@kristiancarter

Amidst all of the anecdotes about Thatcher we’ve heard today, I have one of my own.

I interviewed Radio 4′s John Humphrys in October 2004 where he described the experience of speaking to then PM Margaret Thatcher on the Today programme during the 1987 election campaign:

You have said on a number of occasions that your first interview with Margaret Thatcher was your most forbidding, difficult interview. What precisely about the interview was so difficult?

She was at the height of her powers, worshipped by her followers, feared by her opponents and she routinely ate interviewers for breakfast. She had come into the Today studio (prime ministers don’t do that any more; we have to go to them) for what was to be one of her last interviews before a general election.

I cannot tell you how soul-destroying it can be to interview a party leader at the end of the campaign. There is no question they have not been asked during the campaign, no answer they have not honed to repetitive perfection.

So I thought I would be clever. I had heard her being asked, some days earlier, about her faith. She is a church-going Christian. So I wondered how a tough, cynical, battle-hardened politician defined Christianity.

Instead of asking her a routine question about how she could defend policies that had contributed to unemployment of more than  three million would it not be very clever to start the interview by asking her to define her own version of Christianity. I hoped, and believed, that she would be greatly surprised and mumble something about morality or love.

Then I could pounce. “Ah! You talk of love and you condemn millions to a life on the dole!” or something similar. You can see how naive I was. In my dreams she would sob and beg forgiveness and I would be hailed as the great interviewer who had brought the iron lady to her knees. It did not work out quite like that.

I confess I was nervous – she had that effect on all of us – but I knew that I was on to a winner here and I delivered my brilliant sucker punch with great panache.

“Prime Minister, what is the essence of Christianity?”

She did not miss a beat. Her eyes, hooded at the best of times, may have narrowed a fraction of a millimetre but the answer came out like a bullet.

“Choice!”

There are occasions as an interviewer when you pray that a great thunderbolt will strike the power supply that serves your studio and you will be wiped off the air… possibly even off the face of the earth.

Or at the very least that something will happen to give you a few seconds to regroup your devastated forces and launch a counter-attack. This was one of those occasions but, sadly, there was no divine intervention.

I gulped, tried to imagine what on earth she was getting at, and failed. The interview was indeed a triumph… for her. Thirty seconds too late I had realised exactly what she meant and, dammit, she was right.

The whole point of Christianity is that you have a choice between doing good and doing evil. If you end up in heaven, that’s because you made the right choice; if you end up in hell, it’s your own damn fault.

So it was sound theologically and, from her point of view, just as sound politically. I resolved not to try to be too clever next time.

When your beliefs are underpinned by a strong moral philosophy your political positions become simultaneously harder to deviate from and easier to defend.

Thatcher: the grocer’s daughter with a brilliant philosophical touch.

I didn’t embark on my PPE course (St Peter’s College, 2004) expecting, or even hoping, to one day be running the country. I did it because I was fascinated by politics, fascinated by people and fascinated in particular by the changing dynamic between people, society and state.

Studying PPE at Oxford is an extraordinary experience. My most vivid memories of it are producing four thousand words a week on topics I barely knew about and which changed from week to week. I’d often finish in the dead of night.

By way of example, my British Society course saw me cover 20th-century social investigators, unemployment, poverty, the role of sport and the justice system in one breakneck term. My International Relations paper took me through the psychology of leaders, international law and the EU.

Above all then, the course rewards an ability to absorb a vast amount of information quickly, decide what it is important, and condense it into an argument. I’m told by the person who marked David Cameron’s British Politics finals script (a high First) that he did this remarkably well.

Today’s political culture rewards being seen as “in touch” and, by extension, using a “think on your feet” approach. We favour heart and instinct over craven political calculation.

PPE is not to blame for this culture, but its prevalence amongst the higher echelons of Britain’s political class is a product of it. An always-on news economy which prioritises instant response will naturally reward those who have cut their teeth in the hothouse of an Oxford PPE course.

But then, these skills are rewarded in other professions too – in media, PR, banking, law, management consultancy, advocacy – in fact, in almost any profession with a public facing element. Even academics, to my knowledge, rate concision.

And surely no one seriously thinks that Cameron is basing his economic decision-making today on what he learned in his PPE course in the 70s? If he is, that says more about him than the course.

Some of the most extraordinarily bright, lucid and varied people I’ve ever met, I met during my years studying PPE at Oxford. They’re not to blame for the global economic crisis, and neither are their predecessors.

