Wednesday 1 June 2016

Can you Re-brand Carwyn ?

Oh dear it looks like the Wasting Mule and Labour are trying to rebrand First Minister Carwyn Jones.  

The  Blurb for Martin Shipton  says he is 


"Media Wales' Chief Reporter.He joined Wales on Sunday in 1994, moving on to the Western Mail eight years later. He specialises in controversial and investigative stories and has been involved in covering the National Assembly since its outset. His book on the Assembly's first decade, Poor Man's Parliament, was published in 2011".
Mr Shipton gives us gushing news of the rebanding of our First Minister
If you’ve picked up on a change in tone from Carwyn Jones since the Assembly election on May 5, your intuition is not deceiving you.
The First Minister’s image has been carefully tweaked to take note of the new political circumstances – and to counter allegations from opposition parties that he was behaving arrogantly in the last term.
The First Minister’s post-election demeanour is very different. He’s coming across as graciousness personified, accepting that no one party has a monopoly on wisdom or good ideas, and going out of his way to state that tribalism isn’t appropriate.

50% less smug  100% more bullshit

The Mule offers a Labour strategist viewpoint 


“It’s a deliberate change of image for Carwyn and fits with the result of the election. Although winning 29 of the 60 seats was a very good achievement in the circumstances – just one seat down – the drop in the share of the vote was worrying from Labour’s point of view [down from 42.3% in 2011 to 34.7% in the constituency vote and from 36.9% to 31.5% in the regional list vote]. It’s the party’s lowest vote share in Wales for around 100 years. That meant that Carwyn had to show some humility and be magnanimous in victory.
“Parties that have been in power for a long time need to renew themselves. No-one is going to say ‘don’t vote for us so we can renew ourselves in opposition’, and it becomes harder at every election to fend off the allegation that you’ve run out of steam and have no new ideas.
“That’s why the new agreements with Plaid Cymru and Kirsty Williams [the sole remaining Liberal Democrat AM] are very important. They allow Carwyn to appear less tribal and talk about the need for co-operation between ‘progressive’ parties of the centre left.
Of course  this may be a tactic to accuse any criticism of the Welsh Labour Government (*Kirsty) of troublemaking
“Even when Leanne Wood made a tribal response after he was re-nominated as First Minister, Carwyn maintained his conciliatory manner. It made the tone of Leanne’s speech seem inappropriate: it’s difficult to convincingly accuse someone of arrogance when they’re going out of their way not to appear so.”

We will  see but I suspect all the re-banding and re-spining will not change Carwyn and we will get the same Labour's Devise Right to run Wales as usual,

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