Loose lips sink ships
You cannot – or at any rate, I cannot – help feeling sorry for Gordon Brown. Everything he touches now seems to turn to horse manure. The bright idea of his advisers to send him out amongst the people has turned into a nightmare story about the British Prime Minister, thinking he was out of earshot of everyone, being recorded (and then broadcast) complaining about a voter who had just questioned him. And then the whole thing is, in my view, compounded by the totally daft decision for Brown to go and visit the same voter at home to apologise in person.
Gordon Brown is, I think, a complex man doing a job for which he is not a natural fit. But he is not a bad man, and for that matter he is not a bad politician. Silly and all though yesterday’s gaffe is, it shouldn’t matter; except to the extent that it exposes some terrible campaign management and a catastrophically bad sense of political judgement.
I do however wonder about the ethics of the broadcasters publishing these comments in the first place. And I wonder about the self-righteousness of some of the responses. And I am horrified at the train wreck that is this Labour campaign.
Tags: general election, Gordon Brown, United Kingdom
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April 29, 2010 at 1:56 am
If all of the private comments I have uttered were made public I would have been sued and probably shot numerous times. I don’t think I am alone in that. All this fuss is self-righteous nonsense.
April 29, 2010 at 5:12 am
The English can be as idiotic as ourselves about certain things. But one thing about them is their forgiveness of others in circumstances where we would mount some very high horse.
I think this situation is not bad for Browne and has more to do with a lack of anything meaty for the meeja to sink their rancid chompers into. For years now, Browne had been demonized as the dour gnome squatting in #11 by Blair’s people. This shows him as being human which was a deficit due to the spin from earlier years.
April 29, 2010 at 9:17 am
We’ll see tonight 8pm BBC: PM debate on the economy, followed by instant polls and instant punditry, this latter consisting in gushing media people interviewing each other about who won in terms of body language, ‘coming across’ etc. Where policies are discussed it’ll be in terms of their expected popularity rather than intrinsic merit. Nevertheless, I shall be glued, even though HIGNFY is on the other side.