If you can’t be good, don’t get caught

A better statement for those of us who are not obsessed with what takes up 50 percent of the news every day is that we’re not interested in politicians.

Governments have to run countries and smaller local bodies have to run towns and counties, but when the whole thing becomes an issue of personalities rather than policies, it becomes a different matter altogether.

The presidential race in the US is dominated by the unsubtle, unpredictable, lurching Goliath that is Donald Trump, but his ilk have roamed the earth since the dawn of time and can be seen in lesser form in this country and any other.

In this line of work, it is inevitable that one comes across politicians from time to time. And so it was when, recently arrived in Tobago, I found myself in a press conference.

Because I look different and he hadn’t seen me before, the MC glanced at me as if I were representing the “international press”.

This is not all that unusual, because all over the Caribbean people seem to think a white journalist must be a BBC correspondent or something. It’s better than being mistaken for Wayne Rooney or one of the Great Train Robbers, I suppose.

Press conferences are the same in this part of the world as they are in the rest of the region and, for that matter, the UK. It’s like a little club. The same old (mainly young) journalists turn up to talk to the same old politicians and everybody knows that nothing very revealing is about to emerge. There is a bland presentation in which they say what they would like us to print. Then they throw it open to questions, and the same old newshounds probe away, asking the questions that haven’t been dealt with and trying to find an angle in the bland replies. There is laughter as the inquisitor pokes gentle fun at the failure of his quarry to cough up anything concrete.

As I talk to a fellow professional during a break, he asks me what I’m going to write and I have to tell him, “As far as I’m concerned nobody has said anything.” When the session resumes, the senior politician makes little jokes at which everyone dutifully laughs. All except the taciturn guy they’ve never seen before, who looks like he wouldn’t smile if they gave him a cheque for a million $TT . But I’m like a Chinese peasant at a Richard Prior gig: people are talking but no new facts are being delivered, no revelations made. It’s the same with any journalistic group bantering with the shiny grey suits: you might as well enjoy yourself, because there will be no joy in the information you actually glean from this.

What politicians really want is PR. They don’t want to debate what they’re doing, but to hand it to the public on a plate, no questions asked.

There was a hilarious instance in the UK this week of such an attempt which backfired. Under- pressure Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn, a squeaky-clean, determinedly unpretentious champion of the downtrodden who is so far left he must fall out of bed every night, had his people film him on a long train journey, apparently unable to find a seat and therefore sitting on the floor. What he and his PR team had failed to take into account was that there is CCT V on trains, and when his own video went public, the train company, Virgin, went all the way to the top, the boss being Richard Branson. That’s a man with a bit of experience of these things and he duly released CCT V footage showing plenty of empty seats and Corbyn actually using one before the recording of the noroom charade.

Corbyn, you see, has pledged to nationalise the railways (in the unlikely event that he ever becomes Prime Minister), which would be detrimental to Virgin and therefore Branson. And so are reputations made and destroyed.

The man who lives in a modest terraced house and doesn’t claim expenses if he can possibly help it has attempted to con the public - and he’s been caught out. He was more than likely talked into it by his PR people, but even so, a blemish has been cast upon his impeccable character.

Oh Jeremy. We thought it was only those vile Conservatives who went in for that sort of thing. How can we take anything about you at face value again? Let it, at least, be a warning to the politicians of the world.

Th e y ’ l l all be playing it s t rai ght in future, w o n ’ t they? N o , t h e y ’ l l just be m o r e careful