In 1973 or thereabouts Margaret Thatcher appeared on a programme with lots of children, who put questions to her. Gordon Brown has repeated the experience in a programme which will be shown tomorrow night on Channel 5 at 7.15pm. Sky has just broadcast an excerpt. He admitted he has cried over the health of his son Fraser, his favourite singer is Leona, that Churchill and Lloyd George are Britain's two greatest Prime Ministers and that he will talk to the FA about girls being allowed to play football with boys.
Actually, from the excerpt that was shown he put in a rather good performance. Doing a programme like that is full of risks with few rewards. To come out of it unscathed is a major victory. I suppose my only questions is: why on earth did he do it in the first place? Are is advisers really so desparate to show his human side that they put him in situations where he could easily fail? Whatever the reason, it's to his credit that he didn't.
And I think that is the first time I have said anything nice about Gordon Brown on this blog!
46 comments:
Iain - is there any truth that your recent defection stories actually refer to your imminent switch to Labour and a key role in a Number 10 under Gordon Brown. This story seems to confirm this.
Quite amazing. Do politicians think voters are taken in when they appear with children or discuss whether Arctic Monkeys are on their iPods? I suspect they don't care one way or the other. Brown, whenever and whoever he pops up with, seems to be appearing by kind permission of the Forestry Commission.
Do you think one of the children will ask him what this country should do about that tin-pot regime in Asia Minor called Iran?
What about a game of hide and seek involving weapons of mass destruction.
Or get Madge Beckett in for a game of "pin the tail on the donkey"?
So much fun to be had.
MAC
Jeremy, never mind about asking about a tin-pot regime in Asia Minor - what about the one being run from No.10 next door?
MAC
Whenever I see pictures of politicians posing with children my mind always goes to that film of Hitler affectionately patting young lads on the cheek before sending them out to stand in front of a Russian tank.
If Brown kissed all the babies heads in the UK and answered deeply personal questions about the sad death of his 1st son and his 2nd son's illness as nauseum, it will still be a spin-doctors attempt to make him look more human.
It is the same as trying to make Tony Blair look honest.....
"Are (h)is advisers really so desparate to show his human side that they put him in situations where he could easily fail?"
Yes, they are. Looks like he's come out ok on this one, but I expect people will figure out why he's doing it and not be duped.
He has recently started trying to do "a smile" during interviews which looks as forced as Arnies T-100 in Terminator 2.
He won't be able to turn his image around.
Part of a transcript of the classroom encounter -
Well, class..I have a little joke for you: What's the difference between brussels sprouts and bogies?
I won't eat brussels sprouts!!
Now then, who wants to run their fingers through my greasy, nit-filled hair?
"And I think that is the first time I have said anything nice about Gordon Brown on this blog!"
Make it the last or I may stop reading your blog!
The cyclopean has been a /shite/ chancellor, he might be okay at math but has the economic grasp of a 10 year old, he never realises the human ramifications of his policies, he is the very definition of the C word you will not let me use here.
'Now then, who wants to run their fingers through my greasy, nit-filled hair? '
Actually you'll only find nits in clean hair, so I expect that Brown will not suffer a visit from Nitty Nora.
The pantomine season has passed but clearly the rocking horse jockey wants to play one of the lead parts in Little Red Riding Hood. Don't he look like a wolf?
Churchill and Lloyd George??? Call me naive, but speaking asa member of the Labour Party I would have thought Brown would have had a smidge of time for Attlee.
I will not be watching this guff.Sounds like nauseating spin.
PS:As a young man,Gordon's hero was socialist firebrand James Maxton. Daresay he's off the list too.
What about this story, Iain?
Back to the bad old days of Tory sleaze.
Cameron condemned for shameful abuse of power
So in one day he has been punished for breaking Parliamentary procedure and punished for contravening planning laws?
Some might say this is an appalling lack of judgement, but I like it, it shows his 'devil may care' pot-smoking, rebellious attitude. He's a loose cannon, a maverick... oh I can't go on, he's a dead fish. He is though, isn't he. Even his sleaze is boring.
Oops... that was a response to Xerxes about David Cameron.
I wasn't suggesting Gordon B smokes pot. Though it might not be a terrible idea...
If Gordon wants to be useful, maybe he should go and tell Tony to pull his finger out and go get our sailors in Iran freed, rather then messing about with school children on tv...What would Maggie be doing if she were in charge???? Im sure the SAS would have been sent in by now, and we would have made our position known to them, maybe a nice measured response like a couple of missiles directed at the Naval Headquarters in Tehran...
