PM's five-day interview of Andrew Lansley was a good idea ? but it needed to toughen up
PM (Radio 4) has a new strategy for the headline political interview: instead of getting ministers in at the crack of dawn, so John Humphrys can bust their balls and they have to pretend at the end they really enjoyed it, Eddie Mair does a five-parter in which, so far as I can tell, he intends to hug or lick them to death.
The producer said in her blog that the whole week of Andrew Lansley (pictured) was warranted by the scale of the proposed NHS changes. Fine. Wouldn't your first question, then, be: "given the unbelievable scale of these NHS changes, why isn't there anything in your manifesto? And don't blame the Liberals. There's nothing in their manifesto either." Isn't that your first question? Not for Eddie, who is unready to be so vulgar. The most critical thing he said was: "have you countenanced failure?" It's not a bad question, but it's a pretty weird one. What politician have you ever heard say: "yes, I've countenanced it; if it happens, it hopefully won't become clear until I've moved to the Foreign Office"? There's a rumour, by the way, that although the GP-consortiums idea wasn't in any manifesto, Lansley had been talking about it since 2003, but no one noticed because it's impossible to stay awake all the way through one of his speeches.
A five-part interview is quite radical for radio current affairs. If it's going to become a fixture, I think it has to be more of a punch-up. Otherwise it sounds like a party political broadcast.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/jan/21/radio-review-andrew-lansley-nhs
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