This morning I appeared on LBC‘s Nick Ferrari Breakfast radio programme.

I was invited to join Mehdi Hasan (New Statesman) to talk about the forthcoming visit to the UK of Pakistan’s President Zardari.

Mehdi led off, unexpectedly (for me!) praising David Cameron for speaking out about the fact that elements in Pakistan were supporting or engaged in terrorism, even if India might not have been the best place to make such remarks for obvious reasons (Kashmir etc).

I then briefly made some of the points previously made on this website about the What, the How and Why of public pronouncements and the negative way they might be received.

I suggested that far from making the President’s visit more problematic, the episode had raised the political intensity of the visit in a way both sides could use to good effect.

There probably would be a private tete-a-tete discussion between the Prime Minister and President to get their personal relationship on track; President Zardari might frankly tell Mr Cameron that he was doing his best to deal with extremist tendencies, and say that he did not need outside statements which made that thankless task more difficult by frothing up populist anti-Western sentiment.

Mehdi eloquently wrapped up by reminding listeners of many other statements of concern from Western leaders about divisions within Pakistan, now brought to the fore by the Wikileaks documents.

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The more I do media work (and I do very little), the more I admire the skill of those politicians and pundits who do interviews often and to good effect. You need heroic concentration to maintain focus and not get wrapped up in interesting but confusing detail and/or blurt out supposedly clever things which pop up in your brain when you’re talking live on air.