THE CHARACTER OF GORDON BROWN.


We have a General Election tomorrow and it should be the most interesting one for a very long time. Policies are, of course, the most important things to consider when deciding to cast your vote, but the personalities of the leaders of the parties are important too - and their characters are even more so. Policies, as we have so often seen in the past, can be ditched. Their characters they, and we, are stuck with.

With this in mind I think it would be interesting to examine the incident, and its consequences, between Gordon Brown and the Rochdale pensioner Gillian Duffy. The meeting was, of itself, a non-event, and had Mr. Brown reacted to it in a normal way nobody, by now, would even remember that it had taken place,whether the mike was on or off.

But his first response, to what he considered a disastrous encounter, was to blame his aide for ever allowing the woman anywhere near him. This was the behaviour of a coward and a bully, of someone who is so used to being pandered to that the idea that something could really be his fault doesn't even come up for consideration. Afterwards, on the radio with Jeremy Vine, he again blamed his staff before hastily retracting this and instead accused the media scrum of preventing him from answering her properly. This was a lie, for, as can clearly be seen on the video tape, he was under no pressure that would have stopped him answering Mrs. Duffy in any way he wanted to.

Afterwards, when the miked-up cat was out of the bag, and he had spent forty minutes in her house in an effort to control the damage (worrying question: to these people Mrs. duffy was just another face in the street, how did they get her private telephone number - and so quickly?) he emerged beaming his justly famous frighten-the-horses grin. To me, this was a shockingly incongruous attitude to strike considering the circumstances and yet another indication of Mr. Brown's dysfunctionality as a social human being.

All of this must be disquieting stuff for any potential Labour voter but even more perturbing is Gordon Brown's apparently total inability to assess, with even a particle of accuracy, an experience which he himself has been a party to. It was obvious to everybody present, and to anyone who has seen it on television, that this had been a completely innocuous meeting with a member of the public who had actually ended the conversation by assuring Brown that he had her vote. But Brown had afterwards got into his car convinced that there was the material in his chat with Mrs. Duffy for the media to take him apart. Do we want our Prime Minister emerging from talks with foreign leaders not having a damn clue what the actual purport of his conversation with them had been?

My assessment of Gordon Brown would not be a favourable one. He is weak, impressionable, a liar, a hypocrite and an incompetent. But even more worryingly we have a cabinet who are collectively so pusillanimous that they go in fear, even in awe, of such a man.

(None of this means that I am a supporter of Nick Clegg or David Cameron.)

WHY ARE WE NOT PROSECUTING MORE MPS?

The simple answer is because they won't let us. On the one hand, the hand of authority, it is - and I will risk your derision here with the use of the word - a conspiracy. It is the big conspiracy by the haves against the have-nots, by the people with money and power against the rest of us. These influential people may earnestly detest each other, and they do, but if ever one of their number is threatened they all circle the wagons to protect him/her - lest they be next.

You will notice in this country how rarely, if ever, anybody above a certain managerial level is prosecuted. An example of this occurred a couple of years back when three executive crooks were extradited to America for trial. The Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph, The Express and other rags masquerading as newspapers poured their bigoted antagonism on the Damn Yankees and on the traitorous government that could hand over decent (they must be, they were rich!) middle class englishmen into the hands of filthy foreigners. According to them Robin Hood, Little John and Will Scarlet had been abducted from among us in the dead of night and none of us could ever again sleep soundly in our beds. It turned out, of course, that all three -so comfortably safe from prosecution in Britain (though their crimes were committed here)- were, of course, as guilty as Hell.

And on the other hand we have an indifferent, listless majority who, so long as they have the TV, the football, the booze, etc., can be trusted never to rock the boat. As Juvenal said nineteen hundred years ago, panem et circences, baby, panem et circences.

But some of us have at least tried. I began by posting some things on an internet site called 38 Degrees, a sort of political lobbying group, a bunch of tossers who believe that all the country's ills can be solved by petitions. But after several unavailing efforts to convince them that petitions never solved anything anywhere and that a more direct approach was needed, I had to give up on them, the prosecution of a criminal being much too radical a move for these world-shakers.

