The thing about Gordon Brown is that he is very able. He is very competent. He works very hard. He’s probably decent and upstanding and reliable. He’s good with figures. He’s good at securing the loyalty of those in his debt. Unfortunately, none of these come close to being qualities anyone would want in the leader of a nation.
Because, and bear with me, say what you like about Blair or Thatcher but you’ve got to admit they had style. They had drama. Remember Blair’s wounded, arrow pierced eyes when people started to gang up on him about the wars? Remember ‘A new dawn has broken, has it not?’ The IRA blew Margaret Thatcher up and she was still back at the podium being evil within 6 hours. Even John Major had a pinteresque tragedy about him – a ghost of greyish ectoplasm drifting folornly through the swamp of bastards. These were leaders fit for purpose. Fit to be caricatured, fit to be impersonated, fit – even – to be hated, as is our right and need.
But not Gordon Brown. You can’t really hate him. It’d be like hating a middle aged tramp wafting a barely perceptible trace of sour milk through the newspaper section of a public library. You don’t want him there, no one wants him there, but you feel bad because it’s cold outside and doesn’t he deserve this small mercy? so you just tolerate his presence because that is what libraries have always been like. It’s uncomfortable. You don’t know where to look. Eventually you just leave.
He doesn’t seem like a bad man, he doesn’t seem good, he just seems to have no idea what people are like. Of course the British say that they believe in hard work and quiet dignity, but they don’t really mean it – they want to be told they’re working hard so they’ve got something to complain about while skiving or taking their pants off in the street. Gordon Brown though, he really believes that hard work and quiet dignity are good things and his public face is perpetually misjudged as a result. He doesn’t get it. He can’t lead. He is the Peter Principle embodied – a man promoted to the level of his own incompetence. It’s just crushing and awful, like a council terrace cul-de- sacced at both ends.
There are things to actively dislike, of course. The problem he seems to have with women, the sense that he is reacting to events rather than shaping them, the contempt for democracy that manifests itself as his appearing to treat the will of the people as little more than a minor variable in the broader calculations of policy and politics. But, whereas with Blair you could always just shout in his face, with Brown you’re just, like, well… it’s not his fault he smells of sour milk and he has worked very hard…
He’s emblematic of noughties Britain. It was a decade of squandered promise. Our lovely, shiny, exciting Labour government all spoiled and gone rubbish like our lovely, exciting future all broken and gone depressing. And, just to relieve the tension, we’re now going to elect the Tories again, because we really are that stupid.
Gordon’s right, we are a minor variable and an utterly predictable one at that.
Watch this, it’ll cheer you up, then make you sad again later:
www.weebls-stuff.com/toons/Gordon/
