MARR CHATS TO CAROLINE AND WEE DOUGIE

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This morning's Marr Show was, you won't be surprised to hear, strongly weighted towards the Left. We had far-left media-type Mariella Frostrup on the paper review, Liberty director Shami Chakrabarti discussing the extradition of Gary McKinnon, Green leader Caroline Lucas and close Brown ally Douglas Alexander as the 'big' interviewee. Matthew Parris of The Times was the only voice allowed on from the other side of the political spectrum.
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The interview with Caroline Lucas was a very soft one (scoring a low interruption coefficient of 0.3), heralded by the friendly greeting, "Welcome! Thank you for coming in Caroline." Asking her questions about what she wants from the Copenhagen summit and letting her off the hook on nuclear power (despite some self-contradictory points that a decent interviewer would have picked up on and challenged, had he been so inclined), Marr did at least bring up the scandal over those leaked East Anglian e-mails - though clearly only because he felt he had to ("I must ask you about the big row...") and chose not to press the matter by any other questions on the subject. This is not unsurprising, as he didn't bring it up at all during the paper review (when Mariella was waxing hyperbolic on global warming) or during the section of his interview with Wee Dougie when Copenhagen was discussed. He did bring up Nick Griffin and the BNP (Caroline Lucas replied very sensibly to that) and fished for a little praise for his Labour Party chums: "What about the British government then? What about Ed Miliband? He's had a fairly good press for sort-of trying to push quite hard. Generally speaking, in the past the British government would boast about being one of the leaders on sort-of emission targets and cutting and so on. What's your appraisal at the moment?"
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With regards to the interview with Douglas Alexander, this was scarcely any tougher, scoring another low I.C. of 0.4 (only 4 interruptions in 11 minutes). When Marr brings up Labour's lag in the opinion polls he always talks about Gordon Brown's personal unpopularity - as he did twice here - whereas surely Labour as a whole are unpopular for being a bunch of dangerous, incompetent and corrupt liars who've sunk us up to our eyeballs in debt by spending all our hard-earned money like a gang of greedy, drunken idiots as well as changing our country for the worse in too many ways to mention. Talking merely of Brown's personal unpopularity is a total distraction, and so the sort of thing I'd expect from Labour-friendly Andrew Marr. (You can come out now. Rant over!). And guess what? He brought up that Observer opinion poll from last week again (which showed a mere 6% gap between Labour and the Conservatives) before discussing hung parliaments. He's still chasing that dream!
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