Brown's feeble fight-back

Brown has just been on the BBC (“speaking from a school gymnasium”) defending himself. People, he says, will judge him on what he did on terrorism, foot and mouth and the Northern Rock crisis. And PS, it took “tough decisions” to produce the economic growth of the last decade.

Let us set aside the fact that voters judge politicians on any criteria they like. But what did Mr Brown do on terrorism? Responded the next day in a hypnotically dull Marr interview and have his Home Secretary downgrade this to a “crime”. On foot-and-mouth? He messed it up, hence a new wave of outbreaks. And Northern Rock? It was a fiasco: in a global credit crunch, only Britain suffered run on a bank. Finally he does not run the British economy, he just taxes it. And judging by our economic growth (ranked a pathetic 19th of 31 OECD countries from 97-07) he taxes it too much.

All weekend, I’ve been thinking about Matthew Parris’s column in the current edition of the Speccie. It’s one of those rare pieces that makes you think of everything differently. Political success is psychological, he says: Cameron’s speeches are judged to be good because we like him, and the latter point is more important. In the same way, Brown’s crisis handling was judged good not because he did anything heroic or remarkable but because it was his honeymoon and folk had an open mind and were still pleased Blair had gone. If I were Brown, I wouldn’t remind people of this.