Thursday, September 28, 2006

Polly Billington does a Naughtie?

Following on from James Naughtie making slip-ups about his Labour Party affiliation on the Today programme, his colleague Polly Billington has joined the club too. This morning, in a feature with Labour conference delegates about the leadership question she said to one of the delegates, "where are we" on the leadership issue.

Update: It's been suggested in Comments that I may be misconstruing Polly, so, just in case other are right and I am wrong (which would only be the third time in my life), I decided to grab the audio and listen again. You can grab it here and you need to go about 1:40 to get to the bit.

Polly addresses a Labour delegate by name after speaking with another Labour delegate and says: "Are you comfortable with where we are on the leadership? Do you think there is a smooth transition about to happen?"

I accept I may be reading more in it than there actually is, but I don't think I've unreasonably misconstrued meaning per se.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You could be miscontruing this, she could have just meant it figuratively, rather than as joint Labour party supporters. I noticed last night, Miliband on Newsnight said "The Labour Party was" instead of "is" when talking about its future and he then immediately corrected himself.

Iain Dale said...

Sorry Dizzy, you're becoming paranoid. That is a sentence which could have an entirely different meaning to the one you attribute to her.

dizzy said...

I resent the suggestion I'm "becoming" paranoid! There is no "becoming" about it, I've been there for years :-)

Seriously though, I was planning on coming home this evening and finding the bit on Listen Again so I could get the whole sentence as I knew, when I posted, that standing alone it was rather weak.

However I didn't want to misquote and I was in a traffic jam on the M25 at the time. I was going to parahrase it originally but I thought that would be unfair too.