When is our wonderful leader tony going to stop being a fool and act, and when are morons like Brown going to earn their money and stand up to bliar...
Anyone wish Spitting Image was back????? I feel a chorus of 'Go Now' coming on....
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6506989.stm
I hope you condemn Cameron for this, Iain, after your prissy protests about Stephen Timms' breakfast club.
Perhaps a stern reprimand from you will put him right, or maybe somehow you can blame this on Labour - yeah, that's what you'll do.
xeres says
I agree thats bad, much worse tahn allowing torture flights into teh country and then lying to parliament about......people like you are destined to stay on welfare for a long time
DK I don't think most of the comments here relate to GB's political abilities. The authors just think he's horrid.
Being nice to Gordy, Iain? whatever next, smile or grimace to the Tessa Jowell. I just think that he is going to make as terrible job of pm as his predecessor.It's a real pity!!
PS Iain: how did Mr. Prosser vote on the new Cash for nowt bill???
Maybe Brown was teaching them about nasal etiquette.
does anyone else think that Guido has been really dull for the last few months?
i think he's losing it
Lloyd George, the man who generated the law that Labour might have broken.
1. Brown has been an MP since 1983, he damn well ought to be able to cope with a class of 10yr olds, for heavens' sake.
2. Sooner rather than later, the true state of this country's economy will be revealed, and it will be dreadful. We are living in an ocean of Govt debt, fuelled by abject incompetence in almost every Dept of State and the appalling burden of public service inflation-proof pensions that will lour over our children and grandchildren.
I wonder if the TV programme shows the Chancellor telling the kids how much his tax-and-spend programme is going to cost them once they start work?
I see you're on page 19 of The Standard today Iain. Diddn't know you had a wife.
Anonymous 3: PM said
he might be okay at math but has the economic grasp of a 10 year old, he never realises the human ramifications of his policies
Steady on, anon. I doubt that the Gorgon could calculate even a simple sum. He doesn't really number crunch or sweat over any of the figures he spews out at such intentionally, comprehension defying, speed on budget day. We pay legions of cybernautic apparatchiks to do that for him.
Gorgon's job simply consists of swilling vintage whiskey and yelling, "MAKE ME MORE MONEY, SASSENACH SLAVES". Then the little tin apparatchiks do the all the work and and stick a new tape of their results in the voice recorder behind Mr Broon's left ear.
How cruel. I wish I had his money... but he can keep the wife...
David - "nasal etiquette". Funny!
John - agreed. But no one can keep that level of iconoclasm up month after month. Also, the commenters are bringing the interest level down. They're vulgar, abusive, juvenile and grudge-filled. Who would want to trawl through all that sludge to get to one interesting, genuinely amusing or illuminating comment?
Mrs T was on "Val meets the VIPs" with Valerie Singleton - wonder what she is doing these days?
GB's past predilection for the likes of Jimmy Maxon proves nothing, except perhaps the old saying about being a socialist at twenty because you have a heart, and a capitalist by the time you're forty because you've got a head.
And describing his tenure as Chancellor in terms of "Sooner rather than later, the true state of this country's economy will be revealed, and it will be dreadful." (--Judith) is to fly directly in face of the evidence: love him or hate him, love what he's done to the country over the last ten years or hate it, there is no getting away from it: we have been experiencing the longest period of sustained economic growth for centuries.
To attack GB on the economy will only serve to remind voters of Black Wednesday (c/w walk-on part for DC) The more we Tories try to attack Labour/GB's economic record the more it will strengthen Labour & weaken the Tories.
Never underestimate your enemy.
As David Kendrick put it... "The tories who are so keen to knock GB, and lower peoples' expectations of him, are making it easy for him. GB will easily exceed these low expectations."
DK I'm sure you are right. It's very easy to get addicted to commenting, even in a very minor way. When I think about it, the abuse (be it crude or clever), is much like the comments in the pub at the end of the evening. The trouble is, its such fun!
Did Gordon manage to keep his finger from straying to his nose throughout the programme?
As China is creating a communist version of capitalism, Brown is attempting to construct a capitalist version of communism, so I have nothing nice to say about the man.
Iain Dale said... How cruel. I wish I had his money... but he can keep the wife...
