My review of the 'Ask Keir' videoconference with Kier Stsrmer 'at' Southmapton.

Let's begin with a health warning. I understand that every politician wants to say things that resonate with people, and presenting it well is a skill many have. I have heard many politicians 'live' with an audience and most of them manage to leave the audience satisified and even buoyed up. Most of them do that with a well rehearsed speech, and rhetorical skills - knowing what to repeat, knowing when to raise and lower the voice and so on - so it is in some ways more like attending a performance of a play, rather than a meeting.

So, we need to make sure we are not carried away by it all.

The timing, format and content were all important, so I will say a bit about each. It took place on 28/5/2020, starting at 6:15pm; the daily coronavirus meeting had ended something like 15 minutes beforehand. The session opened with an introduction by the chairman who was strictly non-political but a presenter of Wave Radio, a local station. I guess, but don't know, that it went out live on the radio as well. He spoke for less than a minute and just described how the session would run. So at round about 6:17, Keir Started speaking and spoke for no more than 2 minutes himself saying the whole purpose was to answer people's questions, but he wanted to say he was appalled by how the questions to the scientists had been blocked by Johnson in the press conference that had just finished, and how dangerous that was.

I make a point of that, because as in my health warning, even in Q+A sessions, a lot of the same questions come up, and a good politician has, after a few such sessions, stock answers he can give. This was a 'near real time' event: he had no focus-group information on whether people thought Johnson was right to stop the questions or not. In fact, because there is a 'chat window' running alongside the press conference, the only feedback he might have got was that people thought it was right to stop the scientists being drawn in. (I suspect that are a lot of tory staffers posting many of the comments, but that is by-the-by.) So his condemnation of that and recognition of the dangers was as near genuine as you could expect.

It was an hour session, and we are about three minutes into it. The rest of the time, he was responding to questions from the public. He did seem to have a template for the answer, which was invite the person to say how they voted last election and why they chose that, then answer the question, then ask them if they had one thought they wanted him to take away from this, what would it be? He did not follow that absolutely strictly, but it seemed to come up a lot.

One of the things he had said in the opening 2 minutes was he recognised how badly Labour had failed at the election, and the only way to turn that round in his view was to listen to people, particularly those who didn't vote Labour and understand their concerns. He said people often ask him which previous leader he most models himself on, and he claims not to. Obviously, that is one of these prepared answers, but I would say there is one characteristic of Blair that he seemed to me to follow: a willingness to do what it takes to win. There are definite risks in that, especially for those who fear he will be too centrist, or even towards the right. But it is clearly different to the Corbyn approach, which was much more if you present the right policies, people will vote for it.

As it happened, almost everyone who asked a question had voted Conservative in the last election. There was one ex-LibDem councillor who had also voted LibDem in the last election, but said he had been persuaded by Keir over the past few months so would vote for him next time. The was a youth of around 16 who clearly hadn't had a chance to vote yet, and one of perhaps 25 who was a bit depressed because he lives in a Tory stronghold so felt he vote was largely wasted, but everyone else was either a long standing Conservative or an Labour-but-voted-Tory-last-time person. There were no 'alt-right' Conservatives.

The questions were, in the main, fairly predictable. A nurse wanted to know how we deal with long term pay and conditions. The 16 year old was concerned about how results would be handled, another was concerned about BAME differences in susceptability to the virus and what was being done to protect those at risk and so on.

So some of the answers were stock, I am sure, but they did seem to make sense to me. For example, I liked his decisiveness about school re-opening: yes, we do have to open them as soon as possible, so "we have to lock all the unions, headmasters, scientific advisors, local authorities in a room and hammer out an agreed approach and no-one leaves until we have". One party simply declaring the route cannot work.

Overall, he came over as decisive, and genuinely listening. And I believe he was: this determination to win came over strongly, and I do think he sees understanding why people did not vote for them last time is key.   I also liked the ability to react to the press conference that had finished only a few minutes before while doing other preparation for the call (presumably)