After yesterday’s disastrous Nantwich by-election defeat for Gordon Brown by David Cameron’s resurgent, re-branded, made-over, moisturised Tories, which came hard on the heels of the drubbing the Brown One received a few weeks ago in the English local council elections, the media – and a substantial part of the Labour Party itself – is now baying for his head.
I hate to say I told you so.
But I told you so.
Twenty months ago, in the dying days of Tony’s Premiership, when the media was getting all excited about Leader-in-Waiting Brown and giving rave reviews to his dreadful speech to the 2006 Labour Party Conference – and dissing Cameron – I predicted that His Brown-ness couldn’t win the next election:
The delivery of his speech yesterday was full of visual proof of this. I have no idea what Brown is like in the flesh, but on telly – i.e. the real world – Brown looks like a loser. Dead, hooded eyes which offer no contact with the audience or the camera, choreographed but strangely ill-timed, clawing hand movements and weird goldfish-like gulps at the end of each line. After nine years of Tony’s glamorous drag queen charisma, he looks like a particularly deluded punter auditioning for X-Factor while Simon Cowell pulls faces.
Brown may well, as he says, ‘relish’ the opportunity to ‘take on Cameron’, but Cameron looks increasingly likely to simply sweep him aside. After a couple of years of Brown-ness the electorate will stampede to elect the smooth, moisturised, green-ish manipulator Cameron, someone who knows exactly what we want to hear and how to coo those sweet nothings in our ears. By then he’ll be seen as Tony Blair without Iraq. Tony Blair without the TUC. Tony Blair without the haggard face.
Tony Blair without Gordon Brown.
Of course, Brown has been rather unlucky of late. But then, politicians are supposed to make their own luck. Or at least tell us stories we want to hear – and want to believe. Brown has proved singularly, catastrophically unable to do this. And it was staggeringly, appallingly obvious all along. True, things could perk up for Brown before the General Election in a year or so.
But I don’t think it very likely. Do you?