I’m afraid I indulged in a bit of Twitter bullying this evening. There’s nothing I hate more than some idiot know-it-all PR idiot being rude to one the team who produce my Drivetime show. In our first hour tonight we covered the resignation of the Kent Youth Police & Crime Commissioner Paris Brown. “Let’s get Ann Barnes, the actual PCC Commissioner on,” I said as I made my way down to the studio at five to four. “Tell her we’ll take her any time up to 8,” I suggested to my producer Laura.
Half an hour later Laura came down in a break and said “You’ll never believe it, but the press officer put the phone down on me.” Apparently speaking to London’s biggest commercial radio network wasn’t much of a priority for Mr Howard Cox. People often don’t realise that if you speak to LBC you also stand a good chance of appearing in the news bulletins of the Capital, Gold, Heart, Classic FM and XFM networks – 19 million possible listeners. In any case, LBC can be heard in half of Kent.
“We’ll see about that,” I said to Laura. “Watch this…” And so began a Twitter campaign over an hour designed to shame Mrs Barnes into coming on. At one point her press people tried a new tack and told us she was too tired. Having got up at 5,45 today that wasn’t an argument I was likely to entertain. Anyway, at 6pm, they finally relented, and they pleaded with us to stop tweeting. Shaming by Twitter had worked.
So at 6.50 (15 minutes later than they said) Ann Barnes graced our airwaves. It was a slightly testy encounter as you will hear if you click HERE. It lasts around seven minutes.
I didn’t make any reference to the difficulties we had had in the interview, but Mrs Barnes may reflect on the fact that her press advisers did her no good today.
