It’s a week since I sat in the Hospital Club studio and
watched Myleene Klass have a go at Ed Miliband during the recording of ITV’s
The Agenda. The spat (just in case you’ve
been on the moon for the past week) was about Labour’s plans for a mansion tax. It was good box office but no better than
watching Victoria Coren-Mitchell felling Boris Johnson. It also had the uncomfortable undertones of rich
metropolitan whinging about a tax that would affect her. Just in case you missed it, you can view the punch-up here:
Klass, who was brought up by her mother, a nurse, is no
schmuck. She studied at the Royal Academy
of Music and had done her homework on matters like ‘fiscal drag’. She joined the other panellists in a verbal
demolition of the tax, claiming it was ill-conceived and would affect the wrong
people: “When you look at the people who will be suffering this tax, a lot of
them are grannies who have had these houses in their families for a long, long
time,” she opined. “The people who are the super-super-rich,
buying their houses for £140m, this is not necessarily going to affect them
because they have got their tax rebates and their amazing accountants. It’s
going to be the little grannies who have lived in those houses for years and
years.” Her rant had already gone on for
longer than most panellists’ allotted time, but she wasn’t going to be
stopped: “Is that your only option? You
may as well just tax me on this glass of water. You can’t just point at things
and tax them.”
Sitting only feet away from her, my principal observation
was ‘”Blimey she’s skinny”. And “I
actually feel a bit sorry for Miliband”.
None among us – journalists and former journalists - imagined it would
turn into a major story that would still be rolling on a week later. The most we thought it would make was a
paragraph; as a senior former news man commented after the recording, “That’ll
probably make a nice diary item – ‘Klass act’.”
So why did it take
off? And for that matter, how does any
story turn into a major news item?
Looking back at the press coverage, it appears not too many other
journalists recognised its significance on the Monday evening either. However, social media did. Klass has 454,000 followers on twitter which
may have helped to build a head of steam.
Some stories are flashes in the pan and some have legs. And what’s startling about this story is that
it definitely had legs.
By the following morning, Tueday, @KlassMyleene was trending
on twitter. Time for the politicos to
jump on board. Guido Fawkes, Safraz
Mansoor and a variety of newspapers scented Miliband blood and joined the hunt. But the line which launched a thousand tweets
was “Myleene Klass does a Paxman”, enabling The Metro to share this with us:
Ed’s rather weak response to the attack, which didn’t appear
until lunchtime that day, was “Here’s why our NHS needs a mansion tax. It’s
Pure and Simple.
http://www.labour.org.uk/blog/entry/six-things-you-need-to-know-about-labours-mansion-tax
…” Did it really take him more than twelve hours to come up with that? Maybe he wasn't familiar with the Klass canon.
Of course, eye appeal is one of the major drivers of a
story. And the juxtaposition of the very
attractive Klasse with Miliband (late of the bacon burger photo op) was irresistible.
Even the serious-minded New Statesman led
with a picture of the glamorous former pop star when you might think it would
know better.
By Wednesday, the clash resurrected in PMQs with Cameron
claiming Ed had been “pasted by a pop star”.
Radio 4’s The World at One and BBC2’s Andrew Neil among others wrote it
into their scripts. Not everyone on was
on Klass’s side. Some wits set up a fake
JustGiving account to help her pay her mansion tax. Thousands signed a petition to have her sacked
from her contract with Littlewoods because she “has shown herself to be an
inappropriate representative for a brand such as yours which is aimed at
customers who have to pay for their belongings in installments (sic) because
they cannot afford to pay up front”. Her
supporters, not to be outdone, started a counter-petition to keep her in the
job, “Calling for a single mother to be sacked because of her political
opinions is as absurd as it is ugly.”
All good fun; but what can PR learn from the way the story
continued to rumble on for so long. As
ever, coverage depends on what else is around.
The story you think/hope will hit the headlines may not even make a NIB
(news in brief), because there are so many other stories to cover. In this case, you’d think the Rochester
by-election would eclipse it. But in
fact it helped to perpetuate it: Emily Thornberry’s resignation over the photo
gaffe enabled the press to conflate the two stories to portray an
accident-prone Labour party. Events dear
boy, events.
The lesson we can principally
learn is the continuing power of twitter and other social media. Too many press officers I’ve come across
instruct their execs to tweet about what’s happening with no support or
guidance. What irresponsible folly! And then they have to clear up the resulting
mess.
Others think appearing on telly with a bit of glamour will
mean it rubs off on the client. Miliband’s
press officers may now put them right.
However, if Miliband had handled the onslaught with charm rather than
his default defensive stance he may have come out rather better. Think about how Alan Johnson would have
handled it: he’d have listened politely but quizzically and talked about his poverty-stricken
roots in super-wealthy Notting Hill.
Training will always help clients to handle tough media
encounters, but they have to have at least a smidgeon of natural charm about
them. People say Miliband has but his
advisors are yet to find it.
