Derek Draper
Many think psychotherapist Derek Draper's greatest skill is self-promotion and the cunning plan for him to pop in a couple of unpaid days a week to advise Labour where it is going wrong hasn't gone down well with MPs. Correction. It's gone down like a pile of cold sick.
A worrying number of comrades with long memories recall how Peter Mandelson's sidekick spectacularly discredited himself a decade ago and fear what the future holds. I've yet to come across a single MP in Westminster who thinks the arrangement's a good idea for Labour. A fair few can see what he might get out of it: TV interviews? diary on how it all went wrong for Brown? OK! celebrity deal?
In defence of Draper the chief Tory spinner Andy Coulson is no saint. It'll be an intriguing reunion between Draper and Labour.
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And I had thought that Draper was one of the few who, having seen through the betrayal that was/is the New Labour Project, had moved on to a more honourable calling. I wonder if he still holds with the views he expressed when speaking on the BBC series 'The Century of the Self'? I quote:
`What New Labour did suits people in society who exert power in society not through the political system, or not through the democratic political system. It suits big business and it suits entrenched interests and it suits the status quo, those three things of course being those things the Labour party supposed to be a counter-force to. What happens is that big business gets to carry on exerting their power behind the scenes, getting their way, because there's no countervailing pressure. Countervailing pressure is not going to come from 8 people sipping wine in Kettering.
The point about focus groups politics is that there isn't one, because people are contradictory and irrational and so you have a problem in terms of deciding what you are going to do if all you ever do is listen to a mass of individual opinions which are always fluctuating and don't have any coherence and crucially are not set in context. So that is why people can say I want lower taxes and better public services. Of course they do. You say do you want to pay more taxes to get better public services, people are less sure, they then don't believe that of they do pay more taxes it will be spent on better public services so you end up in this quagmire and the truth is a politician has to say "Look this is what I believe, I believe that you should pay slightly more taxes to make better public services and I pledge that I am competent enough to use that money wisely. Do you want that? Vote for me yes or no." And that's what Blair has failed to do. Tony Blair turns around and sort of tries to feed back to them what they already believe, and given what they believe is a load of individual, incoherent, contradictory nonsense that's all he has to offer. And then he wonders why people don't get him. The reason they don't get him is that they are looking for someone to do something that they can't do themselves, that is come up with a coherent political opinion they might have faith in.`