After catching up on today's hoopla on GMB, here's little story about how perceptions of rudeness and hostility are shaped in British political media, and how it has nothing to do with what people are actually like...
I was on a panel show, with the usual range of political representation: me, a Tory, a centrist, and a rightwing journalist. One of the topics discussed was whether the 'hard left' are uniquely nasty, and I think I said something like aggression not being a partisan thing.
Other than me, the other panellists were broadly in agreement that yes, the hard left are uniquely nasty. Fair enough, I'm outnumbered, the conversation moves on.
HOWEVER... an undercurrent during the whole show was the Tory was really going out of their way to wind up the centrist. I think they'd even brought something they'd printed off especially for the occasion. And the mood just soured over the duration of the show.
Then as soon as the cameras stopped rolling, IT ALL KICKED OFF. Having had enough of the shenanigans, the centrist absolutely blew their top, and was shouting and swearing all over the gaff. I'm talking 2am in a kebab shop levels of yelling - in a studio context, quite shocking.
What was super weird was that I was the only one who found any of it strange. The host, the producer, the other panellists were totally unruffled. And nobody else clocked the irony of all this kicking off straight after a conversation about how the left are uniquely hostile.
The reason I'm saying this, aside from still finding it funny to this day, is that how people develop reputations in media circles for aggression and nastiness often has nothing to do with how they are in real life. If you're not a political insurgent, you'll get a pass.
I've got time for @IainDale, he's been a fair and thoughtful interlocutor in my experience. But I don't think either @graceblakeley or @TherealNihal were out of line. They were impassioned, GMB is generally a noisy one, and I don't think it was an especially heated argument.
@IainDale @graceblakeley @TherealNihal All I'm saying is I've seen a fair amount of actual aggressiveness and hostility, and there being no such calls to exclude those people from public life. Which is to be expected, media terrain is a political battlefield, but let's not pretend the rules are evenly applied here.
