Disaster Management
A Mature Oaten Cock In Full Display*
What is it with politicians, that they can be so media savvy in some ways, and totally inept in others?
Exhibit One:
former Lib Dem leadership wannabe Mark Oaten, exposed for his affair with a rent boy he met online…Few voters, other than a few die-hard bigots and happy clappy fundies, could give a damn about his sexuality – for all we know his wife may be fine with it, as many partners are with many other modes of sexual fulfilment. Britain is a country at now more or less at ease with homosexuality or bisexuality. Other MP’s and public figures have been out for years – being gay is not that big a deal.
But Oaten put himself forward for the leadership, running on a ‘responsible family-man’ image, tailored to the Lib Dems right-wing and to Tories discomfited by Cameron’s modernising zeal. This showed some sophistication in his media positioning. He had a respectable dad’s views on everything :
“We need smart solutions not the same old failed approach. We support the piloting of ‘managed zones’ in designated areas of cities, subject to a code of conduct and regular contact with police and health workers. “The object of these zones is not to ‘tolerate’ prostitution but to move it to a specified area where professionals can work with prostitutes to help them reach a point where they can choose other employment.”
Ohhh, that’s what they’re calling it now. Bloody management speak, sigh. I remember the old days, when it was just called ‘watching badgers’.
We had real euphemisms then, none of this cheap outsourced stuff.
It’s the hypocrisy, stupid. All the time he posed for the cameras as proud Dad, Oaten knew he had this potential dynamite waiting to blow. His family, and most of all his children, will have to deal with the humilation and public fallout, and it’s all his doing.
Did he really think that it wouldn’t come out? Where was his media sophistication then? or was he getting a kick out of living on a knife-edge?
What’s unforgiveable is that his ambition was so large it outweighed his concern for his family. He could have had a happy fulfilled sexual and family life if he’d only been honest with himself and them. Instead he treated them like accessories and considered them a price worth paying for his ambition to be leader.
Speaking of ambition cut short by hubris, here’s Exhibit two: George Galloway and the Respect party.
Now I’d like to make it completely clear that my criticism is not politically motivated, but purely about the media handling. That said, WHAT THE FUCK WERE THEY THINKING ?
Did George and his complaisant advisors really think they could use a massive media company like Endemol, a capitalist company, to get an anti-capitalist, anti-war political message across? He truly thought they’d let him rant uncensored? Did this come out of some boozy midweek afternoon pub conversation, to be so utterly inane? Jesus wept, how criminally naive can you be? Being morally in the right means nothing if you lose the message war and fatally wound yourself and your comrades in the process.
Because of this compete and utter stupidity the anti-war movement, and Respect as a party, are now nothing less than an easy running joke for the nation’s cheap chat-shows – and that’s a complete betrayal of everything 2 million of us marched on London for. Stupid, stupid bastards, they’ve handed it to Blair on a plate.
Add that to the wholesale co-opting of ‘Respect”s name by Blair and New Labour and it’s a total media disaster.
Oaten and Galloway, you’re doing a heckuva job.
