Idiots, useful and otherwise
Picture the scene:
Gordon Brown and his advisers are hunkered down in their bunker on Saturday afternoon. They receive advance word of the News of The World’s poll. The Tories are ahead in the marginal seats. To call an election would mean destroying the Labour parties parliamentary majority and force it to slug it out in a hung parliament.
A heavy silence falls on the room. For several minutes nobody says a word. Finally, a shaky voice says,
‘We’re screwed. What do we do now?’
Everybody looks from one to the other. Slowly, Gordon’s broodling sulk starts to lift. As one, everybody says together,
‘Get Marr’.
I don’t have much more to say about this charade. But I would like to ask eveybody who saw Andrew Marr interviewing Gordon Brown: please raise your hand if your intelligence wasn’t insulted by that interview. Please raise your hand if you think Andrew Marr wasn’t handpicked to give Brown the result he wanted. And please raise your hand if you believe any of Brown’s reasons - such as they were - about not holding the election.
How the Brown-Marr summit helped anyone, I’m not sure. Brown looks worse for fronting up to only soft questions. Marr’s reputation sinks further for delivering them. I mean, were Richard and Judy busy or something? Was Davina McCall washing her hair? Patrick Kielty must have had a hangover. It’s hard to imagine them being worse. Marr makes the latter-day David Frost look like a interrogator at Abu Ghraib.
David Cameron says he wants a general election because we’ve in effect had a change of government from the Blair years. On this showing, he couldn’t more wrong. It’s the same old, same old: caught in a lie, a soft interview and pretend none of it happened. It couldn’t have been more apparent if Brown had said he was ‘a pretty straight kinda guy’. And we’ve got another two years of it.
Onwards to Tehran!
Posted on October 7th, 2007 at 10:41 am
| See also • Show a repeat of ‘Allo ‘Allo instead • Take courage, Gordon • links for 2008-04-30 |
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Filed under Brown, UK politics |
No-one seriously voted for Labour at the last election under any other contention than “vote Blair, get Brown” anyway.
That’s a fair point but we were also told that Blair would be serving a full term.
True, but we never believed Blair.
Labour R.I.P.
It now looks fairly certain that there will be no election until 2009 - and a lot can happen between now and then in what will be a long game instead of a short game.
With a long game, I’m not so sure a fixation with tax cuts is going to look quite so attractive after some government tinkering with the Inheritance Tax threshold, the low tax rate paid by private equity holders and the tax status of the Non-Domiciles. IMO it’s time to focus more on wasteful public spending.
At least Nick Robinson would have said what needed to be said - Andrew Marr is a bloody intelligent guy but like you said, he’s a soft interviewer.
I think the focus on the change of Prime Minister takes us further down the erroneous road of treating the PM as President. He ain’t, at least under our current system. Political parties are elected on the basis of their manifesto, and individual MPs, theoretically, are elected on an individual basis, including the PM. What I’d like to see is fixed term Parliaments, so that a General Election can never be used like this as a political football.