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Labour's new PR chief to take on statesman Salmond POLITICS:
Sunday Herald, The, Jul 22, 2007 by Steven Vass Media Correspondent
WE may be no closer to knowing whether Jack McConnell will continue as Scottish Labour leader beyond the next couple of months, but we now know that Brian Lironi is to be the party's new chief spin doctor.
Following the likes of Alastair Campbell and Paul Sinclair from Labour cheerleading at Trinity Mirror to doing a similar job within the party, the Sunday Mail's political editor is hoping to be released from his reporting tasks some time in the next couple of weeks.
He will certainly have his work cut out. He joins a party currently trailing the SNP in the polls, which many believe has yet to come to terms with its election defeat in May. Labour might have spent all those painful years as Her Majesty's Opposition at Westminster, but it has never had the same experience at Holyrood.
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In contrast, the SNP is seen as having been spun exceptionally under Kevin Pringle, who masterminded party communications during the election campaign and has since been made a special adviser to Alex Salmond.
Pringle will doubtless have had a hand in subsequent presentation successes such as the Lockerbie bomber row, abolishing prescription charges for the chronically sick and ruling out nuclear power. From his election-day landing by helicopter at Edinburgh's Prestonfield House onwards, most say that Salmond has looked surprisingly statesmanlike.
Lironi's Labour Party, on the other hand, is having to adjust to life without special advisers, which are a privilege of being in office. This has put paid to official McConnell spokespeople Douglas Campbell and Rachel McEwan, while the 40 or so press officers employed by the Executive are civil servants and now seerve the new SMP administration.
Lironi, who is a keen folk guitarist and pianist, with a decent golf handicap and a love of East Fife Football Club, is effectively the replacement for that PR shortfall. Labour MSPs are generally said to be pleased with his appointment.
Although he has only recently joined the Labour Party, he is seen as being broadly sympathetic to their outlook.
He will head up a new press office for the parliamentary group, which will include the recently arrived Vanessa Ewing and one or possibly two more press officers.
They will work alongside the existing party press office in Glasgow, which has been depleted to just press officer Tony McElroy after communications head Steven Lawther resigned for "family reasons" three months before the election amid rumours of internal squabbling.
The latter office has a budget to bring in one more member of staff, but a direct replacement for Lawther looks unlikely.
Once Lironi has got his feet under the table, it may well be that he will in practice be running both operations.
His first major task will be to work out where communications went wrong at the election. While much of Labur's unpopularity can be blamed on issues such as Iraq and the public's natural tendency to get bored of anyone in office for a long time, most observers believe the party's communications deserve a share of the blame.
The favourite complaint is Alastair Campbell syndrome. It might be four years since the man himself stepped back from Labour duties as Tony Blair's spokesman, but many point to a generation of spin doctors in Scotland and in London who adopt the same tough tactics.
The press pack would be treated unpredictably at best, rudely and aggressively at worst, and what few stories were put out in Scotland would go to trusted loyalists. Douglas Campbell and Paul Sinclair, adviser to former Scottish Secretary Douglas Alexander, are among those name-checked by different observers as examples of the trend.
This was then compounded by a strategy of cultivating only editors, which would often put the political hacks' noses out of joint, and misunderstood the ways in which stories end up in most papers.
At the same time, Labour arguably suffered from having its press officers based at its Glasgow headquarters rather than at Holyrood and not having anyone to directly represent the parliamentary party. The party press officers in Glasgow were often distracted by having to field questions on MPs and local government.
Labour is also accused of not telling journalists when or where events would take place until the last minute, starting them late and producing sloppy press releases.
Then there was London, which neither seemed to like McConnell's policy plans nor trusted him to win. While the former first minister wanted a positive message on areas like health and education, Brown and Blair and their communicators wanted to focus on the dangers of independence.
Such disagreements seem to have hastened Lawther's departure. Having apparently long felt frustrated that McConnell ignored his advice to stick to core policies and not get sidetracked by things such as Malawi, the final straw is said to have been when focus group supremo Philip Gould began to intervene early this year.
Put it all together and it begins to look like an open goal for the SNP.
