UPDATE: Dermot Murnaghan has tweeted it wasn’t him. Quite possible it was another Sky correspondent, as I have no idea what he looks like. There was a caption up with Murnaghan’s name on it at the time. It was whoever was reporting for Sky from Edinburgh just after 13.10 today.
Just after 13.10 Dermot Murnaghan on Sky News, speaking in Edinburgh, told us that the success of “Labour’s fightback” in Scotland was due to Gordon Brown, Labour’s “most vocal campaigner alongside Jim Murphy of course.” He had been speaking at a lot of rallies and visiting a lot of constituencies, wooing voters back to Labour.
I had to play it back to make sure I had heard it correctly. There is absolutely no evidence for the success of the Brown “fightback”, despite the frantic promotion efforts of the corporate media. Was Murnaghan just wittering, or was he seeding a narrative to prepare the ground for a counter-intuitive result once the thousands of fake postal ballots get mixed in?
David Axelrod : “Believer” and Miliband election campaign consultant and strategist.
“BELIEVER” By David Axelrod
Hardcover: 528 pages
Publisher: Penguin Press (February 10, 2015)
http://www.amazon.com/Believer-My-Forty-Years-Politics/dp/1594205876
New York Times Book Review (David Gergen):
“Would Barack Obama have been elected president without David Axelrod? That question is less far-fetched than it may seem… what emerges is important: a portrait of political campaigning that is more like what we hope than what we fear, that rises above the machinations and muck… a stout defense–indeed, the best I have read–of the Obama years… Judging from his first book, Obama has the talent to write the best presidential memoir in modern tunes. It is worth waiting for. But for now, David Axelrod has written a highly readable, uplifting account of the candidate he loves–and, reassuringly, has shown politics can still be a calling, not a business.”
The Los Angeles Times:
“Axelrod, liberated from the constraints of messaging, is warm and wry, loyal to Obama without being uncritical, and occasionally acid in his appraisals of others — now-Secretary of State John Kerry, political consultant Mark Penn and former Sen. John Edwards will not be among this book’s biggest fans. It helps that Axelrod can write. A journalist before he was a political consultant, his book is revealing… but best of all, it is well told — the work of a capable, professional storyteller.”
‘Professional storyteller’. Yes indeed.