promethea.incorporated

jbeshir:

It was as I was doing these four interviews that I realised how professional politicians and celebrities do it. As you get the same questions all of the time, you develop your patter to tell anecdotes with certain soundbites and phrases. Everyone does this. If you watch multiple interviews with a film star plugging the same film, they’ll tell the same stories every time. If you watch any interviews with the Leave campaign from before the referendum, they’d relentlessly repeat the phrase “Take Back Control”, to make their point.

I ended up doing the same. When asked if I really thought London should be independent, I’d always joke that I can’t envisage passport control on the M25. And if the broadcaster were an international broadcaster, I’d then add “ - that’s the road that rings London” to make sure everyone understood.

…

I wasn’t feeling very nervous as by this point I’d given approximately a million interviews, which more or less all had same fairly soft questions. But with about ten seconds to go before we went live on air the presenter said to me “So the first question is going to be asking why you want to overturn a democratic decision”. Wait, what? Agh! I just started a jokey petition and now I was plotting against democracy?! Had my revolution gone too far?

Amazingly, it was at this point I realised that all of these interviews had trained me for this exact sort of hostile questioning, and I had learned another trick the real politicians use: the pivot. This is where politicians take a question and somehow end up answering a very different question - the question they would have preferred to have been asked.

…

Though I’ve enjoyed the media attention this week, there is one niggling problem: I’ve now started this thing that is now beyond my control, and there are now thousands of people looking to me to tell them what to do next. It feels inevitable that I’m going to end up disappointing them.

Over the last week I’ve learned a lot. I’ve become the accidental leader of an independence movement, I’ve accidentally trained myself to become a savvy political operative, and I’ve accidentally won the genuine support of a surprisingly large number of people for a cause that might actually be quite unwise.

Honestly I think I support their idea more seriously than they do. I mean, it’s worth a try, and separate residency rules and citizenship and market access and maybe even other laws for London vs the rest of the UK might actually work well even if the two stayed heavily bound together.

Downside: I’d have to move to London, which would be damned expensive.

Well I for one am certainly available for the position of the leader of the Londependence movement if nobody else wants it…