Hello! Here in Smolensk butcher’s shop we looking at Volgaleaks.com website. Today they publish extraordinary UK Government Communications memorandum. Here it is in original English form, including notes ministers and officials scribble on it.

COMMUNICATIONS REVIEW: PM, DPM, SELECTED CABINET, DIRECTOR GOVCOMS, CABINET SECRETARY

OVERVIEW

This paper highlights the successes of the first phase of the Coalition’s communications strategy, notes issues and suggests future actions. Overall, our assessment is extremely positive. The government continues to enjoy favourable media coverage. Criticism is muted, sporadic and uncoordinated. While it would be wrong to suggest that this condition does not precisely correlate with the merits of the Coalition programme, it is nevertheless unusual.

BIG NARRATIVE

The Coalition’s greatest success has been to forge a compelling narrative. The economic and fiscal predicament facing the UK was caused by the staggering irresponsibility of the banks. But the Coalition has downplayed this intractable problem and placed one of its effects – the Deficit – centre stage. Though Britain is not hugely indebted by global standards and was not at risk of a Greece-style default, most commentators have accepted the Coalition line that:

1. The Deficit is the worst problem facing Britain since the Black Death
2. It is Gordon Brown’s fault
3. Arguments that it is a necessary and sustainable response to the collapse in aggregate private sector demand flowing from the Credit Crunch are just Communist nonsense
4. George Osborne has saved the country from bankruptcy and from Gordon Brown
5. The UK’s credit rating (which had not changed) has been “secured”
6. Public services as currently envisaged are unaffordable
7. This is Gordon Brown’s fault
8. Public servants are at best dispensable, at worst evil
9. Cuts and the suffering they cause are not merely an unfortunate necessity. They are responsible, even “good”
10. The government is trying strenuously to be “progressive” and “fair”. (This last point will be looked at under the section on the Liberal Democrats).

Successive governments have of course relied on journalists’ fundamental ignorance, laziness, spinelessness, alcoholism, and lack of intellectual curiosity to propagate their more questionable messages unchallenged. But what distinguishes this situation is the seniority, eminence and cross-party nature of domestic press “support” for the Coalition’s “no alternative” narrative, despite criticisms from several Nobel Prize winning economists, the Mayor of London, and large portions of the non-UK media. It is therefore unsurprising that the general public has internalised the narrative. This, together with the priceless gift of obliquely worded support from former PM Tony Blair, has put the Opposition on the defensive. [DC: Would be good to reward TB in some way. Prominent seat at W&K wedding?]

The Government should build on these strong foundations. The collective commitment to self-sacrifice should be made vivid. We recommend a programme of “Austerity Promises”. These should be selfless money-saving acts, promoting “Big Society” values, undertaken by prominent people and ordinary citizens alike. Suggestions include:

1. Fiona Bruce presenting the 10 O’Clock News by candlelight
2. Pensioners volunteering to survive the winter by foraging food from their local parks (with guidance from Noma’s wild food enthusiast René Redzepi)
3. Replacing Nick Robinson with a sign saying “The latest government policy is fantastic, Hugh”
4. Volunteer communities swapping full fire-service coverage for flame retardant night attire
5. Kay Burley eschewing much needed neurosurgery and being trepanned by Adam Boulton during a Sky News piece on Labour’s drift towards Marxist-Leninism
6. Pilot council estates where children will forgo traditional mainstream education and pursue “life-skills” in suitably socio-economically tailored online learning modules, featuring Joey Barton, Susan Boyle and the cast of “Hustle”
7. The merger of Andrew Rawnsley and Simon Heffer
8. A family made homeless by housing benefit changes starring in a new reality show “Street Survivors, with Ray Mears”.

We make more suggestions on uses of popular culture towards the end of the paper.

[AC: delete Sky News refs. Want them onside. Besides, trepanning in’t gonna work if there’s fark awl in the head, is it? Also keep NR – useful, if astoundingly stupid. But otherwise up the ante on Auntie. Howbaat they replace all new Christmas commissions with re-runs of Dick Emery?]

