The panel tonight looks promising:
Harriet Harman - Labour deputy leader and possible candidate to replace Gordon Brown, with the added bonus of being oddly popular with the Labour party grass-roots and very unpopular with the general electorate. A Harriet Harman lead Labour party could drop below 15% in the polls. Bizarrely for the daughter of a Harley Street doctor who is also the niece of an Earl and who went to St Paul's girl school, she seems to want to return to the days of class warfare.
Alan Duncan - Conservative shadow secretary of state for business, enterprise and regulatory reform. Good on economics and strongly critical of Labour's record.
Lynne Featherstone - Liberal Democrat Spokesman for Youth and Equality Issues. An irrelevance from an increasingly irrelevant party.
Ian Hislop - The editor of Private Eye magazine and a very good satirist. He has been increasingly critical of Labour's record recently and if on form could destroy Harriet Harman.
Simon Wolfson - Chief Exec of Next, a donor to David Cameron's leadership campaign and was a board member of the "Vote No" campaign.
Do my eyes deceive me or are the right of centre in a majority tonight, presumably the audience and David Dimbleby will hep to redress the balance.
Line of the evening from Ian Hislop, something along the lines of "Gordon Brown said he'd abolish boom and bust, well he abolished boom".
And here is some video of Ian Hislop doing his stuff...
I was at a far more lively meeting (local Council) last night, which went on for more than four hours, so I missed this.
ReplyDeleteHowever, catching up (just parts so far) on iPlayer this past half hour, I have to conclude that Hislop did very well overall, despite his little "gaffe"(!)
Harman was allowed to speak most of all, but seemed to dig herself into an ever deeper hole if anything. The news that 54% of Labour people (actually just an on-line survey, so not necessarily all that representative) want Gordon Brown to go floored her for a long moment.
Oh, and yes: the political balance was the other way round, just for once. I suspect this "one-off" will have been done purely to avoid the risk of a charge of political bias in panel selection being made to stick. Next week, it'll no doubt be business as usual.
Why don't they have an even number of panellists? It would be symmetrical flanking Dimbleby as well, which would be better presentationally.