On dinner with Gordon

Posted on April 16, 2009

Quite a few people have been keen to know a bit more about how last night’s dinner went. Apparently half a dozen tweets aren’t really enough…

It’s not something that happens every day of course, but in general I think it was a worthwhile event. Not a meeting of minds as such, but very often an informal relaxed environment without an audience to play to allows a different kind of dialogue to develop.

Getting ready to go there, I have to admit that I felt a little odd – I think mostly because the venue was the Prime Minister’s own home. How should I approach this? Should I plan out a series of interventions or just play it by ear? Should I keep quiet and just take mental notes all night? Most importantly, when invited to a working dinner at the Prime Minister’s home… does one take a bottle?

Frankly whatever the reason for the dinner, if I was feeding people at my flat they’d better not show up without some booze, so I grabbed a decent one I’d bought the other day from Inverarity (what do you mean you’ve never been? You must!) and took it along.

But before getting there I had a mysterious phone call to make – I’d been told that I had to call Inspector Something-Or-Other when I was five minutes away from the place, and I’d be given further instructions. So I found myself standing at the station platform (it looked pretty close on the map) and being told to head for the bloody great big silver BMW over the road. What is it with governments? Not only do people lose the power to walk anywhere when they become Important; they also seem to think that nobody else is able to walk either. Of course I didn’t know the way exactly, and a friendly Liberal who happened to be nearby said that it was quite a long way up the hill, so I took my seat in the back.

The trip must have taken all of fifteen seconds! It’s bad enough to run these energy-hungry beasts at all, but to lay them on for what would otherwise have been a pleasant saunter up the road simply proves the absurdity.

Anyway, up the hill, past the cameras, into the house, and it was immediately obvious that I was the only one with a bottle in my hand. Hey ho, might as well hand it over anyway.

After some drinks and nibbles and a mixture of football talk and baby talk, neither of which are my hot topics, there seemed to be some sort of hidden signal at which we went through to the dinner table. Sitting there, it was suddenly so much harder to ignore the fact that we were nine middle aged guys in suits. Hey, it’s only forty years since the sexual revolution, what did you expect?

Well I say suits… I was wearing a rather nice waistcoat from Mr Ben’s, but no jacket. Does that still make me a middle aged guy in a suit? (36, since you ask)

Now some people have been asking what the house was like. I’m not going to give you any detail there I’m afraid. It’s the guy’s home after all, and that makes it his business. Suffice it to say that if you were expecting a modest, even reserved ambience you wouldn’t be far wrong. But the welcome was warm enough.

Similarly I don’t really want to go into great detail about the discussion. There was nothing specific mentioned about ‘Chatham House rules’ or anything like that, but if this kind of event is going to be of any value I think people really ought to be able to feel that they can speak without having every detail reported outside. A discussion like this could all be held on the record, or even on TV. But it would end up simply as another bout in the endless fight between performing politicians. The point of an event like last night should really be to find out whether there is *any* scope at all for moving beyond that.

There really should be. I spend much of my time loudly disagreeing with all the other political parties on issues like energy, transport, the economy… sometimes it seems like the whole political agenda. On the fundamental objections I have to ‘mainstream’ politics, there’s barely room for a fag paper between Labour, SNP, LibDem and Conservative parties. But even I can happily sit down and work together with others when we do find issues in common. Actually it’s a far more satisfying way to work. In the current circumstances, as we face the perfect storm of an economic crisis, a climate crisis and an impending energy crisis, we should be willing to work harder than ever to find even a small patch of common ground.

So while a few surreptitious tweets about the small-talk are pretty harmless, I’m not going to go into the detail of what everyone said.

My own contribution, of course, I can talk about. You won’t be surprised. That perfect storm requires a transformation in our economy, in our society, and in our politics. If you haven’t looked at the Green New Deal yet, please do. That would give you a pretty good flavour of what I tried to get across.

Was it any use? I have no idea. I don’t expect the PM, the FM, or anyone else to suddenly do an about turn and start developing a sustainable economy or ploughing up the runways for cabbages. But Green ideas should at least be heard by those in power, and as yet they’re not heard in the Westminster debating chamber. So I was glad of the invitation to take them into Mr Brown’s house, and I’m glad that I accepted.

Oh, and about those tweets. Perhaps I should have mentioned at the time that I was doing it, but it seemed pretty harmless to me. It’s still a new enough medium that we maybe need to develop a shared etiquette here. Apparently the PM was “utterly relaxed” about it, but one other guest called it “pathetic”. Takes all sorts, eh? Now let me guess…

1 Comment

1. [...] Web 2.0 news, Patrick Harvie had both praise and criticism in equal measure for his remarks on Dinner with Gordon.  Jeff was as relaxed about the whole affair as the PM allegedly was, while Richard Havers thinks [...]

   Pingback by Smears, Shipyards, Sorry, and Saltires - Scottish Roundup — April 20, 2009 @ 10:06 pm