From The Annals of the Gord

Chris lancashire

As each revelation appears - I am currently reading Powell's knifing of Brown - you wonder how the hell this unbalanced, talentless, unpleasant man managed to firstly clamber to the top of the Labour Party and then to make it into No 10. Powell's book, inadvertently, reflects badly on Blair as well - they already knew Brown was dangerously unbalanced and yet didn't have the guts to sack him.

From all of this Labour need to stand back and take a long hard look at their party structure and leadership selection mechanism. Starting by purging the equally poisonous Balls, cutting free from the Unions and rerunning the recent leadership election would be a minimum.

Martyn Rowe

Chris Lancashire - yep, yep and yep. I've been wondering that too..

Godron Brown's ascent to the leadership of the Labour party reflects terribly badly on those within it. He should've been stopped. A person like that would never make it to the top in the Conservative or LD parties.

Simon Stephenson

Yes, yes Chris lancashire (11.40am). It's not that we've had bad fortune with our recent leaders, it's that we've almost certainly got an inadequate process for selecting them.

And before anyone starts shrieking that I'm a threat to "democracy", let me just say that there are a million different ways of selecting leaders, all with a level of democratic content similar to the one we use now, any one of which may prove to produce better outcomes than we've experienced in recent years. Why not explore other possibilities, perhaps starting with imposing restrictions on the permissable levels of deceit and misinformation that can be passed off as an essential part of political contest?

dearieme

I imagine that the explanation is partly that Brown had a higher IQ than most of them. The other Labourites of his generation were pretty dim.

David Booth

It couldn't have happened to a fouler character.

In answer to Chris lancashire's question as to how Brown managed to crawl his way to the top of the Labour party.
Gordon Brown is one of those characters who are ruthless in pursuit of his own ambitions and completely in different to the well being of the organization they are part of, in short he is a parasitical creature.
The fact that he has left the Labour Party a smoking wreck with a new leader who has the charm of a toilet brush will not even register on Browns radar or indeed his delusional "moral compass".

Austin Barry

Why be surprised at the madness of political leaders?

Current example, Brian Cowen the gormless 'Tea-soak'(and other livelier libations)of Ireland.

Here is a man whose weak landslide of a face exemplifies the corrupt, in-bred and lazy mendacity of the Irish political class.

Fortunately, he will soon be resuming his former occupation as chief campanologist at Notre Dame Cathedral.

Ding dong and good riddance.

Bloody Bill Brock

In my considered opinion Gordon Brown is a fecking nutter. Chris L is dead right, a man or Blairs political nous should have found a way to remove him.

Vulture

There wwere plenty of warnings abt Bliar the narcissist fantasist, and bruin, the sociopathic weirdo before they rose to power.

They were ignored. Even after bruin's manifest bullying and paranoia had been revealed to all, millions still voted Labour.

If Ian Huntley and Ian Brady emerged as Labour leaders, they would still get the votes. labour voters are fuckwits.

Yam Yam

Have the Secret Service guys been trained up to protect the President from flying hole punches?

RMH

Who them them to cool it, its unclear?

AF

vulture,
To be fair I think that the labour voters (i'm not one of them)would only know as much as the media told them,much like the rest of us,however those closer to the him have no such excuse and certainly knew what a deranged and bullying man he was,and were quiet happy to unlesh him on the public,Bliar could have stopped him in his tracks but being such a weak man didn't have the gonads to take him and his supporters(whelan,mcbride,balls et.al)on.

ollie

I agree with Vulture - all of the signs were there long before Brown's coronation. His vast array of inadequacies and social ineptitudes were well known many, many years ago.

Yet, Labour were happy to see their one and only electoral tour de force usurped by "one of their own". They were ALL complicit in it.

I read Labour commentators - and none of them will question their leaders, no matter how blatantly nuts they are. They didn't question Foot, or Kinnock, or Brown. Yet they stuck pins in Blair, the only thing that made them electable, or even palatable.

A party of mentally degenerate people - led by the mentally degenerate.

yank

Perhaps you all are stuck in the same political cycle we've been in for some years now. For 6 consecutive presidential elections, we've been unable to even nominate (let alone elect) a Tier I candidate for the presidency.

A Tier II candidate can be acceptable, but comes with certain defects of policy or character which can lead to trouble if not managed properly and will inevitably be exposed by events.

