Doing a Thornberry
It occurred to me after one of yesterday's posts that I have now used the expression of "Doing a Thornberry" on someone in two separate posts without making clear what I meant.
The extraordinary thing about the tweet which terminated Emily Thornberry's membership of the shadow cabinet was that it appeared at first view entirely harmless, and it was the way it was subsequently presented that was so disastrous for her. I had to spend ten minutes explaining to one of my family, who is not lacking in political awareness, why a picture of a house with the three word caption "Image from #Rochester" could possibly be a resigning matter.
And of course, if Labour still had the sort of efficient spin operation which Campbell and Mandelson ran for Blair, it wouldn't have been.
The tweet was so damaging to Labour because their opponents in the press and on the net were able to convince many people that the tweet was a coded sneer against the sort of working class voter who live in houses like that one. Which they were only able to do because Thornberry's response to the tweet failed to squash that interpretation and, even more damning, the fact that half the Labour party promptly started attacking her for it, and the way Ed Miliband sacked her demonstrated only too clearly that they believed the tweet meant exactly what her opponents said it did. If she'd said she was impressed by the patriotism of the residents of the house, and everyone had stuck to that line, how could anyone have proved her wrong?
To explain what was meant in my earlier posts, I now use the expression "Doing a Thornberry" on sometime to mean successfully presenting a post or comment on the internet as a politically suicidal attack on people whose support is essential to the author of the item so represented. Irrespective of whether this attack is in fact a fair representation of what was meant.
The extraordinary thing about the tweet which terminated Emily Thornberry's membership of the shadow cabinet was that it appeared at first view entirely harmless, and it was the way it was subsequently presented that was so disastrous for her. I had to spend ten minutes explaining to one of my family, who is not lacking in political awareness, why a picture of a house with the three word caption "Image from #Rochester" could possibly be a resigning matter.
And of course, if Labour still had the sort of efficient spin operation which Campbell and Mandelson ran for Blair, it wouldn't have been.
The tweet was so damaging to Labour because their opponents in the press and on the net were able to convince many people that the tweet was a coded sneer against the sort of working class voter who live in houses like that one. Which they were only able to do because Thornberry's response to the tweet failed to squash that interpretation and, even more damning, the fact that half the Labour party promptly started attacking her for it, and the way Ed Miliband sacked her demonstrated only too clearly that they believed the tweet meant exactly what her opponents said it did. If she'd said she was impressed by the patriotism of the residents of the house, and everyone had stuck to that line, how could anyone have proved her wrong?
To explain what was meant in my earlier posts, I now use the expression "Doing a Thornberry" on sometime to mean successfully presenting a post or comment on the internet as a politically suicidal attack on people whose support is essential to the author of the item so represented. Irrespective of whether this attack is in fact a fair representation of what was meant.
Comments
It was the way in which it was interpreted, with her lack of Uniterpreting it, then adding fuel to fire by saying "I have never seen anything like it" that made it into an issue.
It would never have been an issue if she had said something along the lines of "i was pointing out that the people of Rochester are very patriotic"
it was never going to be a hook that impaled her until "I have never seen anything like it" said down her nose. That's why it was a problem.