Boris Johnson's Sunday morning meeting with Eddie Mair

On several occasions, I've asked whether interviews are ever capable of delivering good news for politicians and wondered why our political leaders appear content with the deal that appears to have been done with the media - in which news interviews have more or less taken over from speeches as the main means of political communication in Britain (see links below).

Vivid evidence of the damage a politician can do to himself was provided yesterday morning on a TV show in which interviews play a major part, and where the producers' best hope is that an interviewee will say something - or, better still, say some things - that will attract much wider media attention than the show normally enjoys.

This time, the interviewee was Mayor of London Boris Johnson, for whom at least three of Eddie Mair's questions caused problems (from about 7 minutes 20 seconds into the above): was he fired from The Times for inventing a story, had he told former leader of the Conservative Party Michael Howard a 'bare-faced lie' and had he talked to a friend on the phone about having someone beaten up?

Not news on the BBC?
A curious feature of this story was the way in which it didn't become a story on the BBC, whose news broadcasts later in the day carried on as if the Mair-Johnson interview wasn't news at all, even though other media outlets thought differently:
ITN
Daily Mirror
The Guardian
Daily Mail
Huffington Post

Short-term irritant or longer term damage?
The interesting question now is whether these few moments from a Sunday morning TV show will have any more lasting impact on Mr Johnson's reputation and political career.

If nothing else, I suspect that I won't be alone in watching tonight's Michael Cockerell documentary that  prompted Eddie Mair's quetions (at 9.00 p.m. on BBC2).

Related posts on televised interviews

• Politicians & broadcasters in the UK: collaboration or capitulation?
• Do interviews ever deliver anything but bad news for politicians and boredom for audiences?
• Snakes, ladders and the folly of Q-A campaigning
• Interview techniques, politicians and how we judge them
• Ed Miliband lands on a snake
• Why it's so easy for politicians not to answer interviewers' questions - and what should be done about it
• Gordon Brown's interview technique: the tip of a tedious iceberg

Related posts on media coverage of speeches

• 'The lost Art of Oratory' by a BBC executive who helped to lose it in the first place
• 'The art of oratory is fast on its way out': at last, some support from a top journalist
• Will the 2010 UK general election be the first one to leave us speechless?
• Political speeches can still make a big difference - like changing the date of an election
• Blair speaks and the BBC tells you what he said
• Obama’s rhetoric renews UK media interest in the ‘lost art’ of oratory
• Is the media no longer interested in what goes on in parliament?
• Did the media ignore Hannan because they think speeches are bad television?

Ten exceptional interviews from my archives

• Politician answers a question: an exception that proves the rule
• A Labour leader with no interest in spin!
• A Tory leader's three evasive answers to the same question
• The day Mrs Thatcher apologised (twice) for what she'd said in an interview
• A prime minister who openly refused to answer Robin Day's questions
• 'Here today, gone tomorrow' politician walks out of interview with Robin Day
• The day Mandelson walked out of an interview rather than answer a question about Gordon Brown
• Mandelson gives two straight answers to tow of Paxman's questions
• Two more straight answers from Mandelson - about failed coups and the PM's rages
• Rare video clip of a politician giving 5 straight answers to 5 consecutive questions

Did the cardinals have a hidden agenda in electing another old man to the to the papacy?

Now that Benedict XVI has shown the world that a pope can retire when he feels a bit past it, the cardinals must have felt liberated to hand the top job to another old man.

And how very polite commentators have become. There was a time when the advanced age of the new Pope would have been a major focus for comment and complaint. But there doesn't seem to have been much of either (yet).

Since qualifying for bus and rail passes, I don't feel at all inhibited about saying that I think there's something vaguely barmy about cardinals electing a 76 year old to take charge of an organisation as big and complex as the Roman Catholic church.

Unless, of course, their hidden and hush-hush agenda was to accept the implicit change in job specification decreed by Benedict - i.e. that popes can now retire whenever they feel like it.

By opening the papacy up to anyone below the age of 80 (males only, of course) the cardinals are giving more of them a chance to become infallible. And, if old fogeys are now to become the norm rather than the exception, the Roman Catholic church won't have to suffer for too long from any mistakes the 'electorate' happens to make (as, for example, the pope emeritus?).

Ashdown can still rouse the party faithful

It's good to see an old dog who hasn't forgotten what were new tricks to him when he first gave a leader's speech to his party conference 25 years ago.

Speaking to the Liberal Democrat Spring Conference in Brighton, chairman of the party's next general election campaign and former party leader Paddy Ashdown made the most of his chance to rally the troops again in what Patrick Sawyer of the Daily Telegraph referred to as 'a rousing speech'.

And what was the line that caught the media's attention?

Surprise, surprise - it was a simple contrast: “I don’t want being in government, to be a blip for the Liberal Democrats. I want it to become a habit."