A Tier III candidate possesses obvious and multiple fundamental flaws, and should never rise to the top of the pile, and yet we seem to be seeing the Gores, Kerrys, Browns, McCains and Obamas doing so. The system seems broken, or is at least failing to produce a desired output.

I might acknowledge Dave as a Tier II, if barely, and Milliband certainly seems no better than Tier II. However, both men are in transit, clearly, and could rapidly move out of those categories (And since both seem void of Tier I characteristics, there's only one direction for them to move.).

This systemic problem must be remedied, because it seems to be having a reverse effect over here. Rather than competing to drive the curve up, the lack of competition of ideas seems to be driving the overall curve down. It's a race to the bottom, and I don't see the establishment working to reverse that race, as they're fully invested in the running of it.

Tweedledum and Tweedledee seem content, do they not?

Verity

Bloody Bill Brock - a man or Blairs political nous should have found a way to remove him."

Evidence that Blair is as malign as I intuited the first time I ever saw his peculiar face in the press.

As an aside, interesting that the mighty Obama, a one-termer, saw fit to reprimand another leader's aide in his own country on his own turf. His coarseness, arrogance and absence of manners is depthless.

He and Blair will chum up when Obama craps out 2012.

Verity

Ollie - Brown got promoted to PM because he knows where the bodies are buried. Not talent, charm or aptitude.

lescam

Foot or Kinnock weren't guilty of being complete lunatics; misguided certainly, but not certifiable like Brown. He [Brown] should be in a mental home. He definitely needs to see a psychiatrist. Blaming his nastiness on his lack of vision won't do, plenty of blind people, including David Blunkett, behave quite normally with a lot less vision than Brown has. He is just a very nasty, aggressive, bully who should have been sacked by Blair years before he ever got to be PM.

My favourite Brown anecdote was revealed in a recent book by Peter Watt. At a dinner at No 10, Brown allegedly took umbrage because the guests seated themselves while he was absent taking a phone call. As a result he sat half turned away from the table, without uttering a word, and left halfway through the evening without saying good night, leaving the guests to fend for themselves, and show themselves out. Watt's wife, quite reasonably, whispered to her husband; "He's bonkers". Who could argue?

TrevorsDen

At last Vulture and I agree on something and so succunctly put too.

Brown did not have such a glass eye that it stopped him diving into a broom cupboard to avoid John Prescott.

The Labour party were totally in the thrall of Brown who spouted meaningless verbage, hid his economic incompetence in a waterfall of unfunded spending and confounded his onlookers and opponents alike with nothing more than economic conjuring tricks. Until the money ran out.

It reminds us that their judgement is so bad and that their commitment to a balanced budget is so thin that they should never ever be let near government ever again.

The Liberal Democrats should be shouting this from every rooftop in the land at every opportunity.

michael

Egotistical prima donnas have no time for political correctness. In his fit of egocentricity it would not have mattered if it had been the Queen had been waiting to greet him.

Verity

Michael - HM doesn't wait for people. They wait for her.

McRaker

This whole ghastly situation further proves that fact is stranger than fiction.

David Ossitt

dearieme

“I imagine that the explanation is partly that Brown had a higher IQ than most of them. The other Labourites of his generation were pretty dim”

A higher IQ?

On what do you base this argument.

The man is as dim as a Toc.H lamp.

Mr L

I agree that Dr Brown is/was a nutcase.

But he did save us from Blair's determination to join the euro.

Occasional Ostrich

I'm finding a word-play on that title almost irresistible.

Lord, make my mouth (well, in this case fingers) continent, but not yet.

ollie

I think we all agree that Brown is at the very least a socipath, and maybe a genuinely certifiable psychopath.

Whatever he is, he was certainly a dark and malignant stain on this country's political history.

Frank P

Asperger's jobbie. More to be pitied than scorned. He's gone. Why waste time and vitriol; we did all that when he was in harness and there was a point to it - to remove him. Turn your attentions to the 'successor'. Another freaky fuckwit of overweening ambition, but straight from the Marxist nursery; ugly gauche ghit! Plenty to chew on there, without resorting to yesterday's potatoes. Paternity leave? Pussy-whipped! Potential Prime Minister? My aspidistra!