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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/po ... 66667.html

The Green Party leader Natalie Bennett has given her second car crash interview in as many hours on LBC Radio, with listeners describing the performance as “a complete meltdown”, “extraordinarily bad” and “awkward beyond words”.

Other parties have their oxbridge confidence, their media training and their downright lies to get through interviews. It would be great to see ordinary humans in government.

emordnilap wrote:Other parties have their oxbridge confidence, their media training and their downright lies to get through interviews. It would be great to see ordinary humans in government.

I totally agree and feel very sorry for Natalie but politicians require the confidence of a snake oil salesman and a few timely sound bytes to make an impact.

She obviously hadn't prepared for the interview.

Perhaps she needs a mentor - Caroline Lucas?

What she should have said is

"If the BOE can print £380 billion pounds and give it to *ankers to create a bubble in the stock and property markets, the BOE can print whatever it takes to build 500,000 low cost/rental homes and insulate every house in the country, all to zero carbon standards. At least with the housing the government can pay the money back from saved energy and from rental payments so that there is no inflationary trend."

Simples!! If they want someone to go on the box and say that, I volunteer.

You don't need Oxbridge or even public school confidence you just need to know what you are talking about. Or at least think you do

I (sort of) felt sorry for too. What she's going to realise that as her party gains in popularity, the scrutiny nd mud-slinging increases in proportion. Just look at what's happening to UKIP (not that I really care)...

i just listened to the interview on the LBC website. Appalling. I'm afraid I don't feel sorry for her at all. She let her party down badly in that interview. You can't blame Nick Ferrari. He was just doing what he does. She should have gone into the interview with her eyes open and her facts straight, OR gone on the attack and told him that she was not prepared to engage in a nit-picking, point-scoring interview; that she firmly believed her policies were the right thing to do and that they would find a way to make it happen.

It's about confidence, which was sadly lacking. If you're not confident in yourself, how can you expect other people to be confident in you? It's an essential prerequisite for leadership, from the head of the hunter-gatherer tribe to today's politicians.

Having said all that, we all have off-days.

The thing that gets me about this, and the previous Daily Politics debacle, is that the questions really were simple and straight forward. They certainly weren't aggressive or unreasonable.

This isn't about Oxbridge confidence or PR training. If they existed, she should have known those numbers off the top of her head. If they didn't exist she should have said clear and simply that they didn't have the figures yet. I doubt Bennett will remain leader for much longer.

Yep, she's toast. Or at least she will be after the election is over.

Fortunately it is unlikely to have much impact on how well the green party does, because that has got much more to do with local demographics and the situation in different seats regarding tactical voting. There's some seats where it makes sense to vote green, if you are that way inclined, and some where is doesn't.

She screwed up on two fronts

Firstly, if she is going to play the political game of costings according to the way the current political/economic system works, then she should, as others have pointed out, got her facts, within those political/economic constraints, correct. She demonstrably did not.

However, she arguably screwed up on a deeper level in even trying to do the above, badly or otherwise. What she should have done is point out, as Ken has already alluded to, that the current political/economic system is so utterly corrupted and so utterly broken that the questioner's questions about specific costings are also broken and irrelevant as a consequence. In other words, she should have done the vision thing and not allow him to bog her down in details.

I agree with UE and CLV, she's toast.

This country is screaming out in pain from the need of a proper, self-confident, left wing/ecological alternative to BAU. And this is what we have got. It's f***ing depressing.

Green MP Caroline Lucas: ‘someone had a bad day, it happens’

Caroline Lucas joins Cathy Newman to discuss a bad day for the Green party, but says people should be more forgiving of Natalie Bennett.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lEM7g7 ... e=youtu.be

Everybody does have a bad day, but she's the leader of a national political party and we're 3 months away from a general election. I'm sorry, but there has got to be plenty of talent within the Green party that can do better than that, for reasons explained very clearly in recent posts.

They should put Keith Taylor back in charge, IMO.

Regardless, I finally got around to joining yesterday.

Everyone on this thread wrote:She's toast

Good. She's an idiot.

I saw her speak a few weeks ago... 45 mins of disjointed rhetoric containing exactly one 'number'...

She was talking about corporate tax evasion/avoidance and said something along the lines of "Did you know: DODGY TAX AVOIDERS only paid 0.05% of their turnover in tax?"

I wanted to stand up and scream "Corporate tax is based on PROFIT, not TURNOVER, you f***tard!!! - Why make it any easier for people to dismiss what you(we)'re saying?".

I didn't... I just walked out, taking my 'negativity' and an overwhelming sense of utter despair with me.

E2a: I should note - The reason she annoyed me so much is that the Green Party itself is overflowing with well thought out, costed, radical policies that should make 'winning votes' a breeze, were they presented in a coherent manner.

Unfortunately for all of us and our beautiful planet, the Green Party will always be in the noise.

Too many tree hugging, unwashed hippies don't you know.