Brown bombs on Boulton

I’ve just got round to watching Gordon Brown’s interview with Adam Boulton and it makes his performance on Marr look good. He looked tired and sounded grumpy throughout. Perhaps the oddest thing was how Brown didn’t seem in command of the policy detail. When Bolton asked about helping the poor by just raising the personal allowance Brown seemed stumped.

Interestingly, Brown seemed to rule out a reshuffle in the near future. Kremlinologists will note that he passed up an opportunity to defend David Miliband and instead pivoted to praise Alan...

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Outfoxing Brown

Brown’s breathtakingly bad performance on Marr risks overlooking Liam Fox’s brilliant one. As Andrew Porter has said, word perfect. We see too little of Fox for my liking. Like David Davis, he has an instinctive grasp of low-tax economics and has a wonderful emperor’s-got-no-clothes contempt for Brown’s economic record. “Labour are still caught in this mental rut that Gordon Brown was a great Chancellor, they've got economic stability, and if they say it often enough people will believe it,” he said. Quite so.

As Allister Heath wrote in The Spectator...

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Brown fails to relaunch

A friend of mine, a BBC producer, sends this text message: “I’m watching the PM ‘relaunch’ from behind the sofa. The slow public death of Mr Brown continues. Painful to watch.” Difficult to disagree too much. My thoughts:-

1)      “It’s been a bad night” he started – woops! Wrong soundbite. That one was for use on Friday morning. He tries again. “It’s not been the best weekend, let’s say” – cue flash of weird smile.

2)      “I think it’s true I’m a more private person in a public arena” – yip, an introvert in an extrovert’s job. But this is

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So, what should Gordon do now?

There’s lots of advice for Gordon Brown in today’s papers. Perhaps, the most interesting comes from Matthew Taylor, a key adviser under Blair.

"After waiting a few days to avoid the impression of panic Gordon Brown should do a major interview. In this interview he should announce that he will dedicate his efforts to delivering a very short list of very important outcomes by

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Was this actually Labour's worst result since World War One?

I would like to call on the collective wisdom of CoffeeHousers. I have read everywhere that Thursday was Labour’s worst result for 40 years, whereas it looks to me as if it is the worst since World War One. Here’s why. As far as I can determine, the source for this “40 years” was Tony Travers from LSE. We walked out of the BBC...

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