Jamie Janes: The Courageous, Honourable Young Man the News Forgot

November 11th, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

The Parallax Brief is tired of posting on the tawdry Jamie Janes letter story. It’s starting to feel awfully like reversing back over the fluffy kitten you just knocked down, and if he writes any more on the matter,he’s going to feel so sullied he’ll have to scrub himself with a brilo pad when he takes a shower tonight.

So, this will be the last post on the story, and to sign off there are two points that need to be made.

First, the Parallax Brief desperately hopes that Britain is not going down the American route where slobbering, populist right wing media outlets snarl their way through the 24 hour news cycle, and are astonishingly successful in setting the agenda for the more moderate news channels. It is now commonplace for fanatically partisan outlets like Murdoch-owned Fox News, and blog the Drudge Report to set the news agenda for CNN, NBC and the rest.

The way the BBC has led with JanesGate suggests it might be.

Second, what has been lost — and tragically, unforgivably so — is that Jamie Janes was a young man who did what most of us would never contemplate or even conceive. He was brave and honourable enough to offer his life in the service of his country. He is a real life hero: a hard, fit, courageous young man who who died so the people he was fighting wouldn’t get a chance to take on softer, fatter, more cowardly people like the Parallax Brief here in the UK.

Yet amid the he-said-she-said slime of this whole affair, this young man’s awesome sacrifice has been utterly forgotten.

On this day of remembrance, perhaps we should spend a moment considering what Mr. Janes did and give thanks that there are still young men with his constitution in this land.

If you would like to pay tribute to this hero, the Parallax Brief has found this site that might be worth a visit: http://www.lastingtribute.co.uk/tribute/janes/3162087

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Dissent in the Sun Ranks About Handling of Gordon Brown – Jamie Janes Letter

November 11th, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

The Parallax Brief has just noticed that the Think Politics Twitter feed has some interesting inside information about the dissent in the ranks at the Sun over the paper’s grotesquely cynical attack on Gordon Brown for his shabbily presented letter to the mother of Jamie Janes. It seems that Sun journalists aren’t all snarling sociopaths afterall:

Just spoke to a former colleague who works at The Sun – apparently there is dissent in the ranks about their handling of the Brown letter.
10 minutes ago from web

Apart from being a nice scoop, it also backs up rumours of exactly the same situation published elsewhere. From the Guardian:

The Sun’s new political editor is said to have remonstrated with his editors on Sunday over whether to go hard on the prime minister’s misspelt letter to the grieving mother of a soldier killed in Afghanistan.

Tom Newton Dunn is only two weeks into the job but he already knew the prime minister had bad handwriting and poor eyesight so his inclination was to ease up.

The next morning another reporter at the Sun’s head office in Wapping, east London, reported seeing Dunn unusually in the office, away from his normal desk in Westminster. All accepted that this was to make sure he was “closely coordinated” with the very particular idea the desk had for this story.

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Sympathy for the Devil?

November 11th, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

A couple of evenings ago, after the Sun’s sociopathic and appallingly cynical attack on Gordon Brown for his sloppy letter to the bereaved mother of Grenadier Guardsman Jamie Janes first kicked off, the Parallax Brief was talking over the phone to one of his masters from Think Politics management. Both of us, in our own way expressed sympathy for Brown, despite the fact both of us think he’s a poor premier who deserves almost all the criticism that’s come his way.

The Parallax Brief got to wondering whether the Prime Minister isn’t in the same position John Major was in 1996, where he was led a fantastically unpopular government despite being seen as an honourable man who couldn’t keep control of his philandering cabinet members.

However, Benedict Brogan, the the Telegraph’s Chief Political Commentator, has today on his blog listed the reasons not to feel sympathy for the prime minister:

Regardless of its patent sincerity, the letter should never have been sent, either by him or his staff. We may deplore Mrs Janes’ decision to make a public meal out of an unintended slight, but she is entitled to and as with any statement he issues he must always have mind to how it might appear if made public. Mr Brown has been in the business too long to be excused the kind of petulant amateurism that characterises so much of what he does.

Mr Brown wanted to be Prime Minister. He volunteered for this gig. He had a decade to learn the pressures of the job. He should have studied the job description more carefully rather than spend his time trying to hound his predecessor from office.

Mr Brown is not blind. It is admirable that he has reached the top despite suffering limited vision, but as he assured us only recently his eyesight is stable and he can still read. If his eyesight impairs his ability to lead, he should step aside. If not, it’s time his friends stopped pleading it as an excuse.

