Oh dear. You've really got to feel sorry for Gordon Brown. Another week's PMQs, another trouncing. Cameron's attack this week at first appeared a bit scattergun, but in the end proved to be very effective, as he drew out various issues on which the Prime Minister had promised to listen, but then failed to. His final attack was corruscating in its vehemence and really seemed to hit home. The lack of cheers from the Labour benches for Gordon Brown told its own story.
Interestingly, both David Cameron and Nick Clegg alluded to Charles Clarke's "helpful" remarks.
Anyway, my marks: Cameron 8, Brown 6, Clegg 7.
UPDATE: I've just done a 10 minute interview with Steve Richards of The Independent on College Green post PMQs. His analysis is devastating for Brown. Bascially he thinks he's more or less had it. I'll upload the video during the afternoon.
42 comments:
Naturally you're wrong Iain. But since when has 8-6 been a "trouncing"? 4-1 is what I call a trouncing. Meanwhile Tractor Production is Best Ever.
Iain,
Boring waste of time. Brown isn't up to the job. Clegg improves.
PS More like 666 I'd have thought ....
Feel sorry for Gordon Brown?
Why?
Does he feel sorry for any of the things he has done in the past eleven years which have slowly screwed over the British people?
Does he feel sorry for the tax hikes, the ruined economy, the pension raid, the lies, the deceit or the destruction of the constitution or selling us irrevocably down the river on Europe?
Does he feel sorry for the service men killed through the lies and ineptitude of the Labour government?
Does he feel sorry for anything?
No - the only person he feels sorry for is himself!
The "sleeper" in PMQs and one that will come back to haunt Brown is Wendy Alexander's assertion that she and the Scottish Labour Party is happy for a referendum to be held on Scottish Independence whilst the British Cabinet(comprising of a majority of Scots including a Scottish PM) is saying she didn't say that and that Westminster has the ultimate authority under the "reserve powers" to make the final decision on the future of the Constitution and Scottish Independence anyway.
Another "Dog's Breakfast" and another ticking time bomb for Brown and the Scots Cabal who rule at Westminster
Would agree with your scores; but the second half of PMQs was so boring today.
There seems to be some meat in the Bendy Wendy break up the Union story...and Gordon's involvement.
I am sure Alex Salmond will NOT fail to exploit it.
The most pleasing thing is the, rather than listening, Brown remains in complete denial and trots out the same misleading statistics and claims that nobody believes, as if Thursday 1st May 2008 never happened in fact.
Clarke is making a bid for your top ten traitors list?
Wrong. A man who wanted an election now, as Cameron should, would have been quite ruthless in kicking a man without a leg to stand on.
Instead he went for laughs.
Although for the good of the country (never mind the party), Brown must go now, Cameron does not convince with this performance that he is serious.
Iain - I think you're being too kind. Cameron 8, Brown 2, Clegg 5.
I still think Clegg has to stop looking so petulant. There's a difference between looking angry and determined and looking like you want to have a sulk.
Ed Milliband looked like a rabbit caught in the headlights - just about remebering he was supposed to nod his head in approval - sometimes.
DC understood this was not about pleasing the crowd - but sowing doubt on the Labour benches. He succeeded.
Nick Clegg tried to sound cross about his 10p question not being answered - but can't quite fake the outrage ( which is odd considering that's a core Lib Dem competence ).
Cameron 8 Brown 2 Clegg 4
Brown is out of touch, he hasn't got a clue what the price of petrol or the price of a barrel of oil is these days!
Cameron's too lightweight - he needs to get some grasp on the Tractor Production statlies and nail a few - visiously.
And in shock news, Chris Paul comes out to defend whoever is leading Labour this week. If Gordon Brown told you to jump off a cliff, would you do it?
Most boring PMQs ever.
Send the man a hearing aid, or an appointment time at the local multiplex hospital to look into the possibility of a hearing aid in 6 - 8 months.
While he's there he can listen to people telling him this multi regional hospital is another innovation they told him they did not want.
I think the real reason she just reclassified cannabis is to try and stop PM Bean smoking so much of it.
Clegg does consistently look and sound like a sixth-former.
Hope you asked Steve Richards how he feels about the entire electorate in London 'fail[ing his] test' of whether they were intelligent enough to re-elect Ken.
I think DC did really well. What he can take to Britain is the Bendy Wendy chaos. He stirred up the PLP with ref to Charles Clarke, and he can take early release of prisoners and closing post offices to Crewe. All we got from GB was tractor production.
Clegg’s approach to pmq’s is ask a question, and then pretend to be angry with the follow up.