Facile generalisations about whole groups of people, however, bring us no closer to a solution.

People who oppose same sex marriage like to talk about the idea of a ‘traditional marriage.’ But it’s not entirely clear what that means. Marriage as an institution has evolved substantially over the last 250 years.

Marriage of 250 years ago – Young people’s parents chose their partners to suit their own interests.

Marriage of 100 years ago – Young people could get married, as long as society did not disapprove.

Marriage of 50 years ago – Young people could get married, as long as it was not to someone ‘feeble minded’ (or in the US, if the marriage was interracial)

Marriage of 40 years ago – Marriage defined by roles and obligations by gender. Wife responsible for things around the home, but couldn’t decide where the family would live.

Marriage of 30 years ago – A heterosexual couple free to organise their relationship how they want, not defined by whether they have kids.

Marriage of today – A relationship where traditional gender roles can be reversed and a stay at home dad is completely normal. Or indeed, two dads.

It suits the anti-gay marriage lobby to present this as a binary choice – a break between the old and the new. The time eternal institution of marriage is more fluid than people tend to make out.

Although DMAA has been on the ‘Wada list’ of banned substances in elite sport since 2010, it was only withdrawn from sale in the UK in August 2012.

Elite sportspeople are arguably safer taking DMAA-like substances than ordinary amateur runners. They have a battery of doctors around them to ensure they can take them as safely as possible.

It begs the question – why are ordinary people allowed to buy and use supplements off the shelf which would be banned for an elite athlete?

“What we are doing is exposing the rather nasty underbelly of racism in British sport and this particular aspect of British sport, football, which is a complete contrast to what you had at the Olympics.

“If you had a section of the crowd at the Olympics chanting [Yid] do you think it would be tolerated?

“It would be closed down immediately, so I don’t understand why something [that] would be unacceptable in August somehow becomes plausible and acceptable because it moves up to a football ground, unless you go with the intelligence in a sense of a people who openly couldn’t care less about the feelings of what they say and the impact on others.”

That’s precisely the point though. Language does demonstrably acquire meaning via context. It is different at White Hart Lane to if it happened at the Olympics. Spurs fans referring to themselves “Yid Army” in the stands is a way of countering against vicious racism – of ‘owning’ the language so that it is no longer a term of abuse. At the Olympics there is no such context.

Similarly, using the “n-word” in a Twitter post calling for Obama’s assassination has a wholly different meaning than when used between African American people in the Bronx. I routinely call my gay friends “queer” and “faggot” and I think it can be safely assumed that I’m not being homophobic.

Football terraces have always been places for raw, bawdy and sometimes tasteless humour. But by treating language as a monolithic entity (as though there are somehow “good” and “bad” words) we risk depriving minority communities – black, gay, disabled of the very tools they need to fight discrimination.

Where are today’s youth most likely to look for the latest fashion trend? For years, the answer has been mainstream media publications or blogs. Today, the answer is likely their friends on Facebook or Tumblr.

The fashion for tie-dye tees by brands such as dertbag, HUF, Freedminds and Thrasher that is currently sweeping through London’s hipster neighbourhoods wasn’t born of bloggers and media outlets, but ordinary people using social networks.

In fact, you’d be hard pushed to find a young person who put much stock in fashion blogs at all anymore. Fashion blogs tend to be good for describing what has already happened, but that is not much use to those trying to stay on top of the latest trends.

Instant, mobile-enabled tools such as Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr give ordinary people an opportunity to document and find out what’s hot before an influential blogger can get around to covering it.

The currency for what’s hot isn’t coverage in mainstream media outlets or blogs (in fact, by the time it has appeared there, it has likely peaked), but ‘Likes’ and ‘Reblogs’ from ordinary social media users.

Bloggers, in a way, are a victim of their own success. As social media empowered ordinary people to emulate mainstream media channels, brands rewarded the more influential bloggers with access and privileges.

Yet this almost immediately raised questions about credibility. A reader of a blog could never be sure whether a blogger was endorsing a product because they genuinely believed in it, or because they were being paid to do so.

Many bloggers too, particularly in the “mummy blogging” sector have been guilty of deliberately seeking out “review copies” of products. The Advertising Standards Agency has tried to clean up the practice, without much success.

Bloggers are also not directly accountable to their audience in the way that they would have you believe. The minority of people who do make negative comments are easily dismissed as “trolls” and “haters,” blurring the boundaries between blog and media outlet further.

