CLEGG MAKES IT A DOUBLE

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Andrew Marr's interview with Nick Clegg lasted 18 minutes 30 seconds (as ever including the bits on the sofa at the end), contained 26 interruptions and scored the same I.C. as last week's against David Cameron - 1.4. (My prediction of 1.1 was an underestimate, though my prediction that it would be higher than Gordon Brown's 0.8 proved correct.) This is not an untypical figure: *
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17/1/10 Nick Clegg 1.4
20/9/09 Nick Clegg 1.3
22/11/09 Nick Clegg 1
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Marr remains a real Labour Party man, it seems.
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One obvious feature of the interview was the number of questions Marr asked about specific Conservative proposals - on marriage tax allowance and caps on immigration - and the way he let Nick Clegg attack the Tories without interruption (or extraneous noises) in his answers to those questions (see at 4.24 in from the start of the interview). In contrast, Marr asked only one question specifically about Labour (the possibly of reviving Paddy Ashdown's idea of a 'progressive' realignment of the Centre Left), but when this led to an attack on Labour's illiberalism he interrupted it within just 9 seconds and put a stop to it! Unlike the questions about the Conservatives, this one was not meant to result in such an attack!!
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All that said, well done to The Andrew Marr Show for inviting Peter Watt onto the programme, and allowing him to spill the beans on the disreputable behaviour of Gordon Brown. He may be a bitter man (Mr Watt that is, not Gordon Brown!), but this was pure gold. I for one was not expecting it to happen, given that the BBC had previously been playing the story down for all it was worth. But happen it did!
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