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Saturday 26 May 2012

Is it more rude to ask if someone’s going whacko than blind?

Rod Liddle says the furore surrounding Andrew Marr’s questions to Gordon Brown is academic. These rumours are rife in the blogosphere

Let’s get this out of the way first: there have been no rumours about Andrew Marr which, even if proven to be true, would remotely affect his ability to do his job. And secondly, Andrew Marr is a mere journalist, not the Prime Minister. Even for those of you who, with some justification, dislike the double standards employed from time to time by our trade, there is a difference.

Another theory doing the rounds is that Marr felt sort of compelled to ask the question because he is perceived by the right to be, at best, an unaligned wet liberal and, at worst, a card-carrying activist of what is still referred to, by some foaming maniacs, as the Blair Broadcasting Corporation. And thus, in a wish to be truly rigorous, he was pushed towards an area of questioning which even a hardline Tory would consider de trop. Ergo, hoist by his own New Labour petard via the crime of overcompensation, as the psychologists would have it.

And finally, the sort of moderate, considered view — the third way, if you like — is that Marr overstepped the mark by asking about prescription drugs, but was within his rights when referring to the issue of Brown’s eyesight. Of all the points of view we’ve examined this seems to me to have the least to commend it. Brown has been blind in one eye for a considerable period of time; the only evidence to support the thesis that his other eye is now playing up comes from the blogosphere, which has occasionally leaked into the mainstream press. ‘You need hard evidence before you ask the Prime Minister something like that,’ I was told, in reference to the drugs. But where’s the ‘hard’ evidence for Brown’s recent problems with his eyesight? It’s a false dichotomy. The Labour party has insisted that the only references to Brown’s alleged reliance on prescription drugs comes from ‘extreme right-wing’ bloggers. But that’s not true: the right-wing columnist Simon Heffer alluded to it in his column for the Daily Telegraph, and the (sorta) left-wing columnist Matthew Norman mentioned the same thing in passing in one of his own columns. In fact, Matthew actually wrote that if the Prime Minister wasn’t taking prescription drugs, he should be. In any case, the prescription drugs business had been established in the mainstream press every bit as much — if not more — than those worries over Brown’s eyesight. I suppose people consider it ruder to ask someone if they’re going whacko than if they’re going blind.

More articles from: Rod Liddle | this section

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