Simon Hoggart
Thursday December 6, 2007
The Guardian
"The Tories never liked Tony Blair, except in secret. They yelled at him, they resented his electoral success, they thought he was a charlatan, and they were outraged by his endless lists of non-existent triumphs. But they rarely laughed at him. They laugh at Gordon Brown. Sometimes the house is like a medieval village green where cruel boys throw insults and fruit at the local idiot, who shouts back and waves his arms like a broken windmill."
Iain,
As with all PMQs it depends how they are reported in the news bulletins. As Cameron didn't go in for the kill then Brown may look better in them than you think.
The Wendy Alexander business should prove interesting and damaging for Labour.
SIX point for Brown, are you off your head, what exactly did he say that was worth a single point? All I heard were the usual tractor production figures.
Does Brown seriously not know its PRIME MINISTERS QUESTIONS - meaning the questions are asked OF HIM not BY HIM.
Lack of Labour applause for Brown suggests he is royally shafted.
The only question is will he resign after Labours worst election defeat ever in June 2010, or will the men in white coats come for him before then??
Oh and he still doesn't know the difference between investment and spending. A bit of an oversight for such a 'serious' politician, such an economic 'giant'...
Zorro.
I would feel sorry for him if I didn't hate him so very very much. Frankly there's nothing that could physically happen to him that's bad enough. DK's sharpened cockroaches are too kind.
If only David Cameron wasn't so anti-England/English. He's every bit as bad as Brown. Except Brown doesn't masquerade as "English" then start churning out anti-English bile like "Sour Little Englanders" and banging on about "Scots blood" in his veins and the "Scottish Empire".
Cameron does.
The Conservatives will never be an honourable alternative whilst they back things like health apartheid because the so-called "Union" is apparently paramount.
British Politics smells absolutely rancid - and David Cameron is one of the main reasons.
Don't get me wrong, I can't abide Brown and NuLab - but don't expect me to start fawning all over Cameron either.
Could someone please enlighten me...
Brown's tractor production figures always include "record numbers in employment". Since there are now record numbers living in the UK, this reeks of stating the bleedin' obvious. Has anyone crunched the numbers?
Similarly, while he talks about low unemployment, the number of "economically inactive" has risen to 8 million or so. Surely that is a more meaningful figure?
The remainder of his boasts are mostly about how much of my money he has pis... sorry, invested in public "services".
Does anyone actually give a toss about this "Sour Little Englander" business, except the people who post this all over various forums, with the only result being they make themselves look just that?
ps as soon as anybody makes a point of saying they are "no supporter of .... " you can usually take it as read that that's exactly what they are.
Chris Paul. I have recently taken to avidly reading your comments and your blog.
I have, on the basis of the evidence presented to me, concluded you are a deluded fool.
Carry on dearheart!
Well said Chris Abbott and Paul D!
Alan said:
I still think Clegg has to stop looking so petulant. There's a difference between looking angry and determined and looking like you want to have a sulk.
Very true. However, Cleggesterone is a full blooded European aristocrat,so petulance is second nature to him...likewise legovers, rootlessness and indecision.
His biog describes him as an:
Aristocratic public schoolboy
Son of a banker
Stduent of the meaningless political philosphy of the Greens at uni
And one who briefly Tried his hand at:
ski bum
journalism
drag queen
embarrassingly bad author
lecturer
MEP
MP
Party leader
How long before he cocks up again and is off to pastures new, I wonder?
As Alastair Campbell told News 24 afterwards, after big embarrassments like the elections, it's always anticipated that the PM will be absolutely torn to shreds, and he always isn't. Fairly standard stuff. Brown wasn't that bad.
And Iain, how did you manage to deliver this verdict a few minutes before Brown had even finished giving Clegg his final answer? (itself barely a third of the way through PMQs)
The biog I mentioned was a BBC one, by the way:
With his Dutch and Russian heritage, and more than a decade working in Brussels, Mr Clegg is probably the most Eurocentric of Britain's party leaders.
An accomplished skier, who reputedly speaks five languages, he is married to a leading commercial lawyer, Miriam Gonzalez Durantez, a former Middle East expert at the foreign office, whose father was a conservative senator in the Spanish parliament. The couple, who met while studying at the College of Europe in Bruges, live in South London have two young sons.
Mr Clegg's father, a banker, is half Russian and his aristocratic grandmother fled St Petersburg after the tsar was ousted.
His mother, Hermance van den Wall Bake, a special needs teacher, is Dutch and arrived in Britain, aged 12, after being incarcerated in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in Indonesia...
TV presenter Louis Theroux and his novelist brother Marcel are friends - he once took a road trip across America with the pair, during which, to the amusement of the brothers, he frequently practised transcendental meditation. He once acted opposite a teenage Helena Bonham-Carter in a university play about Aids.
Mr Clegg was educated at Westminster school, one of the country's top public schools. Friends recall a "spotty" but self-confident teenager with a keen sense of fun, who sought out the limelight in school plays.
