Slick soundbites and poor spin from slippery Dave

By Charlie Whelan

The one good thing about watching Andrew Marr on Sunday mornings when most sane people are still fast asleep is that you can tune into the Match of the Day repeat first.

Dave Cameron certainly wasn’t watching the footie though and not just because he doesn’t like the people’s game. He was busy learning his lines.

The trouble with learning a complete set of slick sound bites is that when things don’t quite go to plan there is little else to say and for Cameron this was cruelly exposed, as the signal from the show coming live from his house kept going down. Every time we returned, the Tory leader didn’t know when he had been cut off so he just repeated the last sound bite delivered. The end result was that it looked like he had nothing new to say. Indeed he actually didn’t, leaving hacks with little to report except the Tory leader’s reaction to the racist royal.

We did learn, though, what a poor spin operation Dave has. Andy Coulson must have thought he was very clever in insisting that as Gordon Brown had appeared from Downing Street last week, Dave was entitled to have the programme live from his home. The smart AM editor Barney Jones would no doubt have preferred the interview to take place in the safe haven of the studio. He will have been furious that the signal kept going down but I bet he was secretly delighted that the Tories’ insistence that Dave gets the same treatment as the PM so spectacularly backfired.

UPDATE:

Here’s the full transcript of Cameron’s interview with Marr if you can possibly bear it, or you can watch the performance in full here.