When pundits who ‘explained’ why Vote Leave’s plan to realign politics was mad/stupid/impossible now give post hoc ‘explanations’ for why it’s all so logical/inevitable … ignore their babble… Pundits = noise not signal. Eg ‘the centre ground’ DOES NOT EXIST, it’s pundit fiction
Eg. 2014 dominiccummings.com/2014/06/30/my-… & 2016, CTRL+F centre ground - dominiccummings.com/2017/01/09/on-…. Vote Leave strategy in 16 & 19 was based on SW1 theories re ‘centre ground’ = false. SW1 didn’t learn after 2016 & provided a chance for us to win again in 19, ignoring pundit howling 
KS is a beta-lawyer-gamma-politician, like ~all in SW1 he obsesses on Media Reality not Actual Reality, he’s played the lobby game (badly) for a year WITHOUT A MESSAGE TO THE COUNTRY, now the pundits will a/ savage him, b/ tell him he needs to focus on them more, more exclusives!
Cos he’s gamma he’ll listen to the babble! What will he NOT do? Focus on public priorities > media priorities. We have a No10 & Opposition who see their job as Media Entertainment Service & neither knows how to be this better than TB/Mandy. Neither will try to be… a government
A measure of how bad KS is: until I googled yesterday I didn’t know who Shadow CHX is & when I looked at photo I had 0 recognition, she never touched my consciousness in a year…
Caveat: in 2020 I didn’t attend PMQ mtngs, Cabinet, ignored politics/communication as much as I possibly could (contra pundits noise), but still that tells you something: *0 impact of any LAB econ message of any kind!*
A sign KS trying to improve: sustained effort on violent crime, not ‘a crime week in the grid’ (usual sw1 crap) but SUSTAINED, month after month after month. P(80-90%) won’t happen. KS OODA will stay Media Reality, not Actual Reality cos reorienting= infuriating media on own side
Other signs: SUSTAINED intelligent activity on a/ the huge productivity agenda, b/ bringing in serious ppl from outside SW1 to help, e.g hire @davidshor & tell ShadCab to do as he says, Shor understands politics better than any LAB MP or KS office. Again P(80-90%) won’t happen
Politics will for a while resemble DC/GO vs EM: two groups focused on the media but not as good at it as Blair, neither focused on country or *being a serious gvt*
The optimal political strategy for CON *&* LAB a/ is almost identical & b/ wd be described by pundits, as VL strategy 16/19, as ‘incoherent/mad’ cos does not fit SW1 ideas of lt/rt/centre, but wd be wildly popular. Neither will do cos both=oriented to MediaReality>ActualReality
Why does this happen? Politicians are PROVABLY NOT RATIONAL even about their own election/comms! They orient to internal chimp gangs + media, not to public/ActualReality, cos of party etc incentives + political media=so noisy the politicians can't learn their errors from there
If LAB had a leader 80% as good at comms as Blair + focused on ActualReality, they'd win next GE easy. They don't/won't, P(80%), so impossible now to be confident re what will happen, both parties cd easily be hated/held in contempt at same time
& pundits ignore counterfactuals: e.g If LAB had played the Establishment’s collapse 16-19 smart, they cd have destroyed Tories, who wanted to ignore Vote Leave’s plan for how to adapt; if vaccine decisions had been conventional spring20, today wd have been terrible for CON etc
Politics is always more contingent, more branching histories that nearly happen, & less 'inevitable' & less 'strategy', than the fairy tales you are given by the media... remember, the world in which neither Brexit nor Trump happened v nearly existed... ENDS
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