Crimes and follies
From Napoleonic master-strategist to complete ass in a month. It’s almost enough to make you feel sorry for puir wee Gordie.
Almost.
But no, let us put aside the brief flicker of pity. Let’s concentrate instead on how richly deserved it is that the Prime Minister should have the contents of the media chamber-pot emptied over his head. In all the mess over the election that never was, there are two particular elements which have had insufficient attention and which shout ‘guilty’ from the roof-tops.
One, the jaunt to Basra. This was not – as it presumably seemed at the time it was planned – a masterstroke depriving the Tories of a headline. It was a crass attempt to use the army for political purposes, broke a promise to make major announcements to parliament, and included the obligatory fake figures and double-counting which are essential in any New Labour ‘announcement’. It can’t be blamed on some teenage adviser, either. Brown went ahead with it and in one airplane trip reminded the world that he is far, far closer to a Blair-like spinner than he likes to admit. The statesman was examined and turned out to be made of cardboard.
Second, the smugness and arrogance he encouraged among his little internal clique and then more widely. Kinnock’s claim that Labour would grind ‘the (Tory) bastards in the dust’ (he clearly never learnt from his hysterical performance at Sheffield in 1992); Miliband D musing on the ‘next ten years’; unnamed Cabinet ministers (Miliband E) who had decided that the only issue left for the Tories was how to replace Cameron. There’s nothing like a little bile in politics, but when your master wants to play the national leader card, the factionalism should be kept under wraps. But Brown hates Tories so he couldn’t bring himself to shut them up.
Contrast Boy Dave’s gentle chiding of Labour that ‘they mean well but we have to learn from their mistakes’. That was classy. We should have more of this sorrow than in anger stuff in UK politics – it’s a shame that most MPs on all sides can’t bring themselves to do that, as it works with voters.
Of course Big Gordo will stage a come-back of sorts. But the contrast with Blair, who managed almost to the end to judge the public mood and capture it, is so clear. Brown is a tribalist, a conspirator, a manipulator. In his book about Courage (tee-hee) he missed out his true role-model. But then Richard Nixon wouldn’t have sold.