Craig Oliver, the Alan Partridge of strategic government communications, has had another brainwave for how to deal with the press. His latest wheeze for getting hacks onside is to hand them so-called Twitter exclusives. The plan is to spoon feed patsy journalists stories to be broken online before they are officially announced. Presumably in return for favours.
Dave will be hoping it goes down better than Number 10’s last big brainwave. Guido understands that private focus groups have tested the effectiveness of the phrase “aspiration nation”, only to find the public hates it. It’s not like Cameron used the leaden phrase in his last party conference speech or Osborne used the term as the theme of his recent budget. A-ha…