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z politics


Behind the spin


As a producer and editor on Radio 4’s Today programme, Roger Hermiston worked through five General Elections and was in a unique position to observe and sometimes face the wrath of leading politicians and their advisers. With decision day - May 7th - a matter of weeks away the Cavendish-based writer tells us what happens in newsrooms when the country goes to the polls


I


f it feels as if it’s been going on for months and months – well, that’s because it has. Sometimes it feels like it’s been going on for years. This must surely be the longest


running general election campaign in history. In the old days it was simple. The


party in power would hand out some goodies by way of a few tax cuts in a spring budget, there would then be great


fun in trying to guess the date of the election, and finally a few weeks later the Prime Minister would fire the starting gun. Everyone would climb into their battle buses for three or four weeks and David Dimbleby would declare the winner in the early hours of a Friday morning. Now, with the introduction of fixed


term parliaments, everybody has known forever that this General Election will be


on May 7, 2015. To the weary eye, this campaign is just one, never-ending circus of Monday launches and cobbled together policy initiatives. Heaven knows how my old colleagues on the Today programme are coping with all this extra politics, all this additional attention from the party’s spin doctors, and all the added scrutiny from that army of executives (if they still exist) within the BBC who are employed to ‘


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