The Sketch: Gordon may be listening – but he's not really hearing

Poor Gordon. He's got to be contrite but purposeful, chastened but confident, unbending but flexible, learning but leading. It needs a suite of skills that he's a bit too old to pick up quickly.

If "listening" really is the rhetorical strategy, he isn't the natural choice to front it. On yesterday's Andrew Marr Show, relaunching another fightback, he turned the knob on his hearing aid the wrong way. It was like talking to a deaf grandfather from a bygone era. Far from listening, he was busy getting his key messages out.

But, as Andrew Marr said: "If people had been listening to those messages, you wouldn't have got 24 per cent in the election."

"People want to know we have an unequivocal sense of direction," he replied, a little arbitrarily to some ears.

After Gordon rehearsed his passion for education, fairness and "unlocking the talent" of everyone in the country, Marr pointed out the PM had been saying that for some time but now "the country is deserting you".

The listening answer starts with the words, "the polls were indeed dire for the Government". The deaf grandfather answer begins, "I don't accept that".

Then: "What do you make of Boris Johnson?"

"That's a test for the Conservative Party as a whole." It's not part of a conversation, is it?

Another exchange: "Should you step aside?"

"No, because there's a job to do. Take housing –"

"But with respect, because there's a job to do doesn't mean you're the man to do it."

"We're going to build three million houses ..."

"Show, don't tell" is one rule of communication. If Gordon wants us to believe he is listening, the best thing to have done was listen. In one respect, his Sunday morning performance may have been suicidally deaf.

The abolition of the 10p band was on the front of The Sunday Times and the subject of Frank Field's article in the Daily Mail. It's still a live issue, after weeks of government listening and learning.

The PM's response? "Frank Field is satisfied with the letter written to the Treasury Select Committee."

"He doesn't sound satisfied," Marr said doubtfully.

"No, no," the PM strode on, "I think he is." And there we are. Frank Field's Daily Mail article had made three objections to the PM's handling of the situation and the first was that the letter to the Treasury Select Committee was "as clear as mud".

Will there be comprehensive reimbursement? "We think we can help the low-paid," the PM said. Think? Think? That's very far from what Field believes he was promised.

If Gordon sticks to this line, he'll lose his Finance Bill and be gone within the year. It's not the listening, in the end, it's the hearing.

simoncarr@sketch.sc

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