Was the Conservative candidate gagged after losing Eastleigh?



Maria Hutchings, defeated Conservative Party candidate in yesterday's Eastleigh by-election, has provided another remarkable video-clip for my collection.

What's so peculiar about it is the 'interviewees' determined refusal to say anything at all, accompanied by an unchangingly static facial expression.

Opening questions fishing for her view on what had gone wrong,  such as "Why did you do so badly?" and "You came third in a two-horse race - what went wrong?" quickly gave way to her silence as the main focus of reporters' attention: "Why won't you say anything?"; "Have you been gagged?" and "This is unbelievable."

And there was indeed something very 'unbelievable' about it, as it's so rare for a politician to refrain from  speaking to the media, even in the face of such difficult questions, that I too was left wondering whether Ms Hutchings had been 'gagged' by her party machine...

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think she is probably now an ex-politician so doesn't need to speak!

Julien said...

I suspect that she may have had in mind the idiotic post-count interviews of so many and thought: "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt".

Unknown said...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCZAf4A6fYE

Danish politician employing the same strategy! :)

You may not understand the questions, but you do understand the answers!

Roger said...

Let's not forget former Scottish Labour leader Iain Gray's who literally ran away from reporters at least twice during the 2011 Holyrood campaign (one of which occasions was put on youtube with the Benny Hill theme added).

And this sounds exactly your cup of tea:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/02/why-obama-never-said-not-red-states-or-blue-states-but-the-united-states/273253/