The one blot in his copybook came when, as a 16-year-old exchange student in Munich, he and a friend were arrested for setting fire to a collection of rare cacti belonging to a professor...He was given community service and had to spend the summer digging gardens.
After studying anthropology at Cambridge, he briefly became, in his own words, a "ski bum" and tried to write a novel, which he later described as "embarrassingly bad".
He won a postgraduate scholarship to the University of Minnesota where he studied the political philosophy of green campaigners.
He tried his hand at journalism, as an intern in New York on left-wing magazine The Nation. He took full advantage of New York's nightlife - in one picture from the period he appears in drag with friend Marcel Theroux at a party with, in Marcel's words, his "fashionista" friends.
After a spell in Hungary, where he was sent as the first winner of the Financial Times David Thomas Prize, he went to work for European Commissioner Leon Brittan, in Brussels...He managed aid projects in the poorest parts of Russia and led the EU's negotiations on China and Russia's entry into the World Trade Organisation.
A brief spell as a lecturer at Sheffield University followed before he became a Liberal Democrat MEP in 1999.
his image as an unflappable performer took a knock during televised debates, appearing angry and flustered when accused by Mr Huhne of "flip-flopping" on policy.
http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:YAZOOe0-fkYJ:news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7046587.stm+Clegg+lib+dem+grandmother&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=uk
So many 'brief spells'
The Rt Hon David Cameron (Conservative, Witney) 'Her Britannic Majesty's Reserve Prime Minister' should reel off some real Stats to counter that awful man (the sort-of prime minister) and his projected pig iron production figures.
Just put it in Pravda Mr Brown, nobody is listening.
Cameron would at least read out the stats with a certain joie de vivre.
The PLP desperately need a knife for the PM's back. I'm sure the Conservatives still have that lovely set with the bone handles.
They could ask the LibDems but theirs are blunted from excessive use.
Blogger times a blogpost from the time you open a document ot create a post, not when you actually post it. It is a bit of a weakness in the system.
"You've really got to feel sorry for Gordon Brown"
NO YOU FCUKING WELL DON'T! All he's managed to do is shaft this country and it's citizens more so than at any time in living memory. It's made me feel dirty just typing this!
What I thought was interesting was the Scottish perspective - specifically that the main beneficiaries of Cameron laying into Broon (and by implication, dear Wendy) are the SNP.
Funny that.
Did anyone notice how utterly, utterly miserable Alastair darling looked throughout PMQs today? mouth downturned, eyebrows like thunderstorms over the Southern Ocean - an expression that demonstrated beyond argument that he would rather be somewhere, nay anywhere, else that sitting beside McBroon while the latter trotted out his autistic answers.
Someone's for the chop in the reshuffle. Darling - or McBroon???
PaulD said...
Could someone please enlighten me...Brown's tractor production figures always include "record numbers in employment". Since there are now record numbers living in the UK, this reeks of stating the bleedin' obvious. Has anyone crunched the numbers?
Delving into the maze of statistics on the ONS website, I calculate that between mid-1997 and mid-2007:
- the number of people in employment increased by 10%.
- the general population increased by 2.7%.
Therefore, the number of jobs created in that 10-year period greatly exceeds the the increase in population.
Brown is right that there are now record numbers of people in employment but a more interesting statistic, which never seems to get mentioned by the politicians is the Working Age Employment Rate.
Looking at the last 50 years:
- the Working Age Employment Rate was highest in 1974 at 76%;
- it fell to 68% in 1983;
- it has now struggled up to 75%.
The Government's target is 80%.
Video with Richards stop after about 14 secs. Is there a problem?
Does not work on the Friction web site either.
Great interview with Steve Richards. Like it!
Gordon Brown is up right now:
Once upon a Midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quant and curious volume of forgotten lore-
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping on my chamber door.
"'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door-
Only this and nothing more"
.......
Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,
In there stepped astately Raven of the saintly days of yore.
Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he,
But, with mein of lord or lady, perched upon my chamber door-
Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door-
Perched, and sat, and nothing more.
etc etc..
Only for "Lenore" read Tony Blair
Get James Earl Jones (Darth Vader) to narrate (as in the Simpsons )
and you have the first 10 minutes of this week's Headcases (ITV Sunday at 10pm).
"Gordon Brown. Another week's PMQs, another trouncing."
Seeing what you wanted to see I'm afraid.
GB was actually quite good this week. Far less inability to formulate proper sentences; far more relaxed and in command of his brief. For the first he was quite Prime Ministerial.
Of course, he has been rubbish as PM. When Tony Blair became PM he had already faced leadership issues having had difficult periods as Leader of the Labour Party. It is possible that GB has now gone through a very difficult time and emerged personally much stronger. You tories had better hope not.
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