Question and Answer Insania

The assembled masses who had battled with the hangover to attend the Question and Answer session with Hazel Blears, Harriet "I Am A Woman" Harman, and James Purnell were treated to a debacle that would have had David Dimbleby wincing.

For starters, whether Keith Vaz, who was chairing the horror-fest, was aware that the microphone he was wearing ensured that his sotto voce asides to the panel were boomed loud and clear out to the audience and the viewers at home is hard to tell, but he did keep on doing it.

Meanwhile the audience - presumably suffering as much as the bloke sitting next to Westmonster who looked suspiciously like he was clad in the suit from the night before - were gently lolling around as soothing platitudes such as "progressive" and "equality" were uttered by the panel.

Clearly if you want to get your audience bowling underarm, all you have to do is keep repeating "progressive consensus" whilst asking them to stare into your eyes, because it was hardly a rigorous session: would Harriet agree that we need to do something about inequality? Why yes, and over the last ten years Labour's successes in...

Would James Purnell agree that sport is nice? Why yes, he would as a matter of fact.

Mind you, we were all woken up when Hazel Blears delivered her address to Conference. Maybe it was the fact that the lip-sync is bolloxed on the centre's TVs (the sound is two seconds ahead of the image) or that Hazel was beaming at the audience manically as if she was a small ginger hamster who'd just had a shot of PCP straight into the eyeball, but it really was too much for first thing Monday morning.

Written by Lloyd Shepherd on 24 Sep 2007 1:01 PM. Permalink