Where the City’s best and brightest get a few things off their chest. Today, Michael Martins, partner at Overton Advisory and a former US embassy staffer, takes the Notebook pen to talk Linkedin politics, meeting 2024’s batch of wannabe MPs, and upcoming literary revelry.
How do I feel after meeting this year’s batch of wannabe MPs? Hopeful
Over the past few months, Overton Advisory has been running free media training for prospective parliamentary candidates, or PPCs. PPCs are the people who have decided they want to become MPs, and if they’re Labour, as many I’ve met with are, they will likely end up doing so. Few people would seek out the public scrutiny and borderline abuse that comes with the job title, but many of these PPCs have brought me a lot of hope for the country’s future.
I got my start in political campaigns. For someone who went to a rough high school, didn’t grow up with a father, and was the first in their immediate family to go to university, the bar to entry was a lot lower on a campaign during election season than an entry level job at a “respectable” place where I didn’t know how to navigate the complexity of an HR process. Handily, I got a very effective education in what made a candidate good or bad. I also witnessed first-hand how many struggled with harnessing and conveying their sincerity, or worse, fell victim to a misspoken word or unintended gaffe that derailed their political ambitions which were often decades in the making.
So, with that experience in mind, the vast majority of PPCs I’ve met fill my sails with optimism. Many have come to our offices with the keen belief that they can either a) save the Conservative Party or b) help Labour put this country back on the right track. After nearly 15 years in Westminster, it is very difficult for me to not be jaded and cynical, but witnessing these people come in and say things like ‘we need to do better at feeding poor children’ or ‘my community can support better jobs than in an Amazon warehouse’ has been a privilege. So as bad as the eventual headlines stories of gaffes will probably be, I’m optimistic about the election outcome, one way or the other (just please cut my business taxes so I can hire more staff and help grow the economy).
Labour is winning Linkedin’s air war
Labour is definitely winning the Linkedin photo-op war. The volume of “deeply humbled” and “truly honoured to be invited” posts from Labour MPs and PPCs dwarfs comparative Conservative MP output, many of whom are now remarkably quick to accept connection requests. With the number of annual job movers still 20 per cent higher than its long-run average, Labour’s battle for eyeballs on the main business platform is being won essentially unopposed. Imagine if Labour outlined a business policy platform with details. The sheer volume of likes from the public affairs community would probably cause Linkedin to crash.
Chancellor can’t do his generational sums
At a reception last week, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt called millennials the young generation. As a millennial founder of two businesses with Gen Z interns, it appears the Chancellor has decided millennials are officially old enough to flatter for votes. A 2p National Insurance cut is all well and good, but pretending people in their thirties and early forties are the young generation while rowing back on things like leasehold reform and abolishing the triple lock, and cutting dividend allowance by 90 per cent over six years, strikes me as a clever way to spit in millennials’ face and tell them it’s raining. Keep up the charm offensive, Jezza.
Sad day for immersive theatre
In the Chancellor’s Budget last month, he excluded immersive theatre from the theatre tax relief. The result: another blow to cultural activities in the UK, sacrificed on the altar of reducing the debt load at a time when things like the triple lock still exist. Seeing how much money parents spend stimulating the local economy on a day out with a child, this seems like an eminently sensible way for HM Treasury to take in less in taxes, while also making life more sterile.
A recommendation: The European Writers’ Festival
In a month’s time, the European literary world will descend on the British Library in the same way I used to descend on the Scholastic book fair. At the European Writers’ Festival last year, Georgi Gospodinov, who won the International Man Booker for the Time Shelter, was one of the festival’s keynote speakers. This year the British Library will host luminaries like Andrey Kurkov (love), Joanna Elmy (love x2), and Pajtim Statovci (you guessed it: love), so I’m expecting a repeat. Kurkov’s book of diary entries, Our Daily War, written in Ukraine during the first seven months of the war, has been surreal and sad to read. Hopefully he is right that Putin will be defeated and Ukraine will emerge stronger than before.