Where it all went wrong for Brown
James Forsyth 3:58pm
This Friday marks the first anniversary of Gordon Brown becoming PM. To put it mildly, it hasn’t been a successful start. This week on Coffee House we’ll be putting forward our views on why and where it has all gone so wrong.
The obvious answer is the whole debacle of the election that never was. But this is a necessary but not sufficient explanation for why Labour is now recording some of its lowest poll ratings since records began, and why 85 percent of voters think that Brown has done a worse job than they were expecting.
On Friday, we’ll invite you to vote for what has been the biggest factor in it all being such a disaster.
P.S. You can read Matt’s assessment for The Sunday Telegraph of Brown’s first year here.
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Comments
richard j
June 23rd, 2008 4:25pmThe unelected man now thinks he can dictate the market price of oil. His opinion of himself and the opinion his ministers have of him is incredible. What conceit and ignorance.
Perry
June 23rd, 2008 4:26pmDear JAMES, you are a sweet-natured boy I’m sure, but I challenge your assertion that things have gone ‘wrong for Brown’.
The contemptible fellow, immune as he is to reason, commoners’ sense, and any allusion to decency, is, as his, predecessor, quite blasé about his own rightness, righteousness, and reality.
He, in contrast to most, but in keeping with his kind, is content and satisfied. It is for others that things have ‘gone wrong’.
Tiberius
June 23rd, 2008 4:29pmJanet Daley identifies the problems with Brown very well in today's DT, but her dismissal of Cameron's "brand decontamination" exercise is quite extraordinary.
crown
June 23rd, 2008 4:33pmIf you give people a leader they did not elect, who snubbed the media by using Marr to announce the cancelled election and then people realise that GB has presided over an enormous housing boom that has left millions without access to housing, he has then introduced shared ownership schemes to encourage more into the inflated market just as the bubble pops.
cityboozer
June 23rd, 2008 4:53pmIt went wrong because he is useless. This was always the case, even at the height last summer. The press were merely conspiring in a slightly unusual silly season combined with the very usual build-em-up and knock-em-down arc.
David
June 23rd, 2008 5:15pmWhen he decided that he wanted to be PM. It showed a total lack of self-awareness and an ignorance of his own flaws and weaknesses.
Thomas Cussans
June 23rd, 2008 7:08pmDead easy.
He is a charmless, brooding obsessive who has convinced himself he can never never be wrong.
It is hard to think of any more fatal combination for a politician today.
By writing books about 'Courage', he precisely highlights these neurotic shortcomings, scrambling to demonstrate his 'fitness' for office while boasting incoherently about his 'vision'.
The vast irony is that it was the supposedly ruthless New Labour machine that allowed itself to be taken in by these obvious inadequacies.
By rights, we should feel sorry for someone so clearly out of his depth. Yet the universal reaction is that this is a man to be despised, not pitied.
I cannot tell you how much I am looking forward to his inevitable humiliation.
He deserves it all – and more.
DW
June 23rd, 2008 7:08pmCity boozer is quite right...
The election that never was only woke up the media to his short comings. The rest of us all along have known he was incompetent with the economy, with control freak, bullying and bitter tendencies, and someone whom Blair never had the nerve to sack - that's why he survived.
He is also someone who refuses to believe he is fundamentally wrong. I wish this country could get rid of him.
David C
June 23rd, 2008 8:11pmThere really is no single cause for Brown's self-destruction (and it really is self-destruction). Every step he has taken has brought him to this point. He could have turned away from the path he has chosen at any time, but his flaws would not let him. Now he is disconnected from the electorate and the electorate have turned their back and are walking in the other direction.
Car crash politics.
Ian C
June 23rd, 2008 8:28pmI had never been a Brown fan prior to his non-competitive elevation. When he was first noticeably acting as PM -parading around last summer's floods pretending he could fix everything - it struck me then that "the man bores for Britain, he can never get re-elected if he is inclined to drone on like that."
We, and more to the point the Labour Pary, would have been aware of this potentially lethal fault, sooner had they had a leadership contest. At least they (and the rest of us) would have been warned that this man is a liabilty on the media stage.
Having gone wrong with that - no contest - any further errors were always going to be compounded in ways that they would not have been. So, the non-election, swiping Tory IHT plans, the missing 25m personal details and so on, merely served as the 'hors d'oeuvre' for what followed - 10p abolition killed him off. It was so blatantly politically motivated and so out of tune with himself, let-alone anyone else.
In sum, it all flows from the Granita Pact with Blair in '94. He was always the wrong man for the job he aspired to and came to believe was his right.