David Cameron’s Spectator Interview

The Christmas issue of the Spectator published on 14 December carried an article, David Cameron on tax, coalition, ‘green crap’ and Team Nigella, by its editor, Fraser Nelson, based on an interview which he had secured with David Cameron. To some extent, it was a precursor to an article Cameron wrote for The Times (£) on 1 January and his New Year’s Day message. The interview generated some media attention at the time of its publication in December, for example, the PM’s remark in the context of the constraints imposed by being in coalition with the Lib Dems:

I’m happy to tell you — and Spectator readers — privately that there’s a good list of things I have put in my little black book that I haven’t been able to do which will form the next Tory manifesto

and

… he is ‘obsessed’ with Why Nations Fail, by two American academics who argue that a nation’s fate is determined not by the quality of its politicians but on the strength of its institutions — courts, schools, banks, government. ‘Someone said to me: you only like this book because it’s two academics who have written a very complicated book that confirms all your prejudices. I said, well, what’s wrong with that?’

and his “Team Nigella” remark which probably caused more comment than the PM or Nelson would have expected.

But I thought it would be interesting to analyse the article from another point of view, starting with the logistics:

It’s 9.30 a.m. on a Friday and David Cameron is about to head for his Oxfordshire constituency and work from home.

There is no date but presumably it was Friday 6 December because:

This morning, he has paid a visit to Tech City, London’s answer to Silicon Valley, and travelled to South Africa House to pass on his condolences following Nelson Mandela’s death. His last appointment, which will last for as long as it takes to drive to Beaconsfield service station, is an interview with The Spectator.

According to Google, it takes about 45 minutes to drive from South Africa House in Trafalgar Square to Beaconsfield service station, just off the M40. Nelson’s article attributes about 600 words as being spoken by Cameron. On 1 January Isabel Hardman posted the PM’s New Year message on the Spectator’s Coffee House website on YouTube and as text. In a tad under three minutes (2’ 58”) he delivered 478 words, so he was speaking at more than 150 words per minute. So the 600 words in the article would have taken him only four minutes out loud.

Nelson, when I’ve heard him on BBC2 Newsnight or Channel 4 News, is an articulate Scot with plenty to say, so one might think that his questions could easily take longer than the PM’s answers. However, on 26 December, again on Coffee House, Nelson published a supplementary to his magazine article titled David Cameron: the press may regret its defiance over regulation. This included some verbatim Q & A text where Nelson’s 99 words of questioning received 245 PM words in response. There were another 299 new words of Cameron direct speech as well.

So, in summary, the Spectator has now provided its readers with about 1150 words direct from the PM’s mouth which would have taken him less than 10 minutes to utter. If Nelson was more prolix than his Q& A section suggests, he might have spoken for 10 minutes too. From which it seems that less than half of their time on the car journey can be accounted for by the Spectator reports so far. Nelson started his Coffee House piece:

In my interview with David Cameron in the current Christmas edition of The Spectator, there wasn’t enough space for everything.

Well quite. Even allowing for pleasantries and perhaps a few guarded telephone calls (one assumes Nelson's phone would be deferentially in airplane mode), as much again as was reported must have been said but was certainly not intended for the consumption of “Spectator readers — privately”!

New Year Predictions 2014

At the start of the year I post about some of the predictions which people have come out with in the previous 12 months –for the record so far, see my post a year ago. This year I’ve picked three (and a half), mostly about the UK 2015 election, the outcome of which may well become apparent in the next 12 months. I’ve avoided the opinions of politicians – obviously Michael Gove is going to say he’s convinced that the Tories will get a majority in 2015, whether he believes it or not. Instead here are some opinions from observers, not players.

Firstly this from John Rentoul in his Independent Eagle Eye blog in July:

I suspect much of the Labour Party has lulled itself into a false sense of Swedenism* because some polls suggest that people think Osborne is an objectionable piece of work. Of course they do; he is a politician and he is currently in government. What this poll does, however, is to compare his policies with those of the other lot, had they been in the despised position of being in government. 

If Labour haven’t persuaded the voters that things would have been better under them by now (and I’m one of the 32 per cent in that last question, incidentally), they are unlikely to do so by the time of the election, now that the economy is picking up a little. And if Labour cannot do that, it cannot win. 

*Swedenism, n: The attribution to the electorate of generous social-democratic qualities.

Next an Oxford academic, Steve Fisher, in October, all very quantitative and objective at 559 days in advance, in a post on his Elections etc blog, pithily titled: A long-range forecast for a 2015 British General Election based on current polls and historical polls and votes:

Forecast Election Day Shares and 95% Prediction Intervals 

Con : 40.2 plus or minus 11.8 i.e. between 28 and 52 

Lab : 31.8 plus or minus 6.6 i.e. between 25 and 38 

LD : 11.8 plus or minus 14.5 i.e. between 0 and 26 

Forecast Election Day Seats 

Con : 337 

Lab : 265 

LD : 21 

Con majority of 24

Another quant with a high reputation is Nate Silver, “the man who knows everything” according to Will Pavia in The Times (£) in April:

What about Britain’s coalition government, I say. Will it survive? He thinks for a moment. “So, I’ve never quite understood,” he says. “What are the Liberal Democrats getting out of the coalition exactly?” He really does ask the most acute questions. As I struggle to supply an answer, he says: “And does Labour have a charismatic leader?” His prediction, based only on the fact that “you have had a rough several years economically”, is that David Cameron will not be re-elected. 

“He’s awfully unpopular right now,” he says. “Look, this is dangerous, because I can extrapolate from the political science literature in the US. In the US context, the economy is not everything, but it’s an awfully large factor and the personalities of the candidates don’t matter very much in nine out of ten cases. I’m not sure if that’s as true in the parliamentary system. I think the economy bit has generally been shown to be true across different parts of the world.” Cameron might as well call in the removal men.

The “half”? Later in the year, Silver also gave his opinion on the outcome of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum in the Scotsman:

... [he] said polling data was “pretty definitive”. “There’s virtually no chance that the Yes side will win”, he said. “If you look at the polls, it’s pretty definitive really where the No side is at 60-55 per cent and Yes side is about 40 or so. “Historically, in any Yes or No vote in a referendum, it’s actually the No side that tends to grow over time, people tend not to default to changing the status quo. 

… “If there was a major crisis in England – if the Eurozone split apart and there were ramifications economically (for the UK) – the maybe things would reconsidered a little bit. But he added: “For the most part it looks like it’s a question of how much the No side will win by, not what the outcome might be.”