I thought next to involve our brave crusading journalists, although my opinion of journalists is roughly equal to that shown by Aldous Huxley when he declared that he was giving up journalism to become a writer. People such as Marina Hyde of The Guardian, Henry Porter of The Observer and Francis Wheen who writes, intermittently I hope, for Private Eye. All received my letters without troubling themselves to reply, so the help they offered was about in line with my expectations, but their rudeness, I will admit, surprised me.

By then I realized I was on my own and so thought to bring a civil action, as a taxpayer, against an MP. I took legal advice on the the liklihood of a successful outcome and received an answer in which the words 'snowball' and 'Hell' featured prominently. This did not entirely surprise me. One cannot have the peasants suing their betters simply because they, the peasants, have been robbed by them. That way lies Madness, Anarchy, Chaos, or worse still, Democracy.

My increasing desperation may be discerned from my next move, I contacted the Crown Prosecution Service. I asked them if they might be interested in prosecuting some criminals and they told me that no, they weren't, really, at least not these particular criminals. But if I believed a crime had been committed I should report it to the police. So I did. The police were, rather to my surprise, very polite and decent about it but, of course, could not discuss anything where an ongoing investigation might, just might, be occurring. They said, however, that I could try reporting the matter to the Commissioner for Parliamentary Standards. So I did. The person I spoke to there seemed almost bemused by my inquiry and - is Pontius Pilate the present Commissioner ? - recommended I talk to the Crown Prosecution Service or the police about it.

Now you don't have to tell me twice that I am being given the old run around. You have to tell me three times. And now that I had been told three times I was beginning to get the message. Nobody, particularly nobody in authority, let alone the lily-livered citizenry, wants to see Members of Parliament proscuted for the many crimes they have committed. Maybe it's just me, but I find this rather strange. It's our money they've stolen, for God's sake!

In my correspondence with the CPS, I had begun by concentrating on the case of the former Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott. I did this for two reasons. One, because he is a repulsive bullying thug, and two, because he is a sitting duck. In the publication known as the 'Green Book', which is the bible for MPs regarding their expenses, the most important injunction is that all 'allowances', as they prefer them to be called (for obvious reasons), must be "wholly, exclusively and necessarliy" incurred for the purpose of carrying out their parliamentary duties.

John Prescott had his house in Yorkshire mock-Tudorized and charged it to the taxpayer. There is not a person in the country, outside of the idiots in the fees office, who will believe that this bit of exterior decoration had anything whatever to do with his job as an MP. Yet the police have appearantly investigated him and passed him as clean. Shome mishtake, shurely!

But they have an explanation for this, too. I have had a short correspondence with Detective Superintendent Matthew Horne of the Specialist Crime Directorate at New Scotland Yard and he informs me that where the police decide that no effort has been made to deliberately decieve the fees office that case will not be pursued. This in spite off the many examples where the Fees Office has allowed claims that were clearly improper, such as the ludicrous floating duck house and the porn films, not to mention Prescott's mock-Tudorization. The police reaction to the Fees Office allowing a claim that contravenes the rules was to decide that somehow that claim then became a valid one, not that the Fees Office was wrong.

And there is another, scarcely less important, instruction in the 'Green Book'. It is that "Members are themselves responsible for ensuring that their use of allowances is above reproach", which of itself blows the excuse that "the Fees Office said it was okay" clean out of the water. Thus we see that the entire police investigation into MPs' expenses was based on a fallacy.

So what do we do? They seem, through hundreds of years of experience, to have closed all the loopholes, and the usual solution, to write to your MP about it, hardly seems appropriate. But we have an election looming, and with that an opportunity. It is true that many of these crooks will not be standing for re-election, but many more, probably hundreds, will. And since these people have no shame, we must shame the public into voting them out. The constituency offices of the worst offenders should be picketed with placards announcing "This man/woman is a thief. Do not vote for a thief." Such an obviously libellous, if it were untrue, statement has the distinct potential to attract media attention and could be disasterous for the MP concerned.

This might be our last chance to bring at least a little retribution down on the heads of the robbers who have for years been filling their pockets and their bellies at our expense. And it could be fun, too!