Anthony Barnett (London, OK): Cameron is in real trouble with today's Telegraph poll showing that Brown would double Labour's majority an election tomorrow. As Stephan Shakespeare of YouGov, who did the polling, said on the World at One, this is no mere bounce, if that implies Tory support will be back on top the day after tomorrow: "something fundamental" has changed.
But what? The media response is that it is all about positioning, especially Brown placing himself on the right. I wonder if it is that simple. Nick Robinson reported an amusing incident in making this argument. He had just seen Brown in his No 10 office and they had talked about how he had moved the furniture around from Blair's days. Then he read a story in the Sun saying that Brown had moved upstairs to a different room - the old office of the paper's hero Margaret Thatcher. Nick's response was "Gotcha!" Brown is playing the game and appeals to the Sun and its readers with this literal re-positioning! The official response from No 10 about Brown's many offices is hilarious, as Robinson recounts in his blog.
The comments on it, however, are mostly scornful, asking why does this matter. I've criticised Robinson myself for his reporting but not because it is trivial. It is not. An influential line is being taken namely, the power of the media itself. "You see!", Nick is saying in effect, "What matters is less what Brown does than how it is presented - the media is the content".
A similar attitude motivates the universal negative coverage of David Cameron's visit to Rawanda. He was right to go, in the supposedly old-fashioned sense that marking the genocide there was more important than getting in the way of the emergency services for the sake of some photo-ops in contaminated water, even if that might have deservedly laid low a good section of the press core. The press wanted their UK story to sell papers not world justice. But there is no doubt that he is on the ropes. And it is not just because he and his Cameroons so underestimated Brown.
