Skip to main content

In Politics it is better to be lucky than clever

The problem for Ed Miliband, after the car crash interview he did on the BBC Today programme last week, is that he is beginning to get a reputation of being an unlucky politician.

The cock-up of a tweet from his spokeswoman: " ''Hypocrisy of Cameron pimping himself out in Zurich..." is precisely the kind of silly unforced error that lucky politicians do not succumb to.

Of course, if in a few minutes, England were to win then Cameron looks like a very lucky politician indeed, while Miliband looks, well, like a loser.

UPDATE: well. I suppose, predictably, England did not get the World Cup, but even that may be lucky, if the FIFA corruption scandal gains any further traction. After all awarding the world cup host nation status to a genuine Kleptocracy does kind of give the game away.

Comments

Dan Falchikov said…
Well said. You may be interested to know I've started a little blog of my own (no where near as good obviously), but I suspect we may be discussing similar themes over the coming months. Particularly the uselessness of the UK Labour Party.

http://livingonwords.blogspot.com/
Cicero said…
Good Luck with that Mr. F- will link to it, when I can remember enough techi stuff to do so...

Popular posts from this blog

Post Truth and Justice

The past decade has seen the rise of so-called "post truth" politics.  Instead of mere misrepresentation of facts to serve an argument, political figures began to put forward arguments which denied easily provable facts, and then blustered and browbeat those who pointed out the lie.  The political class was able to get away with "post truth" positions because the infrastructure that reported their activity has been suborned directly into the process. In short, the media abandoned long-cherished traditions of objectivity and began a slow slide into undeclared bias and partisanship.  The "fourth estate" was always a key piece of how democratic societies worked, since the press, and later the broadcast media could shape opinion by the way they reported on the political process. As a result there has never been a golden age of objective media, but nevertheless individual reporters acquired better or worse reputations for the quality of their reporting and ...

Liberal Democrats v Conservatives: the battle in the blogosphere

It is probably fair to say that the advent of Nick Clegg, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, has not been greeted with unalloyed joy by our Conservative opponents. Indeed, it would hardly be wrong to say that the past few weeks has seen some "pretty robust" debate between Conservative and Liberal Democrat bloggers. Even the Queen Mum of blogging, the generally genial Iain Dale seems to have been featuring as many stories as he can to try to show Liberal Democrats in as poor a light as possible. Neither, to be fair, has the traffic been all one way: I have "fisked' Mr. Cameron's rather half-baked proposals on health, and attacked several of the Conservative positions that have emerged from the fog of their policy making process. Most Liberal Democrats have attacked the Conservatives probably with more vigour even than the distrusted, discredited Labour government. So what lies behind this sharper debate, this emerging war in the blogosphere? Partly- in my ...

One Year On

  Head vabariigi iseseisvuspäeva! Happy Estonian Independence Day! It is one year since I stood outside the Estonian Parliament for the traditional raising of the national flag from Tall Hermann tower. Looking at the young fraternities gathered with their flags, I was very sure that Estonia too would soon be facing the aggression of the criminal Russian regime. A tragic and dark day. 5 eyes intelligence had been clear: an all out invasion was going to happen, and Putin´s goals included- and still include- "restoration" of Russian imperial power across Europe, even to the Atlantic. Yet there was one Western intelligence failure: we all underestimated the guts of the Ukrainian armed forces, the ZSU, and its President and people. One year on, Estonia, and indeed all the front line states against Russia, knows that Ukraine saved us. Estonia used that time to prepare itself, should that "delayed" onslaught ever be unleashed, but equally the determination of Kaja Kallas, ...