today : live by the sword...

Oh dear. We all hoped it would never happen even though we knew it probably would. The Labour government is looking like any other government: ministerial blunders, the refusal of people to resign, extra-marital affairs, a whiff of scandal.

Much of it is not their fault. For example, policy wise they are being treated rather unfairly. The unions are boo-hissing ministers for reasons that I can't really fathom - boredom maybe. The NHS is having problems, although everyone seems to be measuring its current state to some mythical perfection, rather then the shambolic, underfunded, peeling paint mess of ten years ago. The same goes for education. The NUT is jumping up and down over changes but don't appear to have an alternative of their own. Surely they don't want the status quo?

The donors and loaners scandal is the most disappointing to me. It is simply a case of powerful people manipulating the rules, thinking they can get away with it. Nobody knows if they have actually broken the law, but that's not the point. Dodgy behaviour is dodgy behaviour, even if it stops short of being criminal. We knew they might end up behaving like this, but hoped they wouldn't.

In some ways Labour are simply suffering media karma. If you predicate your government on presentation and media manipulation then it will eventually come back to bite you. There is not a day goes by where politicians don't try and dominate the news cycle. I don't know what happened in the past, but it seems that these days people are never actually left alone to govern. By speeding the appearance of change and improvement they increase the expectations of change and improvement until it becomes an unsustainable treadmill where people want everything to be immediately perfect. Oh, and they don't want to pay for it.

Government is, these days, all about presentation. What Bush senior famously dubbed the Vision Thing. I suspect that governments didn't realise that just what they were playing with when they adopted this apparently simple way of governing and remaining popular on a quick fix short term basis.
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Fact is, if the only real contact people have with politics is in the form of a daily or weekly Tv presentation, then politics becomes just that - another Tv show. And the same rules apply. Governments, like Tv shows can jump the shark, lose ratings appeal, or simply run out of plot lines. In reality Tv or drama or soap there have to be villains and heroes. If you set up your government as a Tv presentation then naturally people will assume these roles. Look at any long running drama.Those that survive for several seasons change and refine their set up as well as their plotlines. Others become more sensational by introducing scandal, extramarital affairs and scurrilous plotting. Dramas like ER exhaust their setting and widen out to include the home lives of the characters. There is churn among the personnel. People die. Others arrive. Some Tv shows just have a natural term limit and last only one, two or three seasons.

Tv is governed by rules. 22 episodes per year with a season premiere, a couple of sweeps episodes and a season finale. Real life, in the matters of economy, war, natural disaster and public policy unfortunately doesn't work to such convenient timetables. People are bored by the Iraq War because it has no drama, no highs and lows. It is simply a grind. The economy is a slow moving beast. In fact, if a government tries to contrive a ratings grabbing episode with a big tax giveaway, or some other glossy one-off policy, it just messes with the long game. And if you get it wrong then I'm sorry, but you can't get out of the shower to find it was all a dream.

This is what is causing Labour's current woes. People are just bored with the same old faces and the same old stuff. This is Labour's problem as much as anything. They played the media game and are suffering by it.