For your average Facebook user, the picture is very different. The vested interest in a product usually begin and end at looking cool wearing it. The price of failing to do so isn’t abuse from an anonymous audience of ‘trolls’ – but a very public shaming in front of a large audience of online ‘friends.

The ‘Like’ is also a particularly brutal metric for relevance. Facebook’s EdgeRank means that if your online friends stop liking your content, it will become literally invisible to them. The price of not being ‘Liked’ is obsolescence.

Coupled with the immediacy of a Facebook NewsFeed or a Tumblr Dashboard, and the assurance of being ‘on demographic’ that comes with reading content sourced from your own friends, you can see why Facebook is becoming many people’s new fashion blog.

This has fundamental implications for how PR firms approach seeding. For a long time, agencies have treated ‘social media’ as another communications channel – influential publishers publish, and consumers consume.

Under the ‘Like’ model however, even identifying the influencers is hard. The 177 people who have liked the photo, not the person who shared it, confer legitimacy.

Neither is what is being described here particularly unique to the youth market – we are just seeing the change first amongst the heaviest users. No one likes vested interests, everyone wants their news faster, and everyone benefits from the democracy of the ‘Like.’

This is a fundamental shift for PR, and I don’t have all the answers as to how the industry might deal with it. Certainly though, it might be time for brands to reconsider what constitutes an influencer. We’re all influencers now.

Based on a 20-month study, Solve Media found that a projected 10 percent of all online traffic isn’t human. Between January 2011 and August 2012, the company observed 100 million unique visitors a month across 5,000 publishers and found that one out of every ten users wasn’t a user at all, but a bot.

As social becomes the dominant force on the internet, so identity will become more and more important.

Although this survey was carried out by CAPTCHA manufacturer Solve Media, CAPTCHA’s are an inadequate solution. It’s not fair on the user to be constantly asked to prove that they are human.

Browser manufacturers can help solve the problem of ensuring we are who we say we are online by making authentication part of the browser. Mozilla’s Persona project looks like a step towards this, and it will be interesting to see how Google and Microsoft respond.

Tom Phillips, Telegraph:

Designed to resemble a Ming dynasty table by French architect Anthony Bechu, the Shanghai academy opened in 2005 and is part of a new breed of elite institutions geared towards senior government officials.

A prospectus handed out to visitors said the “international, contemporary and innovative institution” offered “cutting edge leadership training”. Gordon Brown and Romano Prodi have both visited while past speakers include Lord Patten, the University of Oxford chancellor, and Robert Zoellick, then president of the World Bank.

Professor Frank Pieke, the 
chair of Modern China Studies at 
Leiden University, said the academies were conceived because of Beijing’s “impatience with the lack of what they call the quality of local cadres and their inability to govern their localities or institutions effectively.

Fascinating to watch China’s shift towards being a services economy. Firms like Ogilvy, DDB and Edelman already have Chinese offices – how long until China starts to grow its own global powerhouses?

Enrico Moretti, The Atlantic:

In essence, private investment in innovation has a private return for the firm that makes that investment, but it also supplies a social return that benefits other firms. This means that the market provides less investment in innovation than is socially desirable, because the return on such investments cannot be fully captured by those who pay for it. To correct for this market failure, and compensate those who invest in R&D for the external benefits that they generate, the United States government subsidizes R&D through tax breaks.

The problem is that the difference between private and social return on innovation is much larger than the current subsidies. Bloom and Van Reenen estimate that the social rate of return on R&D is about 38 percent, almost twice as large as the private return. The implication is jarring. The United States is not just underinvesting in R&D; our current level of R&D investment is barely a fraction of the socially optimal level.

Because innovation benefits other companies in a market, the market will never fully compensate innovative companies. R&D subsidies are important in redressing the balance in favour of companies who take risks and innovate.

The UK Government recently announced that from April 2013 it would be introducing a tax credit for research and development at large firms, set at a minimum of 9.1%.

While this sounds impressive, this pales in comparison to the 14% that has been in place until recently in the United States, and is even further short of the 17% mooted by President Obama.

If the government really wants to reinvigorate this economy, it needs to get behind companies that are investing in R&D, and help them capture the returns.

Carly Rae Jepsen may be causing controversy for pretending to be a teenager when she’s actually 26 (did these people never see Dawson’s Creek?), but here’s a natty classical take on her hit “Call Me Maybe.”

I’m all for stuff that broadens access to classical music.