Jim Murphy is calling for sensate people to be excluded from political debates. He said human involvement was a nuisance and caused problems for politicians who had to struggle with leadership instructions to do as they are told while pretending to take account of what voters think.
“This poses a real dilemma for those of us brought up in the Labour tradition of machine politics”, he said. “I have a series of rehearsed answers which fit with Labour policy but when there are people in the audience they often disagree and challenge me and it’s very intimidating. People don’t realise how hard it is to lie consistently, sound plausible and keep a straight face, although, to be fair, I do have a straight face.”
He is offering a radical alternative in which a Labour spokesman is allowed to sit at a long desk with another Labour spokesman on the other side of David Dimbleby and they will answer each question in turn without being interrupted. Meanwhile an audience from a Labour conference applauding will be edited in to respond to the answers given.
“I think this will be a much superior format and allows viewers to fully understand the Labour message. It also means that if SNP voters are stuck at home staring wide-eyed at a screen they may be more receptive as we will catch them when their force field of bigoted hostility is down.”
Mr Murphy, one of Labour’s Big Hitters, complained that he had been attacked by members of the public who had deeply hurt him by calling him names. “Someone called me a Soc***ist and another threatened my family by asking: What happened to nuclear disarmament? It’s difficult to describe how insulting these remarks are. I’ve even been called a Lef****ger. That kind of language belongs in the nazi era and shows the depths to which my opponents have sunk.”
It would be better all round, he said, if people didn’t get so excited about politics. “It’s not as if replacing nuclear missiles is a matter of life and death.”
Read Mr Murphy’s column in the Daily Mail.
derek bateman broadcaster2 
Well done, Derek. You’ve encapsulated the type of person comfortable and prospering in the New Labour Party. Blair, Mandelson and the other Labour Gentlemen did well in creating a second major UK party to represent the interests of their social class, and bench-warming principle-free career politicians like Sincerity Jim fit in very well. He and his type would have been lost in the days when Labour had aims and values, but he wasn’t yet born when that was the case.
poor ‘missiles’ murphy-he wants to be your friend, if your people would only see the beauty of WMD.
I’m reminded of “Rockets” Riffkind implausibly put forward as a replacement for the present Scottish Secretary, whose name inexplicably escapes me.
Yes please!
Thanks Derek but reading the Daily Mail would not make my day.
Labour appear to be not only denying that Scotland is a country but that democracy is only for British Labour supporters and anyone else can butt out.
Very good Derek
It’s in his genes.
I’ve seen a small sample of the Daily Mail piece, I could have read more but I try to limit my intake of swivel eyed nonsense of a day. I think Jim Murphy has found his true political home there though. I am sure it will not be long before he has his own piece resurrecting that bastion of common sense and moderation, Woodrow Wyatt’s column The Voice of Reason
I wonder what his next step will be? To suggest that those with obviously political leanings should not be allowed to vote and the Labour HQ will simply organise some postal ballots for tellers to count?
Or we could take politics out of the people! Which in all honesty the political parties at Westminster have been doing for years now. Scunnering folk so they give up…
Yet another politico who seems to think:
“It’s not a new politics we need, it’s a new electorate.”
Perhaps, only politicians should be allowed to vote.
This article is so so unfair. In the past I’ve seen many coloured half-page photos in the Herald of Jim Murphy playing football, of him walking,smiling, arm in arm with Maigrat Curran, It’s nice.
Proof that he is a man of the … wait the kettle’s boiling…What was I saying? Oh yes, …of the creed of opportunist unscrupulous “the public are a bunch of mugs” political chancers.