Iain Dale, interviewing The Times's Matthew Parris for next month's
Total Politics magazine...
Iain Dale
Didn’t you feel having read the Campbell book “how on earth did the rest of the Cabinet allow this man [Gordon Brown] to become prime minister”? The whole book is a catalogue of incidents that show him to be demonic in some ways and totally irrational.
Matthew Parris
When you’ve finished Peter Mandelson’s diaries, you’ll feel that three times over. From Peter Mandelson’s diaries, an even more weird character emerges. It isn’t just the demonic nature of Gordon Brown. It isn’t just the fact that he was impossible to deal with, the rages and the refusals to listen to the truth and accept bad news and all the rest. Some very great men and women have had those traits.
It was that in the end he had nothing to say. There was no treasure trove of new political ideas. The cupboard of his philosophical mind was completely bare and anyone who had followed him as I had, and the things he had said and written and listened to him answering questions would have realised that from the start.
No real surprises here, but why didn't the Labour Party realise any of this and
do something about it at the time?
Iain Dale, interviewing The Times's Matthew Parris for next month's Total Politics magazine...
Good question, Charles Clarke even explicitly warned them before Brown became PM.
ReplyDeleteI can only guess that they were too scared of Brown's notorious bullying tactics and that he exploited Labour's traditional loyalty trait.
Either way, we as a country, will be paying the price for years to come.
Yes, Clarke did, even though his only real interest there was the Labour Party and not the country.
ReplyDeleteWe shall indeed be paying the price for many years; and predictably enough the Left-leaning parts of the media are trying to twist the narrative to blame the Coalition (especially targeting the Lib Dems) for what now needs to happen, and is starting to be implemented.
As Paul Goodman, Jonathon Isaby and others are doing, we too need to continually remind the people of this nation just who it was who put us in this position.
Fortunately we have history on our side: this isn't the first time it has happened, though probably never as severely as on this occasion.