Propeller-Head Wonk Watch: The troubled Demos think tank is officially saying “no comment” this morning but there are reports that the new director of Demos, Catherine Fieschi, has already abandoned ship. It seems to be something of habit for Demos to lose leaders. She was installed following the failed and brief captaincy of Madelaine Bunting which produced a mutiny of the wonks.
Sunny over at Pickled Politics thinks it is something to do with Demos co-sponsoring an event held by the British Muslim Initiative – which some claim is Hamas allied – Guido has no idea if that is true and is a bit sceptical of Islamophobia mullahs-under-the-bed stuff. The Demos “no comment” is a bit of a laugh when you know that they advocate “radical transparency” and a new way of “doing politics… short-circuiting the damaging relationship between politicians and journalists”.
They ask citizen bloggers to get in touch because “We’re thinking about how citizen journalism and new media are having, and might have, an impact on political communication, and on traditional journalism.” Well, Guido got in touch and they said “no comment”.
UPDATE : It is official. She resigned on Monday and an article has just popped up on the New Statesman‘s website where she says
“no matter who’s in an organisation, organisations seldom love you back as much as you love them. They are strangely, in this respect, less than the sum of their parts. And so it’s time to move on…. I wish Demos nothing but the absolute best, but a sense of après moi, le déluge has a certain appeal when you’ve been slugging your guts out for a couple of years. Does harbouring a secret longing for an inept successor, possibly unpleasant, maybe even scarily unattractive, make me a terrible person?”
