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.)