LIBERAL DEMOCRATS

The ideological cover provided for the Coalition programme by Liberal Democrat Ministers – and the gusto with which they have gone about the task – has been a major presentational triumph for the Government. In particular Nick Clegg’s willingness to call VAT rises, benefit cuts and service reductions “progressive”; his post-Election Damascene conversion to rapid debt reduction based on information supposedly unknown before the Election; and his radiation of the sense that being DPM is the happiest time of his life: these evince the shamelessly unprincipled and serpentine elasticity required for successful governance in the UK. [DC: should we change this wording for Nick’s sake? NC: I’m fine with it.] Most importantly, the Lib Dems have caused semantic confusion. Clegg, Alexander, Huhne, Cable and Davey’s post-Election pronouncements have clouded public perceptions of where their Party stands on any given subject and have rendered the terms “progress” and “fairness” so meaningless that they can now be applied to anything at all.

While there were concerns the collective Lib Dem volte face on tuition fees would cause problems, these have been allayed by the actions of the student protestors. Riotous behaviour shifted the focus onto students’ middle-class pseudo-radicalism, criminality and disagreeable personal hygiene and away from the fact that no one in this country will know a gerund from a gerundive by 2020. [AC: What the faaaark? GO: TM and I agree that misfiring protest is something we need more of. Would like IDS views on disabled people protesting against benefit cuts. Images of them beating up policemen with their walking sticks or ramraiding DWP in wheelchairs could be used to show how capable of work they are. IDS: I’ll get back to you.] Moreover, the “Cable Question” seems to have been neutralised (see below).

In short, we believe this aspect of government presentation has been an unalloyed triumph and our sole recommendation is “more of the same”.

EXAMPLARY MINISTERIAL SUCCESSES

The general lack of hostile opinion towards the Coalition has been exploited fully in some quarters. The Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary are to be commended for successfully resetting UK Foreign policy. Here they benefited from the discredited adventurism of the previous administration. This has provided cover for the new policy, essentially a fusion of Palmerston without gunboats, Little Englander thinking and isolationism. Certainly there will be fewer Iraqs in future, but there will be no Kosovos either. Fortunately this accords perfectly with the spirit of the times. As people suffer domestically they will have no interest in attempts – laudable or misguided – to make the lives of foreigners better. They will applaud ministers’ desire to get people overseas to buy British and their threats to withdraw emergency aid if countries do not sign agreements not to attack us (the so-called “Shopping and F*cking” strategy). Indeed, our only recommendation is to strengthen the approach. The Foreign Secretary should be photographed boarding charter flights to overseas missions laden with goods for sale – Dyson vacuum cleaners, Pukka pies, and those Beefeater teddy bears from Harrods.

The complete absence of criticism on sustainability policy is perhaps unremarkable in a country where more people watch “Top Gear” than know what happened in 1066. [MG: Is this true? Official: Apparently, according to both Simon Schama and David Starkey.] But to claim to be the “greenest government ever” and then cut the Environment Agency with a fervour that would make even Lord Lawson quail, without aggravating public opinion beyond the usual climate change denial deniers (our new term for green activists) is remarkable. Again we suggest a “do nothing” strategy. If criticism surfaces, a suitable Minister should select Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” as their luxury item on “Desert Island Discs”. [GO: Can’t we deploy Clegg on this? What about him claiming that when Dave said “greenest ever” he meant the Coalition is a mix of blue and yellow. NC: Wilco if needed.]
But perhaps the most signal triumph is the way the image of the Minister for Work and Pensions has blessed benefits policy. Iain Duncan Smith has adopted a variant of what is known as the “Frank Field” strategy. This is the attainment of apparent expertise in the area of welfare benefits by:

