Feeding frenzy
- 6 Sep 06, 02:55 PM
There was a feeding frenzy in the Westminster newsroom yesterday. As word came through of - I think - the fourth letter of the day to Downing Street telling Blair he had to go/stay/speak out/stay quiet (delete as appropriate), Jon Devitt found a mouse in his drawers.
Jon's distinguished career has taken him to Bosnia, Iraq, Kosovo and all sorts of other hotspots. For many years now he's been based in the relative calm of Millbank, where he鈥檚 deftly explained politics to World TV and World Service audiences around the globe. But he's never experienced anything quite like this.
At approximately half past four, he just couldn鈥檛 resist any longer that bar of duty-free chocolate he'd been saving from his holiday in Spain. So he reached down to the back of his drawer, only to discover that - horror of horrors 鈥 his prized bar had been nibbled almost to nothing. Feeding frenzy or what鈥.Little Milly had even chewed his earpiece!
Uproar ensued. His producer wanted him on air decoding the work of the Downing Street postman. But Jon wasn't having any of that; he wanted immediate action from Millbank's Chief Mouse-catcher (me).
This was perhaps the wackiest moment of a wacky day. At times I felt like an extra in the Monty Python film, The Life of Brian. ("That latest letter - is that from the Popular Front of Judea, or the Judean Popular Front?")
Disentangling the Blairites-for-Brown from the 2001 Intake from the Usual Suspects is a tough business, particularly when most of them aren鈥檛 prepared to pick up the phone.
Just 24 hours earlier I鈥檇 sat in a meeting with Nick Robinson, his producers, and the senior newsdesk editors at Westminster. We鈥檇 all been scratching our heads about how to take on the Blair story. Some fantastic ideas were bandied about, but we were worried about finding a 鈥減eg鈥 for them to justify us doing the story on an important TV bulletin.
Yesterday was the antidote to all those worries. It became clear for all to see that really serious stuff is going on, mostly behind closed doors, but occasionally bursting out like a lanced boil. And it鈥檚 not just about the exact date when Tony Blair will pack his bags, it鈥檚 about the future direction of the government on issues that matter to everyone like crime, health, and energy.
So memo to self: don鈥檛 be shy of finding interesting and engaging ways to cover this running story, even when we fear there鈥檚 a danger of boring people.
But back to the important business of the day - Milly the mouse escaped. Jon Devitt and his colleagues up the end of the newsroom want a date NOW for his departure from Millbank. The mouse is silently defiant: reliable sources say he wants to go on and on, at least through to next summer. Who will win in this titanic struggle?
Gary Smith is editor, political news
