Brown's artful dodger act

Tiberius

Perhaps you can only maul someone who has some life in him.

Tom

I thought Cameron was poor today. He shoudl have opened up with a aimple, "Can the Prime Minister tell the House why he did not join his counterparts in Lisbon to sign the EU constitution". It wuld have opened an old wound that looks like it is about to heal over.

Jack Bloxam

It was like watching two drunken pantomime floosies arguing over who gets to smoke the last fag in the packet. All barbs went wide. All squibs were moist. It was Widow Twanky and Buttons. Vince Cable. Why isn't he the Lib Dem Leader?

David Lindsay

The next Lib Dem Leader will certainly be English, so if Brown really is replaced with either an unambiguously English caretaker (Straw, Johnson) or an unambiguously English full-blown successor (Balls, one of the Milibands), then it really will be the end of the line for Cameron, whose English public school, Oxbridge degree, marriage into the English baronetage, and safe Tory seat in (these days) the Home Counties are all part and parcel of his being a classic posh Scot complete with one house in London and another in rural Scotland (on the Isle of Jura). Do Alan Johnson and David Davis have adjacent constituencies, as Tony Blair and William Hague had?

Dave Bartlett

@David Lindsay
Why do you think Mr Cameron is a scot? The man was born and raised in England.

Jessica, Warrington

Your bang on Fraser in this post, why do the conservatives let Brown get away with saying all this misleading information and hardly ever challenge the facts he puts out? The tories are not aggressive enough, everything Brown does or says they should be out there on the media proving him wrong or rubbishing his claims. Cameron cant just make a fantastic speech once in a blue moon and then go back to resting on his laurels and expect to win the next election, the conservatives need to be on the front foot discrediting the government at all opportunties like labour did in opposition 1994-1997 under Blair. I also think they should try to learn from the Republicans in America and their election winning strategies.

TGF UKIP

Fraser, you ask "How can Brown lie like this and get away with it?" Well,the answer to that is the same as the one to "why are'nt the Tories well over 20 points ahead in the polls" and it's a very simple answer. This effete lot aren't street fighters. They are so taken with their self-image as a bunch of Pollys, there's no visceral hatred and determination to smash Labour to pieces. Just think if the roles were reversed what Blair, Brown, Mandelson and Campbell and their bunch of streetfighters would have been doing to this Government now and that's the answer to your question. Gloves off, Blair, Brown, Mandelson and Campbell versus Cameron, Osbourne, Vaizey and Hilton - now which side would you prefer to be on?

kirsty

Loved it when Vince came back on Brown about leadership elections. Classic.

Victor, NW Kent

D.L. How odd that you should consider David Cameron to be a Scot yet the Milbands are, you say, full-blown English.

RW

There are only two reasons for PMQs: to refresh the morale of the troops and to get soundbites. Cameron wins on both fronts. As for Brown, you need only look at the faces of his backbenchers and listen to the silence. He's a dead PM walking.

TGF UKIP

Excellent point Jessica and good Lancashire common sense - learn from the Republicans. Old "Turd Blossom" himself, Carl Rove's, probably not doing a lot right now. But perish the thought! He might win them an election but just think what that would do to Dave's standing in the eyes of The Guardian, the Independent and Hampstead Garden Suburb. And Matt would probably faint too!

Jessica

TGF UKIP, I dont necessarily mean copy all the policies of Karl Rove/George W Bush Republicans but to copy their ruthless election winning strategies. After all Bush is a two term governor and two term president, yet is supposedly thick (I dont believe that myself).

STAN

TGF UKIP Bush won two presidential elections with 90% of the American media against him, its about motivating the people and giving them something to vote for or against whichever view you take, not your standing with the liberal elites. The liberal elites do not win you elections!

Nicholas Millman

Jessica: "The tories are not aggressive enough, everything Brown does or says they should be out there on the media proving him wrong or rubbishing his claims." I do agree but it is not entirely fair as we know that most of the mainstream media are in the pockets of New Labour. For many years Labour and New Labour propaganda has been amply aided and abetted by all the "usual suspects". The victim was always truth and is so now. The Tories have a real dilemma; if they attempt to ruthlessly exploit a largely hostile media full of Labour/Left subversives and agents they will be enthusiastically accused of spin; if they just put their trust in non-partisan reporting their message will be (and is) buried every time. So far, a Tory Alistair Campbell (and I use that name with the greatest reservation) is conspicuous by his absence. Maybe with his background in PR David Cameron considers it unnecessary but the Tories need to get far more tough and uncompromising if they want to get their message across. They need to turn decades of Labour/Left media manipulation against them - somehow.

TGF UKIP

Jessica and Stan, I agree with both of you completely. Bush is only "thick" and "appalling" according to the BBC and snobby journalists who deplore any form of racism but somehow can't stand Texans. Bush not only has a degree in History from Yale but is the only President to have an MBA, and that from Harvard. He was and is also clever enough to know that "The liberal elites do not win you elections!" A concept which Beltway Cameron isn't street-smart enough to get to. Bush went out, identified with and won with ordinary Americans while so far as Cameron is concerned, native British C2's in Bolton, Bury or Bradford may as well live on the moon. There is one other analogy worth mentioning while talking about the Bush triumphs (and triumphs against the odds they most emphatically were) and that is Rove's identifying that the key to success would lie with motivating to vote "the missing voters." In US terms they were the committed Christian conservatives and in UK terms their echo is found in what Norman Tebbit rightly bangs on about - the missing 4 million Conservative Party voters from 1992. Most of these didn't switch they simply stopped voting. The Conservative Party stopped speaking to them or for them and more than ever under Cameron why should they vote next time? They don't have a conservative party to vote for, simply another liberal, progressive, politically correct, social democrat party chronically mis-named the Conservative Party.

David Lindsay

Cameron seems to think of HIMSELF as Scot-ish, so to speak, just as Blair did. He has said almost as much on a number of occasions, and he even keeps a house there. I write, I might add, as a half-Scot myself. But if Brown really is replaced with an Englishman, then that will be the end for Cameron: he will be presented, fully successfully, as simply too Scottish, and in that sense a New Labour throwback. Of course, he is in fact a New Labour throwback in EVERY sense, as illustrated by his tactic at yesterday's PMQs , which is now the Tories' strategy of choice in general: "Weren't things so much better under dear old Tony Blair, whom we gave a standing ovation on the floor of the House of Commons, and whose clone is our own Leader, David Cameron?" If you weren't that slavishly pro-Blair, never mind if you weren't pro-Blair at all, then why on earth would you vote Tory? And if you were that slavishly pro-Blair, or even pro-Blair at all, then why on earth would you not vote Tory? Blair himself is certainly going to. Do you wish to keep such company? If so, why?

Jessica

TGF UKIP, we are singing from the same hymm sheet!!

ExPat

@ David Lindsay What makes you think the Milibands are English?

Scots Student

Exactly why does being Scottish make you a "New labour throwback"? Don't be silly. That would make Michael Gove, Liam Fox, Malcolm Rifkind, Andrew Neil, and Fraser here all members of New Labour. Now that would be really silly. Take your puerile meanderings somewhere else.

Bill Odd

Your statement "Brown was taken up about the SNP’s decision to pay Scottish police more (from English subsidy)" is utter tosh! It is not a subsidy, it is paid from Scottish tax payers money and, I suggest, if taxpayers from south of the border are not happy, then they should change their government to one which pursues policies which they apparently want. Unfortunately, that will not happen until 2010 as Macavity Bean will hold on until the bitter end. well, you voted in your masses for this lot, didn't you?