The Hounding of Jeremy

New leaders of all parties have in the past been given a honeymoon, sometimes brief to settle in before the usual press and media battering begins and, in the case of Labour leaders builds up to a crescendo. With Jeremy the crescendo began before he'd even won the leadership election and has got even worse now he's in office. It takes two forms. One is to rake up everything he and his closest colleagues did or said in a radical past and assume that he'll do and say the same as leader.This is the approach of the press witness the Telegraph's accusations that he fomented London riots, armed the IRA and smuggled bombs to Hamas all accusations then taken up by brainless interviewers on the electronic media

. .The second  approach is to bombard the new leadership with all sorts of hypothetical problems and demand instant answers about what he'll do, a technique which was brought to overkill by Andrew Marr on Sunday morning. 

Give the lad a chance.

Any leader who has no errors in the past is a saint already and any leader who says my party will do this that or the other or anything else the pundits want is a dictator not a leader. while questions like "will you curtsey for the queen?""will you sing Beethoven's ninth (entire score of course)" at European summits "will you wear a tie for the Pope" are  so daft that the asker is beyond contempt 

Policy formulation is a difficult art. It needs time and thought. You cant give the rank and file members all they want because that would put us out if line with the public. You cant give the PLP all they want because we'd end up with a policy s cautious and anodyne its not worth voting for. So you take the problems. Decide what the problems are, what needs to be done, what's saleable and propagate a policy. TV interviewers aren't that important that all that has to be done on the spot whenever they askLeaders are there to think and to lead not to jump through hoops to please Marr, Dimbleby or Any other passing whipper snapper