative scenario. Suppose a government, in good faith, wishes to ‘connect’ more directly with the nation. Hosting a daily briefing would allow the government to articulate its thinking in a live setting but in a considered way, free of the wilful misrepresentations of social media, leaks, scoops, doorstep quotes and all the other noise that clouds political reporting. Yes, it would undoubtedly be a platform for a bit of spin but that would be subject to questioning from the floor that would very likely be more incisive, informed, and effective than that of the Commons. Considered in this way, a daily government briefing looks to be verging on a daring venture in democracy. A government of elected representatives ought to feel no need to conceal anything, and an informed public ought to expect competency and integrity without expecting perfection or easy answers to difficult issues. A daily briefing in this world could be a discursive space for both elected and electorate to listen to the other and articulate their views. I suppose we’re talking about a forum or an assembly….
Of course, that was never remotely on the cards, though less because it was some ridiculously unattainable ideal, but as a matter of policy. What the leaked rehearsal showed was that the forum could not be rigidly controlled: awkward questions would arise that could not be managed, and that was the final nail in the coffin. That Allegra Stratton’s instinctual, immediate, professional working assumption that truth and honesty were things to steer the electorate away from, says much about how little we can expect from our government. That this is unremarkable – in fact an accepted part of the job – shows how ingrained is our own acceptance that those in public office and pretty well every other sphere of life, for want of a better word, bullshit us, bullshit each other, and probably bullshit themselves.