Perhaps you wouldn't enjoy it if you had it, Iain. Locked away in his bunker, practicing putting on his slap, torn apart by self recrimination, intrigue and distrust. His integrity and sense of himself shot to pieces and fragmenting.
What a huge personal price he's paid for his money and his puny, short lived dictatorship over the people of England. Who is Broon anyway? Does he know? I doubt it. Perhaps he was always the real PM and Blair was only ever Broon's smiley faced puppet. Nope, rather be poor than live their phoney existence.
Auntie Flo'
2br02b: If there has been economic growth, it has been despite Brown not because of him. A favourable legacy (and sticking to Tory policies for the first 2 yrs), a favourable world economy, and taxing and borrowing on a hitherto unknown scale.
Has he been lucky? yes.
Has he been clever? no - but he won't really suffer, we and our children will.
Anyway, I think the wretches have had all the English sparrows killed. B****dy B*****ds
Auntie Flo'
Brown strikes me as the kind of man who makes his undies last at least 4 days , back to front and inside out , maybe even longer if he throws some talc down them every morning.
I can also see him scrubbing off skid marks with a nail brush and drying his y fronts over a hotel radiator during a G8 summit
The tax rate rise for small firms was needed to counter East European scams, Chancellor Gordon Brown has said.
Mr Brown has claimed that East European workers were being encouraged to register themselves as companies to avoid paying income tax when they arrived in the UK.
..."we are going to deal with in a way that does not penalise the good company that is investing in the future". (BBC News online)
Is Brown suggesting here that all SMEs are not good companies investing in the future so all SMEs deserve punitive tax rates whereas all large corporations are? If so, how dare he make such slanderous allegations which he knows to be untrue!
The vast majority of UK's 4.4 million SMEs - 99& over UK's business, Mr Brown, employing almost 60% of staff and contributing over 50% of our GDP - are good, ethical companies.
SME's staff and employers work damn hard to compete with the unfair advantages given to giant corps by brown and nulab. Such advantages include allowing nulab's giant corporate donors to acquire such huge market dominance that they can squeeze the lifeblood out of the small supplier companies with their sheer size and buying power.
Before nulab came to power we had a monopolies commission which stopped the giants exceeding c 25% share of their markets. Now corporations who's directors make huge donations to nulab are given jobs in government and govt committees and allowed to stack up massively damaging 30% - 40% market shares - and the new monopolies 'watchdog' takes no action.
That's simply wrong, Mr Brown and you know it. Please explain why you allow it to happen.
Mr Brown has also claimed that East European workers were being encouraged to register themselves as companies to avoid paying income tax when they arrived in the UK. (BBC News online)
Explain then, Mr Brown, why my company received numerous work applications from Eastern Europeans who had set up companies or gained self employed status after their arrival here(often within weeks) and who's companies had been given official recognition by Inland Revenue - prior to the assession of their countries to the EU.
We thought that the official cards presented had to be scams as some of the the business people concerned had only been in UK for a few weeks and many could barely speak English. There was no way that many of these people could run businesses here with little or no grasp of our language and many applied for work as labourers because that's all they'd ever done. Yet when we checked these out with Inland Revenue we were told that they were genuine.
I asked one Eastern European who spoke good English how he'd managed to establish his company so quickly. He told me that the local Job shop had helped him to do this.
Awwww! Bless' em. The way their excited little faces just lit up when the cameras turned on them.
The chidlren seemed quite happy too.
"does anyone else think that Guido has been really dull for the last few months?"
Nope, certainly not. Several scalps, PM's shortly to come. Back in your box, mong.
Now listen up!! All this political conspiracy stuff and trying to appear human is utterly ridiculous. All The Chancellor was doing was simply seeking a peer review of his budget proposals. Now what could be simpler than that?
I bet those ten-year-olds could do better job of running the country than Gordon Stalin.
They're taking DNA
And fingerprinting children
Broon and Hoonio
Down by the school yard
Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh.
The mama pyjama rolled out of bed
And she ran to the police station
When the papa found out he began to shout
And he started the investigation
It was against the law
What the mama saw
It was against the law.
The mama looked down and spit on the ground
Every time Blair-Broon's's name's mentioned
The papa said oy if I get that boy
I'm gonna stick him in the house of detention
They're taking DNA
And fingerprinting children
Broon and Hoonio
Down by the school yard
Kids and teachers
Down by Scotland yard
Apologies to Paul Simon
Auntie Flo'
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