Media & PR

Will Cameron’s new communications chief be able to live down election night?

The appointment of Craig Oliver as the government’s Director of Communications, replacing Andy Coulson, means that the man who was in charge of the expensive boat fiasco, the fancy computer graphics and the shortage of hard facts (aka the BBC’s coverage of general election night 2010) is now heading up government communications.

That BBC coverage was an all too predictable combination of mistakes – this time it was the Andrew Neil boat party that didn’t work, but the attempt to do something major on general election night that doesn’t involve politicians almost always does go wrong. So too, alas, was the emphasis on flashy graphics and lots of talking over the old-fashioned approach of reporting the news and giving the sorts of details that those watching election results at 4am really want.

So whilst Craig Oliver has clearly got many fans from the positive write-ups his appointment has received, I’m surprised how many also seem to have forgotten how critical the reaction was to his big event last year.

One response to “Will Cameron’s new communications chief be able to live down election night?”

  1. My memory of the reporting from the BBC on Election Night was when they told us that ‘it’s looking bad for the Lib Dems in City of Durham’, then were about to go over to the count… and then went straight over to Gordon Brown’s declaration for 15 minutes. When we returned from that, they didn’t bother to give us the Durham result for a fair while afterwards, although we knew by that point that it had probably gone against us.

    I also thought the boat was a massive gimmick.

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