Mr Brown spent much of the past 15 years or so sucking up to the Sun. He helped it lay in to Tony Blair and whichever hapless Tory leader happened to be in its sights. He used it ruthlessly to do in potential rivals. If you ride the tiger…

The Parallax Brief really hasn’t anything to add to this perfectly logical and well-considered list, except to say that perhaps these don’t actually tackle the reasons that people sometimes feel sorry for Brown. Perhaps it’s more that we see that deep down Gordon is a good man, with a strong Calvinist moral core, who wants to do the right thing, but simply isn’t cut out for the top job. And that inability to meet the demands of being prime minister has led to a series of strategic, tactical, political, policy and presentation mistakes which have (rightly) attracted vast quantities of criticism. In fact, there’s so much criticism that when the Sun slips back into its old role of snarling Tory attack dog over an issue like the Jamie Janes letter, we feel a good man who tried to do that right thing is actually being bullied.

It’s not an excuse for Brown, who deserves to go, but perhaps it can offer an explanation.

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What JanesGate Says About Gordon Brown and the Labour Leadership

November 10th, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

The Jamie Janes letter saga rumbles on and on. At first, the Parallax Brief assumed that it was simply another blunder by an error-prone Prime Minister supported by a spin team unique in its ability to turn a minor hiccup into a PR catastrophe. But the the 24 hour news cycle has turned again, and if anything, the furore has amplified. Today, Gordon Brown was even forced to hold a press conference to explain himself and his actions. Andrew Sparrow, over at the Guardian’s political blog, has some interesting analysis of what the press conference, and JanesGate as a whole, has to say about the Prime Minister.

2. Brown can’t admit it when he makes a mistake.

This is something people have been saying about the prime minister for some time, but the Janes conversation provides a particularly good example. Janes accuses Brown of making 25 spelling mistakes in his letter. Brown (correctly) says that his handwriting is bad and he apologises for that. He says that he spelt the name of Janes’s son, Jamie, correctly, which, if you’ve seen the letter, I think you can accept. But she also criticises him for addressing the letter to “Mrs James”. The letter clearly does start “Dear Mrs James”. But Brown won’t admit that he got it wrong. “I think I was trying to say Janes, as your right name,” he says.

3. Brown is not particularly good at empathy.

Any politician confronted with an angry widow would find it hard to emerge with much credit. Brown clearly feels sorry for Janes and his sympathy appears to be utterly genuine. But he does not convey this particularly well. Listening to the conversation, I found myself wondering how Tony Blair would have dealt with the call. (Bill Clinton, of course, would have handled it brilliantly.) Brown might have emerged better if he had asked Janes to tell him more about her son, instead of just defending government policy.

4. Brown won’t appeal for sympathy himself.

As Sue Arnold wrote in today’s Guardian, Brown’s handwriting is poor because he’s partially disabled. Brown could have mentioned this to Janes, but he doesn’t. And he knows from his own experience what it is like to suffer the loss of a child. But he doesn’t mention this either. Many people will find such reticence admirable, although it probably makes it harder for him to defend himself.

This all seems like common sense to the Parallax Brief, not least because these are exactly the same personality traits that we’ve all been long aware of for a long time as being detrimental to his premiership. In fact, wasn’t it the case that for many years, Gordon Brown was seen as the Labour Party’s Dauphin, but that Tony Blair gained the leadership, despite being intellectually outgunned by Brown, because of his better presentation — especially for the middle classes?

Over at the brilliant Political Betting blog, however, Mike Smithson takes that one stage further, linking Mr. Brown’s problems with David Miliband’s decision to refuse the opportunity to become the first EU High Commissioner.

The big question now is why Miliband has thrown away this chance and what it says about his Labour leadership aspirations. Surely there can be no doubt that this is what he’s going for – the only issue is whether it’ll be before the election or after.

[...]

It’s that characteristic, the refusal to accept what’s blindingly obvious, that more than anything else is [the Prime Minister's] greatest political weakness.

We’ve speculated for so long on the Brown departure but there will come a time, surely, when he or those close to him realise that the best option is retirement? Maybe it’s this prospect that’s caused Miliband (D) to stay in the UK?

There’s no doubt that EU High Commissioner a mega job, and one which would remove Mr. Miliband from the daily gutter brawling of Westminster.  Surely he must believe he has a shot at a lofty role to refuse such an opportunity?

The Parallax Brief wonders, though, whether if choosing Mr. Miliband wouldn’t be making the same mistake the party made with Mr. Brown; that is, selecting a man with intellectual gravitas and an influential and large party power base, but with serious presentation problems and an inability to look up from the minutiae of the trees to see the big picture of the woods?

Whatever the merits of David Miliband as a potential leader of the party, it now seems clear that he is positioning himself for a run. The only question that remains is whether that run will be before of after the election.

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