British phone-hacking scandal: a lesson in crisis management

Dear readers,

Today I will indulge myself and write about what I have been watching and observing the past days ... and months and years. I am talking about David Cameron and politics as crisis management.

As you know, the past two weeks in Britain have been dominated by news of illegal phone-hacking activities allegedly being perpetrated by journalists and executives at the tabloid News of the World (NoTW). This concerns the Prime Minister because the former editor of the newspaper, Andy Coulson, was employed by David Cameron starting in 2007 when he was still Leader of the Opposition, until January this year when Mr. Coulson resigned from his post as Director of Communications at No. 10 Downing Street.

Specifically in this post, I would like to talk about the Prime Minister's performance at the Dispatch Box, versus that of the current Leader of the Opposition, Ed Miliband, during the debate on the public's confidence in the media and the Metropolitan Police, on 20 July 2011.

At the outset, I would like to tell you that my all-time political and public-affairs and statecraft hero(ine) is Margaret Thatcher. No one, it seems, can equal the combination of charm and forcefulness with which she led Government and dominated politics, not only in her own country but also the entire world, and in the process, changed the political imagination itself.

None can equal that achievement, but it seems that David Cameron is three-quarters of the way. His performance in the Commons is not as masterly as Thatcher's in her last major speech after she resigned as Prime Minister on 22 November 1990, but I suppose no one can really expect to equal that. Rather, he performed in such a way that brought out his strength and emphasized his basic honesty and decency, which was reassuring to a public that was getting exhausted and cynical about the whole scandal. In contrast, Ed Miliband could not shake off the impression that he was engaging in political point-scoring, something that Mr. Cameron ingeniously pointed out during his opening statement.

What matters in politics is the impression of competence and leadership, not so much the actuality of those. What transpired at the Despatch Box was that Ed Miliband, by being unable to convey that same impression, left the field open for Mr. Cameron to take. But it is not just by default that Mr. Cameron projects the image of being the only plausible Prime Minister for a few more years. I have already mentioned transparency and decency, but his basic intelligence also shines through in a quantity that manages to overwhelm the meagre supply in the Miliband brain. Only someone who can think on his feet is able to say, "I can assure the house that I have not met Mrs. Brooks in a slumber party, and I have not seen her in her pyjamas."

Which broke the mood, and for good. This is a scandal that teaches many lessons to everyone, but for this political observer, it teaches above all, that in a crisis, it helps to be transparent, decent and intelligent, and to show convincingly that you are all three.