1. Speaking quietly
2. Seeming to be on the verge of tears when discussing the poor
3. Talking about nothing but benefits over many years
4. Playing up a period on the dole
5. Playing down the children at Eton
6. Turning a double-barrelled name into a catchy brand
7. Setting up a think tank
8. Frequently looking into the middle distance, conveying hope, anguish, and other worldliness
9. Using the word “passionately” a lot close to the word “care”
10. Walking around sink estates while looking spiritually tortured

This suffices to convince the gin-sozzled generalists of Fleet Street of his pre-eminent authority, as well as the wider populace, for whom the technicalities of the benefits system are as mysterious as the names, role and whereabouts of their local councillors. The cover this perception provides is extremely useful. The reality of benefits reform is largely cuts and punitive sanctions. This is entirely to the taste of most voters. But IDS’s “concern” for the poor and his “deep understanding” has endeared him to liberal commentators. Glossing over the fact that the interim level of IDS’s supposed miracle cure, Universal Credit, will comprise people’s existing and slashed benefits, that the ultimate level will be lower still, that the tapered withdrawal of benefit for those finding work is only a marginal improvement on the status quo and will in any case rely on the existence of sustainable employment, and that the whole package relies on very real claimant pain now to secure highly speculative gains in the future, these sage theoreticians and earnestly bleeding hearts have hailed IDS as a sincere and radical visionary.

Nevertheless, IDS’s recent irritation on being questioned at the Despatch Box by Douglas Alexander on matters of policy detail is a warning sign. We will be able to spin Alexander’s mastery of the benefits brief in 1/2000th of the time it took IDS as “superficiality compared with hard-won wisdom”, ridicule his wide-eyed innocence as being that of a Sandesh Samra-type naïf [DC: Sandesh who? EP: Asian lass on Th’Apprentice], and play up his most electorally fatal debilitation, his Scottishness. [DC: Danny, you ok with this? DA: Erm... DC: Good] But we must continue polishing IDS’s image in case Alexander’s clever-clever approach trips him up occasionally. We recommend that IDS should well up with tears while reading out a Middleborough single mother’s Giro, share a Tennants Extra with rough sleepers in Birmingham, and have a Willy Brandt moment in which he falls to his knees in remorse outside a 1960s tower block in Camberwell.

Similar self-reinvention programmes to IDS’s should be pursued by those few ministers with image problems. And some ministers may wish to use popular culture to humanise or simply explain themselves, as Vince Cable has done. Cable started out in the Coalition as a potential dissident, then championed the standard position in which policy reversals were explicable in the light of “new evidence” identified since the Election. He then relaunched himself as a neo-Marxist critic of capitalism and then became the fiscally prudent annihilator of Higher Education. Ordinarily this would look like dangerous vacillation, instability, volatility, or just weak-mindedness, all potentially unsettling to the Government’s carefully constructed equilibrium. But just as the Coalition likes to compare the running of the public finances to a family budget – in brave defiance of credible economic theory – so the Government itself is like a family. While the mother and father have been obvious since the Rose Garden, with his decision to appear on “Strictly Come Dancing” Cable has claimed the role of lunatic uncle: amiable, eccentric, verbally incontinent, a bit of a sport, if occasionally embarrassingly undignified, but harmless and even irrelevant.

So, we recommend:

1. Housing Minister Grant Shapps should, like IDS, reinvent himself. Following media suggestions that Shapps is not the brightest person in government, we carried out some objective tests. When we asked him his name he became defensive and confused and later took 23 attempts to identify himself in the mirror. We believe however his image can be improved. By identifying and financially supporting a carefully chosen laboratory Shapps can achieve the double impact of winning a Nobel Prize and exemplifying Big Society principles by allowing state funding for research to be cut.
2. Eric Pickles should mask his incompetence with self-deprecating amiability and appear on “Hole in the Wall”. (As the Wall.)
3. Theresa May should show her commitment to her role, her support for have-a-go community vigilantes and love of snappy clothes, by appearing at Home Office Question Time dressed as a crime-fighting superhero.
4. Transport Secretary Philip Hammond should match IDS’s aura of expertise by giving a speech on insulfrog turn outs at the annual Hornby Modeller Convention, moving into a specially converted National Express Coach, and revealing a lifelong passion for Evel Knievel.

