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Rebekah Brooks David Cameron Leveson Inquiry

What media relations lessons can be drawn from David Cameron's peformance at Leveson Inquiry?

By Max Prangnell

June 15, 2012 | 5 min read

So Prime Minister has had his day giving evidence to Lord Leveson and the close relationship between himself and former News International CEO Rebekah Brooks has been laid bare with just one text message.

But how did the PM perform in front of the camera, with even his wife Samantha watching at home and calling him at lunchtime to jog his memory in order to answer just how often they met with Brooks back in 2008?

Max Prangnell, who runs the media training and crisis communications consultancy Millbank Media along with his colleague Caroline Kerr, offers his reaction.

There’s a golden rule any communications advisor will tell you for free when you’re in trouble and you’re in the media spotlight. Know what you want to say, say what you want to say and don’t say any more than you want to say. It’s not enough to have a rough idea of where you’re going to go with an argument – you need to know the actual words you’ll use, sometimes even when to pause and when to smile. Don’t do what Gordon Brown did, does and you suspect will always do – come out fighting in the belief that you’re cleverer than the bloke you’re talking to and if you just keep on repeating yourself for long enough eventually your adversary will give in and accept you’re right.

David Cameron is too smooth, too sophisticated and too clever for that Sixth Form common room approach. And so it was when he appeared before the Leveson Inquiry this morning. Here was a man, a confident posh boy, who came over as comfortable in his own skin. Who is, you suspect, naturally charming anyway. With a bit of neat photo-shopping you could almost have swapped him for Blair, such were the emphatic (but not too threatening) hand gestures, the pointing with the thumb, the gentle almost laid back language, peppered with y’know’s and I supposes… he knew what he wanted to say and kicked off with a clear agenda in mind; yes, probably with hindsight he was too close to the press in general and News International in particular. Yes, there does need to be tougher or tighter regulation when it comes to the press. So far, so easy.

But, as the morning dragged on that well-rehearsed narrative spluttered at first and then just ran out of steam. He’d made his points and didn’t have a lot to add, except that we knew and he knew he had a further four hours to go in the witness box. First we had questions about the countless weekend get-togethers with Rebekah Brooks and her husband (and his good chum) Charlie. What about these cozy texts then? asked Robert Jay QC, counsel for the enquiry. Then it was Coulson. Why had he hired a man who he knew from personal experience didn’t report what he was told accurately as his Director of communications? enquired Lord Justice Leveson rather politely. Cameron, tried to shrug it off in a ‘that’s-the-way-the-world-is’ kind of tone. It felt hollow and the body language tightened visibly. Had he just been caught smoking in the upper quad?

The afternoon session got tougher again with more deft rhetoric from his knowing inquisitor. This time it was the BSkyB bid. What did he know and when? Like the proverbial rabbit in the headlights he was caught. His core narrative, ‘fessing up to a few mistakes and accepting the need to clamp down on those dreadful guttersnipes, had long since disappeared. He couldn’t ‘go Gordon’ and get all grumpy and harrumphy and he couldn’t do a Blair by sitting back from the question and subtly reframing it to suit the answer he wanted to give. All he could do was ‘not remember’ and ‘not recall’. To be fair, he did make a few attempts to get back in the game but he’d lost the initiative simply because the questions were too incisive and too plain simple. In the world of Westminster politics this is the sort of last line of defence. The sort of big boys version of ‘I’ve forgotten my homework Miss.’

In the end what we were left with? ‘Prime Minister looks uncomfortable as he suffers memory loss on Jeremy Hunt’s role in the BSkyB bid’ will probably not be the headline tomorrow. Well certainly not in The Sun. It was naïve of him to think he could string out a story for four hours and more, and he didn’t have any decent answers for the questions he surely knew were coming. It was cringy at times, but is he seriously wounded? No, we don’t think so. Oh, and there’s one other thing we shouldn’t forget here. He, Gordon, Tony and the rest of them aren’t actually on trial.

Rebekah Brooks David Cameron Leveson Inquiry

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