Doing whatever's necessary - Tony Cunnane's Afterthoughts

Written on 12 October 2008

One of the most frequently used expressions by the UK Prime Minister and his Chancellor of the Exchequer in the last week or so when referring to the global financial situation, aka credit crunch, has been, "We’ll do whatever is necessary". Several lesser UK Government personages have slavishly repeated the same phrase when they’ve been cornered by reporters. I suppose they have to stick to the party line for fear of losing their job but because of that there’s really not a lot of point bothering to interview them or listening to the interview on radio and TV. I’ve just listened to President Bush using exactly that same expression in one of his daily press conferences. It’s catching!

In the US TV election broadcast very late the other night (I watched it in bed - how sad) between the two Senators competing to be the next US President, Senator McCain said, several times, "I have a plan", but he did not explain what it was. That suggests to me either that he did not feel confident enough to tell us what his plan involves, or that there isn’t a plan.

I have a very great respect for John McCain, and for the many other US PoWs from the Vietnam War. I met some of them on the lecture circuit and regularly quoted their horrific experiences when, in the 1980s, I was teaching Resistance to Interrogation to UK special forces in one of my other RAF jobs. (You can click here to read some of my anecdotes about that period of my career).

Before I started my very first PR job in the RAF over 40 years ago I was sent on a course to learn how to do it. There was no such entity as ‘The Media’ in those days and PR meant Press, not Public Relations. We were taught, inter alia, always say something but never tell a lie to a reporter and never say "no comment". If you tell a lie you’ll be found out sooner or later and bang goes your reputation. (Politicians never seem to learn that particular lesson!) For example: if asked, "When did the Station Commander stop beating his wife?", and you reply "No comment", the reporter could quite legitimately write either, "The RAF spokesman would not confirm that the Station Commander had stopped beating his wife", or "….did not deny that the Station Commander had been beating his wife." And neither of those were what you meant to comvey.

In my many years acting as PR officer on different RAF stations around the world, and latterly my 11 years doing that job for the RAF Red Arrows, I never knowingly told a reporter an untruth and I never once used the phrase "no comment". Often I was let off lightly in a difficult situation, for example when being interviewed about a Red Arrows’ flying accident, because the reporters did not ask the right questions. Read how I got the Red Arrows’ job here.

Giving a formal interview to the media, as distinct from merely answering their questions, is in some respects like going for a job interview. The reporter or prospective employer wants to hear you speak and say something useful. Just watch how an inexperienced TV interviewer flounders when faced by a reluctant, or expereinced, interviewee. Even the excellent and very experienced Bill Turnbull on BBC Breakfast TV was driven to the point of distraction the other day when wild-life expert Bill Oddie, unusually for him, had nothing to say.