Steps are underway to deal with the image problem of Dr Liam Fox (who has not been copied into this memo). Inspired by the words of James Mason in “North by Northwest” about Eve Marie Saint (“This problem is best dealt with from a great height, over water”) we have suggested one final mission in the South Atlantic for Ark Royal and its Harriers, before decommissioning.

THE SILENCE OF THE SATIRISTS

A little remarked Coalition communications success is the almost complete eradication of satire. After the 1997 General Election, satirists who had targeted the Conservative regime turned their fire with equal if not more relish onto Blair. We may contrast the savagery then of Rory Bremner with the current condition of “Have I Got News for You”. The latter is muted in its treatment of the Coalition, continues to reserve its most savage comment for Blair and Brown, while one of its regulars, the editor of a once-important publication, has made a supportive and helpful appearance on “Question Time”.

Indeed, the BBC’s Thursday evening viewing serves a valuable purpose. A collection of anoraks, drunks, obsessives and loons settle down to watch “HIGNFY” at 9pm and don’t leave their chairs until Andrew Neil has ceased emitting drivel about a nauseating 1980s brand of Liebfraumilch on “This Week”. These deluded people satisfy themselves this viewing makes them au fait with what is going on in the world, despite This Week’s reliance on pieces by “youth” and “fashion” experts on what we can deduce from how politicos dress, and endless jokes about whether the name Wagner should be pronounced V-A-A-R-G-N-E-R, W-A-G-G-N-E-R, or T-A-L-E-N-T-L-E-S-S-T-W-A-T. [DC: Who is Wagner? MG: A German 19th Century composer with – NC: No, an X-Factor contestant. Looks like what you’d get if you mixed the DNA of Siegfried and Roy, Miguel Angel Jimenez, and Barry from Eastenders. Sounds worse than “Luck Be a Lady Tonight” sung by Chewbacca.] We shall return the popular culture Mr Wagner inhabits later in the report.

Reflecting on the machinery of government communication for a moment, its operations, personnel and “feel” were significant satiric and commentariat targets under the last administration. However, despite the persistence of “The Issue” as we have chosen to codename it, no scalp has been claimed yet by skit writers and investigative journalists. This is possibly because, like the conspirators in Caesars murder, the journalists also have blood on their hands, and because the latest series of “The Thick of It” has yet to air. [AC: REDACT, REDACT, REDAAAAAACT!!!! HOW MANY TIMES DO YOU HAVE TO BE TOLD, I AM NOT, NOOOOOOOOOOT, THE FAAAARKING STORY, YOU SLAAAAAG!]

The administration can also be thankful for the “deflective” activities of some commentators. The vast amounts of newsprint devoted to dreaming up Bagehotian Apocrypha stipulating that Speaker’s Wife must be kept in a broom cupboard is to be welcomed. One columnist in particular, who says of his target that “Satire could not have wished for a riper item”, deserves much praise, despite the fact that his implication that he is a satirist plainly breaches the Trades Descriptions Act. Moreover, he has also shown the way forward in another area. In recasting the current economic crisis as an issue of public sector affordability rather than unregulated finance, the government has focused popular anger away from powerful, rich, well connected bankers and onto civil servants. Our coluimnist’s eschewing of traditional satire’s preoccupation with the vices and follies of the powerful, and instead alleging that an obscure civil servant’s use of social networking sites unfits her for employment, is consistent with this shift of attention from the guilty but impregnable to the innocent but assailable. We are currently studying an idea from News International which would create a Big Society model to channel the widespread fury increasingly felt towards civil servants and also privatise the activities needed to downsize the public sector. Under the proposal (working title “Sarah’s Law”) we will publish civil servants expense details alongside their names and addresses in The Sun Newspaper.

