Blairforce One

The Labour party really are giving this whole Web 2.0, new media thingy a go aren’t they - first David Miliband launches the UKs first Ministerial blog (see previous post) and now T-Blairy has launched a Number 10 Podcast.

David Cameron took the more traditional media intrusion and had a go at telling the world about ‘his’ (or at least his PR teams) favourite music but T-Blairy went one up.

The Prime Ministerial Podcast, and lets be honest here is little more than a giant puff, you didn’t expect anything else did you?

The first episode saw the Big T answer questions sent in to the Number 10 website from ‘ordinary’ members of the public and fielded by Guardian and Sun journalists - the most interesting bit was his stumbling over the England Flag issue.

The second episode, as long as it was taken as pure puff from the begining was actually quite entertaining - just see it as another Blairy Jaunt into the world of light entertainment and you’ll get something from it.

Episode two saw one of my favourite comedians, Eddie Izzard join Tony on his trip to an EU Summit where we had the opportunity to hear about their travels by car, plane and foot (all very fast).

It’s funny, it’s meant to be funny - if it was just Eddie Izzard doing a podcast and wasn’t being put out by Number 10 and the Labour Party then I’d go as far as to say it was actually pretty good - unfortunatly it’s being sold as a number 10 podcast so it loses credibility.

The most insightful part of the whole thing is about 20 minutes in when the big cheese (Tony) was talking about how negotians are part of the way ‘we’ do business in the modern world.

Unfortunatly, as pointed out in the Nick Robinson blog, we don’t actually find out what negotiations are being carried out or what that business is.

If Number Ten really did want to show they were interested in ‘communicating’ then, as suggested by Neil in the Nick Robinson Blog comments if the next installment featured questions posed by someone like Mark Steel or Ian Hislop it might go someway to achieving that.

However, as I mentioned in the David Miliband post - it might not be perfect but at least it’s a start.

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