The election strategy being fought by Gordon Brown and his team reminds me of that followed by Michael Foot in 1983. These cosy little household chats which Brown is doing every day are exactly what Foot did in 1983, partly in order to keep him away from the media. Foot did his best to stay away from as many one on one interviews on the TV as possible, and Brown is following suit. Rumour has it he has already turned down the usual confrontation with Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight ... but was, of course, very happy to submit himself to the rigorous interviewing style of GMTV this morning.
Foot spent most of the campaign in 1983 touring the country speaking to supportive Labour audiences, rarely encountering "real voters". And I suspect that's exactly how it is going to play out with Brown. We'll have more incidents like the one at St Pancras yesterday when Brown is filmed shaking hands with "normal voters", who then turn out to be Labour Party activists.
The one thing you do not want to do in the first week of an election campaign is to hack off the hacks. The LibDems did their best to do that at their press conference this morning with some over-zealous security measures - Adam Boulton almost exploded with annoyance - but Gordon Brown and his team seem determined to try to win this election by treating the media like dirt and refusing to co-operate on basic measures. Gordon Brown's refusal to even acknowledge Michael Crick's presence in the Newsnight film last night was almost comical. What did it achieve? Certainly nothing positive. There is a way to deal with journalists like Crick, but ignoring them is not one of them.
