Open Road

Friday Apr 11th 2008

The London Race

I will never forget seeing Boris Johnson for the first time.  He was drunk out of his head in white tie and tails chairing a debate at the Oxford Union of which he was President while a student at Oxford.  I thought he was a buffoon then and nothing has happened since to make me change my mind.

So I find the idea of him being Mayor of London very scary.  I think it will be extremely close, and Livingstone may just turn it around (see latest Ipsos MORI poll April 9 where Ken has a one point lead).  It is one thing to tell a pollster that you will vote for Boris, another to actually put a cross on a ballot paper for him to run our capital city.

But he may just do it.  And if it does happen, Livingstone will have lost the election rather than Boris winning it.

Brown’s Travails

Brown just can’t get out of the rut he’s in at the moment.

Quite why he thought that abolishing the 10p rate of income tax for lower earners that he himself had introduced was a good thing to do in his last Budget last year is beyond me.  It was so obvious that it wasn’t good Labour politics to get people on low incomes to pay more tax.  They sure as well won’t be grateful for ‘tax simplification’ when their income drops.  The only surprise in this is that Labour MPs have taken until now to register their protest.

Thursday Apr 10th 2008

Human rights and the enemy, an old dilemma

When the British captured Napoleon after the Battle of Waterloo there was the issue of what to do with this spectacular prisoner. We tend to think relatively benignly of Napoleon now, but amongst Lord Liverpool’s government there was little affection for this defeated enemy.

Napoleon was responsible for the slaughter of millions, for a debt in the hundreds of millions and for behaviour that at the time was considered beyond the pale – those who have read the first few pages of War and Peace may recall the characters discussing the scandal of the murder of the Duc D’Enghien. Perhaps not the Hitler of his day, he was certainly the Kaiser Wilhelm.

The government was determined on one thing - not to bring him to Britain. The reason was simple – the Whig opposition would have issued a writ of habeas corpus and put him on the West London party circuit. Imagine Saddam Hussein at the 2004 Oscars.

In the end of course the little fellow was packed off to his comfortable one man Guantanamo Bay on the island of St Helena. Creditably, it never seems to have occurred to the government to simply hand him back to the French royalists, who were quite likely to have killed him as they did Marshals such as Ney.

And so the same problem has returned, in the form alleged Al Qaeda leader Abu Qatada, whom it seems Britain is stuck with. It seems that we can learn a lot from the statesmanship of Lord Liverpool.

Firstly – know your own laws and enforce them properly. The government was very careful to keep Napoleon out of Britain in 1815. It seems that the hapless immigration service should never have allowed Abu Qatada into Britain.

Secondly – there is no need to sacrifice important principles. However much the government hated Napoleon, it seems they never considered turning him over to a probably unpleasant fate.

Thirdly – find a solution. St Helena was a legal fudge, but no-one ever objects to it as inhumane treatment these days. It was a proportionate punishment for Napoleon’s crimes.

The island is, as far as the outside world can tell, still there. I doubt anyone wants another Guantanamo, but I am sure there are people who might prefer exile in the South Atlantic to torture and death in the dungeons of the Middle East.

Monday Apr 7th 2008

Guest Blog from Jonathan Russell on BA and T5

Jonathan Russell is a former Head of Corporate Affairs at Thames Water and PPP. He started his career in the BA Press Office

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS, BUT WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

The past is a foreign country. No doubt BA management have yearned for that glorious past in the last few days – if only they could get a flight there from Terminal 5. One person bore the full burden of being the Go Between twixt the BA Chief Pilot and his distinctly unloved-feeling paramours stuck in cattle class.

Friday Apr 4th 2008

PR Week podcast on Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife’s state visit to the UK

Graham McMillan, chief executive of Open Road, was interviewed for the PR Week podcast on the subject of Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife’s state visit to the UK.

To view the podcast, click here