What to ask the PM?
- 29 Jan 07, 04:09 PM
Prime ministers don't give long, sit-down interviews for domestic TV very often - this is Mr Blair's first (which you can watch here) since Sunday AM in .
Given that they're so rare, you might think there would be all kinds of shenanigans from the No 10 side - you can't ask questions about this or that, you can only have x minutes, it has to be such-and-such a location or whatever. Actually, in my experience such negotiations aren't nearly as common or extensive as people think, and there certainly wasn't anything like that in this case: we were allowed to ask Mr Blair whatever we wanted (although as viewers will have seen, he could still refuse to answer!). We were told he was likely to agree to speak to us over a fortnight in advance, and planning the interview began then.
The difficult thing with these planned interviews is finding the right balance between questions which you have always wanted to ask, and questions which you feel you have to put to him this particular weekend. Our first draft had no questions about the Home Office, and a big section on health. The day before the interview we more or less tore up our plan and started again.
The questions in the end were overwhelmingly topical. We had a list of about 30 we wanted to ask, and we had rejected many more; 25 minutes is very long for an interview, but it's never long enough for the man who oversees every area of government activity. The commonest complaint we receive about interviews is "why didn't you press him/her on such-and-such? Why no follow-up question?". Often a follow-up is absolutely the right thing to do, but viewers have to understand that for every time you batter away a second and third time on a particular subject, a potentially important question is squeezed out of the end of the interview. On this occasion, I hope we got the balance right.
Gareth Butler is editor of
