Tony Curzon Price (London, oD): Did anyone else notice it? The "electricity" word, whispered by an unidentified outsider, to Cabinet minister John Hutton, Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, as he was being grilled on nuclear power by John Humphrys on this morning's Today program.
The minister made a tiny slip: he said that nuclear accounts for "a small" 18% of our energy consumption --- actually, and this is irrelevant, 18% is pretty huge. Someone in the background of the minister, no doubt a nerdish civil servant or political aid, unable to contain his professional rectitude, blurted out "electricity", and the minister corrected himself, "yes, electricity, not energy". Nuclear is 18% of our electricity production, but electricity is only about 1/3 of our energy consumption, so nuclear is only about 6% of our energy consumption.
All very nerdish. Who cares. Well - it was a nice insight into the myth of un-mediation - that what we hear on the news is, "authentic" and "real". John Humphrys gets minister out of bed in the morning and has a ferocious chat about policy on the phone which we are privileged to listen in to. John Humphrys represent the people; the minister is our servant; the Today Program is part of our democratic calling of power to account between elections. Funnily enough, the interview itself was all about another form of what we are offered as unmediated straight talk: public consultations over the future of nuclear energy, and Greenpeace's claim that the supposedly "direct" consultation is in fact a stitch-up.
What the lapsus revealed was that the minister has usually silent aids helping him with the questions (while John Humphrys, no doubt has his corresponding battery of producers whispering questions down his ear). It's like the pictures of Neil Armstrong, the great, lone adventurer with his big step for mankind - when there are thousands of people back at base making the picture of the individual possible.
So where do either of these institutions - the stitched-up consultation and the interview about the big-step-for-mankind (sorry, I mean electricity) - leave democracy? We have grown used to the way post-industrial society retains an industrial means of processing information which has led to a true assembly-line creation of 'reality'. It is not just game shows and reality TV that deliver a myth of reality; the same ethos pervades the political process.
It is a pity that the BBC decided to wipe out the episode I refer to here. The moments around minute 10:54 of the version on the web, have been taken out.
