Hasn't taken them long to get cracking, has it?
The Blair lot were much the same, but at least they had a comms team trying to set the agenda and rebuttals in the media and all that. This lot have fuck all in that department
I dont know if I can make big links and comparisons to these two eras at this stage.
Because what I suspect is that politicians think the sort of private donations stories that have broken so far are not traditionally considered to in the same league as stories where donations can be linked to specific policy decisions, reversals and blatantly dodgy double standards and exceptions.
Take the most famous first example from the Blair government. There was a clear and obvious connection between the donation and the exemption from the tobacco advertising ban for formula 1. There was, apparently, a real fear that it could cost Blair his career. They dragged out and managed the situation but there were limits as to how much damage limitation they could really achieve via spin. Here, as a brief refresher is a 2000 BBC article about that including something of a timeline
BBC News | UK POLITICS | How the Ecclestone affair unfolded I also note that some written evidence of what everyone assumed to be the case at the time, did not properly emerge until after Balir was already gone from the top job, with this article about it being from 2008.
Blair intervened over F1 tobacco ban exemption, documents showBlair interevened over F1 tobacco ban exemption, documents show
Its hard for me to predict what the current spate of stories will do on their own. They are arriving during a period of relative honeymoon immunity, so perhaps what they will do is simply to set the scene for later, a scene that will still waiting for a corruption scandal one or two grades higher to emerge before things really explode into crisis for individuals, party and government.
Of course the other thing this level of stories can do is to offer something that can deliberately be constrasted with the various new forms of austerity that the governments agenda clearly has in store. So far the winter fuel payments have been the main thing for the press to latch onto in this respect, but no doubt there will be other examples to come. I think its still too early to tell whether the 'donations in exchange for particular jobs' form of cronyism will rise far up the corruption leaderboard, I still suspect the top prize will be finding an example of a donation clearly linked to a big policy decision.
As for our impression of how well all this is managed by party PR(opaganda), I suspect there is still a hangover from the Blair spin doctor years. The effective spin machine of those years eventually became a story in itself, something to attack them with. So it would not surprise me if Labour actually dont want to come across as being quite such a highly skilled and smooth operators in that domain these days. Plus a lot of how this is written about comes down to how the press themselves choose to spin the stories, and they have moved on from focussing on spin doctors, and they dont have am Alastair Campbell-type character to weave things around at the moment.
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