Brown's back – and doing a Hillary
Fraser Nelson 9:49amDon’t mention the relaunch! That will be the motto today as Gordon Brown embarks on his, ahem, new year initiative kicking off with a big speech on health . Cameron is ahead of him: he made his health speech last week. Also Brown is off to India and China later this month (or so they say; Brits are the last to be told about their PM’s plans), where Cameron and Osborne made their visit last month.
Anyway, here are a few thoughts on Brown’s 8.10am Today interview.
1) Health Personalisation of NHS service, he said, will provide the “doctor you want, time you want, hospital you want”. More than 25 years after Thatcher said almost exactly the same (video clip here), the idea is still a dream for most Brits.
2) The agenda He almost jumped down the microphone to announce to the nation the “big choices we may this year” – apparently transport, energy security, housing, “education to 18”. He’s long understood that the party that sets the framework wins the arguments. This is what he wants to make the issues – but I suspect fate may have other ideas. As Nick Robinson later put it, all this is “not a natural recipe for political recovery”.
3) Northern Wreck Can we detect a little history rewriting re Northern Rock? “People saw that was happening in Germany and America and were worried”. Hardly. Only Britain turned the drama of the credit crunch into the crisis of a run on the banks. Nobody saw this happening in any other country in the world. And other countries looked on at this pantomime with incredulity.
4) Whose Money? He says “government assets are secured” in Northern Rock. Can someone please take him aside and quietly explain that the government doesn’t have any assets. This is taxpayers’ money which he’s gambled on this disaster of a bank – and some £60bn of it at that. And no, he can’t promise its safe return. Had he done the Lloyds deal when he had the chance, none of this cash would be at risk.
5) Home losses Brown estimates 2m people may lose their homes in America. I wonder, with 1.4m Brits renegotiating their mortgages this year, how many of these he estimates will lose their homes here?
One final point, that I made in my News of the World column yesterday (and Nick also mentioned after the interview). Brown is using the Hillary Clinton strategy – positioning himself as the experienced candidate in an uncertain world of spluttering economic growth, war on terror etc. Brown and Hillary both insist they are the change candidate. But as we saw in Iowa, this cuts no ice with Americans. They are in the mood to take a risk. A mood which may make its way over the Atlantic. Hillary's problem is a desire for Americans, to break the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton presidential cycle. And maybe Britain, too, wants to break with the Blair-Brown era. If so, he’s sunk.
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Oscar Miller
January 7th, 2008 11:51am Report this commentWatching Gordon Brown on Andrew Marr's show yesterday (and on Today this morning) he managed to remind the nation just how leaden and unable to reinvent himself he is. Last year he usurped Tony Blair to grab the AM slot and attempted to portray himself as PM in waiting. Yesterday, speaking in full tractor production mode, he sounded as if he is still the Chancellor - after six months in the top job. While he could just about get away with blugeoning viewers with (dodgy) statistics as Chancellor, he can't as PM. He just has to be a whole lot more inspiring that this. The analogies with America are interesting, but with or without the Barak Obama mood music, I just don't think Gordon Brown is able to rise to the challenge he faces.
Austin Barry
January 7th, 2008 1:42pm Report this commentAlthough a number of Gordon's lively chums from Provincetown continue to assure me that he can be quite merry, there is nothing in his bearing which suggests anything other than a tormented soul lost in a blighted landscape of unremitting misery. As the Americans' say, "lighten-up, dude".
Max Kaye
January 7th, 2008 6:51pm Report this commentI'm still convinced that Brown will be one of the shortest-lived prime ministers ever.
TGF UKIP
January 7th, 2008 7:32pm Report this commentOn Marr yesterday, Brown repeated and repeated that inflation in the UK was 2% but in the US 4%. Marr made no attempt to challenge this despite the number of assertions and their centality to Brown's theme. I am not an economist and don't really know where to go to access the actual figures but my belief and instinct when I was watching was that these two figures of 2% and 4% were based on entirely different calculations of inflation. Can other Coffee Housers help out - was Brown correct and Marr right not to challenge or was it the case, as in the rest of the interview, of Marr, as usual, letting Brown get away with statistical and factual murder.
Oscar Miller
January 7th, 2008 8:05pm Report this commentTGF UKIP - there's a good and well informed discussion on Iain Dale (who also queries Brown's accuracy) about the inflation figures. Scroll down to 'How accurate are the inflation figures' www.iandale.blogspot.com
TGF UKIP
January 7th, 2008 11:59pm Report this commentOscar Miller, thanks for the pointer; I've been through all the comments on Iain's site most of which rightly refer to Brown's sharp practice over his re-basing of the inflation figure. However, none cover the issue of the US comparison. I am more than ever convinced it was comparing apples with potatoes. If so when Cameron appears on Marr he needs to challenge not just the figure but, more pertinently, Marr should be taken to task for allowing Brown to so repeatedly get away with it. We need a Coffee House economist to provide an answer on this.
Fraser Nelson
January 8th, 2008 10:39am Report this commentTGF UKIP, i was going to reply here but posted instead.
Trixy
January 8th, 2008 12:13pm Report this commentIt's the difference between the RPIx, which was the old measure, and the EU way of measuring which is the HICP which misses out such things as utility bills and therefore regularly underestimates actual inflation.
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