Labour’s efforts to demonise the hostile anti-Ed media is working. At the Labour leader’s eighth ‘relaunch’ speech on Thursday at Senate House, every single question from journalists was greeted by boos, hisses and tuts.
The Labour leader actually dealt with the smattering of questions about his latest leadership woes rather well, yet the crowd were having none of it. Party members even hissed the polite chap from the BBC, much to the acute embarrassment of Mr Miliband, who was forced to calm his crowd with a ‘come on now, it’s a fair question’.
When another hack asked if Ed felt he had made any mistakes as leader, one passionate activist audibly spat out ‘yes, taking a question from you.’ After Ed had disappeared to rousing clapping and cheering, things got really heated. One party member even saw fit to come over to the media corner and openly berate the gathered hacks:
The same woman was later heard by your humble correspondent shouting in the lobby those that had asked questions were ‘worse than Hitler’s henchmen stirring up hatred against the Jews’. Surely a late contender for the stupidest comment of the year?
Demonising Murdoch and the Mail is part of Labour’s 2015 core-vote strategy, but the constant poison dripped about the media from the very top of the party is having a noticeable impact. Mr S understands that sweary spindoctor Tom Baldwin has lodged an official complaint with the editor of ITV News after their Political Correspondent Chris Ship had the temerity to ask a question at the CBI conference on Monday.
If attempts at proper scrutiny are going to be drowned out by boos and hisses and heckles all the time, the 2015 election is going to get very tedious, very quickly…
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