Brown's speech was no game-changer

DM

You may be in a minority amongst Spectator political staff, but take the temperature of the BBC Have a Say message boards and the vast majority of public opinion there is right with you.

Hugh

Do they not call the policies GB has announced dog-whistle items.
Take heart James, perhaps your sceptical attitude will be more in tune with the average overtaxed and overborrowed Voter who is not so committed to this Party that they attend its conferences.

Chuck Unsworth

Fraser,

Dont be so parochial. Just because your fellow inmates believe something it doesn't mean that it is so. You (and certainly they) need to get out a bit more.

As to Brown's speech, I guess it's just me but within thirty seconds of hearing him start to speak I'm no longer able to understand a single word. It's a sort of selective deafness that descends upon me. After fifteen minutes I've practically lost the will to live. What was he talking about today?

I noticed that he brought the stunning Sarah along - was that for cover or for support? And what was all that Presidential-style garbage about getting her to introduce him to the audience? Maybe now he's even forgotten his own name, the poor deluded idiot.

The thing is, are the NuLab loonies actually comfortable with this chap as their leader and figurehead? He's excruciatingly, butt-clenchingly, cringingly, embarrassing to watch.

Carol-Ann

I think Cameron should do a reshuffle and put Ken Clarke in as shadow Chancellor and move Osborne to the shadow home office brief. This will stop the inexperience tag which unfortunately does ring true. Ken Clarke has the experience of leading us out of a recession and into prosperity whereas Brown's only experience is running up a big deficit in a boom.

Polly's mum

When I saw Sarah Brown step up to the microphone, I seriously thought she was going to say something like "I am afraid that my husband is having a nervous breakdown, and there will be no leader's speech today. Thank you for your understanding."
The whole thing was totally cringe-making.

Richard Holloway

I'd say you're spot on. He could have laid out a very different vision and put the pressure on the Tories to perform next week. There is no pressure, only a few sprinkled promises (that will quickly unravel in the coming days - where's he going to find the money to pay for all those prescriptions).
All this has done is buy him a few more months. A year max. By the end we'll hopefully have a thumping Conservative majority

Andy D

I bet Gordon Brown didn't say "It's no time for a novice" when he was in Opposition.

Marin

First thought I had when saw Sarah was that the 'novelty' would actually backfire. Otherwise it seems to me 'The Party' is incapable to understand that people are absolutely fed up with empty words, sloganeering and countless policies and 'initiatives' that do not work in practice and get kicked in the long grass as soon as it looks that their political usefulness had passed.

oldtimer

"No time for a novice" he said.

"No time for a bumbling incompetent" say I.

Bonetired

I don't think that the novice quip hit the mark at all. If the person wh has been in power for 11 years screws up as badly as Brown has done, then give me the novice any time .....

occasional ranter

This economic crisis is no time for a novice..... said Robert Mugabe of Morgan Tsvangirai....

Tiberius

Yes, this novice thing is a bit rich coming from a man whose only experience is derived from wrecking the economy.

I'm sure the Cameroons have a suitable riposte on the way.

Porky Jacqui

Gordon Brown can win the next election? A lipstick-wearing pig has just flown past my office window. But I am intrigued - with everyone on conference duty, who runs the country? Perhaps we could build an oil rig in the North Sea and replicate the House of Commons there so that all our politicians could speechify harmlessly to their hearts content and leave the rest of us alone.

jon dee

Where was the dynamism and vision that the country so badly needs. The BBC and other Labour luvvies are too easily pleased.
Browns speech was totally inadequate.The electorate want big ideas not re-hashed schemes that should have been actioned long ago.If this is all were getting from the voice of experience then its not good enough.

Fraser Allonby

A man stands up in a room in Manchester, outside banks won't lend to each other or the public, the national treasure is spent, the man in the room in Manchester states that bonuses on which 47.7% taxation (including employer NI) and between 17.5-50% duty is paid is deplorable despite of the value it may have created (selling the Spanish BAA?) the man in the room in Manchester gurning like a demented automaton talks about fairness, the people are aghast at an unelected man unfairly governing them, who subsidises the work shy and incompetent with the higher tax rates paid by the productive economy and who dares to lecture them on fairness.

The man in Manchester leads a bunch of lunatics to election defeat after an agonising 18 months.

Prodicus

Yep, a complete waste of time and, er, opportunity. Possibly.

The real trick comes next week, when he'll announce his Cabinet reshuffle at the moment calculated best to draw press attention away from the Tory conference, prolonging his own conference bounce,
if he gets one, and reducing Cameron's. The plan being another round of polls showing his ratings improving. The man plays dirty, knowing no other way, and since he can no longer play the ball (put it down to eye trouble if you like) he will, from now on, play the man. As if that will endear him to the electorate.

Anyway, nothing has changed today. Nothing.

David C

Hmm.
I don't think Brown could have presented a new vision for Britain.
I think that the economic crisis, apart from destroying his room to manouvre has also destroyed his plans.
It seeems to me that the victim of his proud boast 'No more Boom and Bust' was Brown. He believed his own lies and based his vision for NuBritain on them.
At the moment he is in denial.
Listen to him and you can hear nothing has changed. He is saying 'Trust Me and don't trust the Conservatives'. Wasn't it just last week that members of the Cabinet were exasperated by Brown's insistence on attacking the Tories rather than addressing Labour's problems. And was it this time last year that Brown was trailing a General Election with the hope of destroying the Tories once and for all?
Hmm.

Dirty Euro

It was a great speech. He showed self belief, strength, and vision. I liked his "novice line", his line about how a sales man who does not tell you what he is selling is proably selling rubbish, and about how he was so poor when he was growing up he needed the NHS to help him to see. That is story the compares well to the story of multi millionaires of the tory front bench, who the ordinary joes smoes will struggle to take seriously as knowing what it is like to struggle economically or to see that often the state is needed to help even the middle classes in tough times. :

John

"This speech should have set out a new economic vision and argued that he was the only man to deliver it"

Since we know, everyone knows, that this is a stupid lie, what's the point of even worrying about it?

The man is a useless ass. As to novices ... he took over the Treasury as a novice, and made a complete dog's dinner of our economy for a decade. The country knows it, and he is going down ... going down ... to Hades, if I had my way.

John

Conference bounce? Maybe with ZanuLab lunatics. As far as sane people are concerned, every time this idiot opens his mouth he just looks even stupider.

Edward McLaughlin

No No Mr Grimsdale

John

Dirty Euro needs someone to wake him up from his hallucinations.

John de Finchley

Why are all Labouroids so f*cking ugly?

They are the Ugly Party.

Dirty Euro

John I see the reality you see the lies and the secret does. :

Frank Pulley

Is that a picture of the subject of our derision, or a reproduction of Edvard Munch's "Scream"?

The Cat Anand

I just read this over on Guido: "Hmmm. Thought it was a nice touch that Sarah introduced him. It was also nice that he shook her hand after the speech. Like loving husbands do."

He shook his wife's hand? Is this true? Oh, please - let it be true!