Finally, we must commend the efforts of Nadine Dorries. She has proved a most useful lightning conductor for the administration. The more absurd and outrageous her behaviour, the more reasonable and moderate the Coalition appears. George Galloway performed a similar function in the early Blair years. The more time talented commentators in the blogosphere spend tied up in dealing with her latest invectives against them or her own constituents, the less time they have to devote to more powerful targets. We believe Dorries should be encouraged to continue her excellent work. She should subject her constituents to every conceivable indignity just short of actual bodily harm (unless it is very dark and there is adequate deniability), with Downing Street always condemning her actions but never quite calling for her de-selection.

TRIVIAL DISTRACTIONS

As the Wagner example illustrates, the best insulation the government has against criticism is the continuing tranquilisation of the British people by trivia. The government must make strenuous efforts to support this. Indeed, in line with a recent proposal from a major strategic consultancy that the Big Society initiative should be underpinned by people sharing their ideas through a network of Big Brother style booths, we believe cultural trivialisation might be turned to good uses. Accordingly, we have drawn up proposals ranging from the purely distracting to the practical:

1. Working with Channel Four or Five on a new series focusing on men who can suck themselves off. [DC: Can GO do this? GO: Not since the Bullers.] This will allow the government to work itself up into moral indignation about our broken society, safe in the knowledge that half the population will spend every available moment bent double and won’t notice they have lost their job.
2. An NHS Dragons’ Den variant on Dave. It is widely known that preventative measures like smoke alarms and better standards of furniture design have helped reduce house fires. We believe that it may be possible to raise the government’s game on preventative healthcare by seeking the invention of a household item which will completely replace the NHS. Pilot pitches viewed by Peter Jones were promising, although his favoured option, the Automated Apple-A-Day Machine, needs development.
3. An affair between Ann Widdecombe and Artem Chigvintsev.

A proposal in which “Crimewatch” would take on the responsibilities of the Home Secretary was not felt to be consistent with our emerging strategy for the BBC. However, we are in discussions on a similar model with Sky and representatives of Ross Kemp.

Without doubt, however, the biggest trivia bonus for the Government is the Royal Wedding. Of course, there have been some hiccups. The PM has promised, given current sensitivities, to refrain from mentioning his rough sleeping in 1981. [DC: Yah, sorry guys.] And protocol experts have given assurances that the worrying phase of the Princess-To-Be’s political awareness training has now passed. There will be no repeat of the moment (fortunately not recorded) of her mispronouncing the words “We’re all in this together” as “Let them eat cake”. But already the likely expense of this event is proving worthwhile in terms of “feel good factor”. (The issue of expense for national events is often overstated anyway, as is illustrated by the DCMS plan to replace the opening ceremony of 2012 Olympics with a pub crawl led by Phil Tuffnell. However we have ruled out Treasury proposals suggesting the Royal Wedding and Lady Thatcher’s funeral should be a simultaneous “shared service”. We fear members of the Royal Family may become confused and cremate themselves.)

Since Royal Weddings cannot occur often, we have been seeking additional national distractions. The favourite so far is an annual Big Society Day. In this people will host street parties and bake ginger biscuits shaped like Phillip Blond’s head. Boy Scouts and Girl Guides will cooperate with their French counterparts and run (what’s left of) the Fleet Air Arm for the day, Opus Dei could give free contraception advice, while the Women’s Institute might show that rocket science isn’t rocket science by operating the Atomic Weapons Executive.

SUMMARY

While there is still much to do, the Government may be well satisfied with its impressive start on the communications front. We reject suggestions that this reflects “structural biases” in the media, and have concluded that this is largely the result of the skill and expertise of our politicians and the Communications Director. [AC: Good.] As an exercise, Ministers may wish to compare the headlines following the CSR, with its direct cuts of over 500000 jobs and indirect impact on at least as many again, with the press enjoyed by the last Prime Minister when making what he thought were private remarks about the alleged age and bigotry of one elector. We have come a long way.

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