No 10's first podcast
- 19 Jun 06, 02:49 PM
I bring you shock news.
When the prime minister goes to an EU Summit he travels in a fast car and then in a plane. He walks very fast. Motorbike outriders stop the traffic for him - and the British ones are the best.
These, I kid you not, are the insights contained in in which the travelled with the prime minister to last week's EU summit. After years of being accused of being obsessed with process and not substance, I confess that I expected a little more.
Izzard does, as you'd expect, capture one amusing bit of "process" - the moment the pops by whilst Tony Blair and his gloomy entourage are watching England's dismal performance against Trinidad and Tobago.
To hear any substance at all, you have to wait until you're 19 minutes in (see, I did listen till the end) to hear the PM say that negotiations are part of the way we do business in the modern world.
You are not told, though, what the negotiations were actually about. Izzard's conclusion is that there's "a lot of running about... boring bits... everyone works hard... I think it works... I like it - it's good and positive stuff".
He concludes, "I hope it's been vaguely illuminating". The emphasis should be on "vaguely".
But let's be fair, we politicos - whether practitioners or journalists - are all in the business of trying to reach those parts of the electorate that are hardest to reach. The main point of access for this podcast, I'm told, won't be via the No 10 website or other political media - but via iTunes where it will be in the entertainment, comedy and politics sections.
Those drawn in by Izzard may well now know the most basic facts about Europe - like how many countries are in it or that that their PM represents Britain at summits four times a year. And he does tell his listeners to go to to learn more.
