Toby Stevens writes on his excellent blog at Computer Weekly:

I’d like to offer my congratulations to the Communications team at the Identity and Passport Service for successfully pulling off one of the most audacious and downright clever pieces of media manipulation I’ve ever witnessed. If I ever find myself in charge of a large and unpopular public service project, I’m headhunting the lot of you into my team. Here’s why.

Yesterday afternoon I was tied up running a small conference when I received an email from a friend telling me that the Home Secretary had scrapped compulsory ID cards. My first reaction was to take that at face value – that the scheme had been binned as a result of the Home Secretary’s policy review. Clearly that was the reaction of the media as well – the BBC, the broadsheets and tabloids, even the Metro are running the story that the government has been forced into an embarrassing U-turn*on the National Identity Service, with ‘£1bn wasted’ according to the Metro. The media appear triumphant that the CWIC airside worker trial in Manchester has been switched from compulsory to voluntary, and there will be no compulsion to have an ID Card.

But we’re so very wrong, and that’s the genius of IPS’ communications team.

This entry was posted by andrew on Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 at 21:49 and is filed under Anti, General, UK News Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.