Politics

The prospect of Gordon Brown becoming PM should fill all sane people with dread

22 May 2004

As with many obsessed by personal ambition, Mr Brown is also graphically disloyal. It surprised no one when Mr Prescott revealed the other day, without the aid of subtitles, that the Chancellor and the Prime Minister had fallen out badly in the past. Mr Blair is no doubt shocking, but if Mr Brown cannot forbear to say so to those who will talk to the press, he ought to resign. This puts Mr Brown’s famed ‘integrity’ in an interesting light. He boasts about the strength of our economy relative to that of France or Germany, but still pays lip service to entering the euro and, therefore, inflicting similar misery on us. He has also suffocated enterprise in this country by his taxation regime, and got away with it largely because of the even greater weakness of our neighbours. For one who is so clever (as his friends often tell us) he can be, deliberately or otherwise, bloody obtuse.

A Brown premiership would, not to put too fine a point on it, stuff Middle England. He is the enemy in a way Mr Blair never credibly could have been. The Chancellor and his gang of Scottish cronies simply don’t grasp the importance of the economically productive majority in England who keep the whole Kingdom afloat. Mr Blair’s pals now say he will go a year into his third term and hand over to the Chancellor. That is very witty. By that stage (if indeed we reach it) the chickens of the Brown economic miracle will have come home to roost, and the brilliant Chancellor will look pretty tarnished. And Mr Blair will no doubt imagine that the history books will record that he had a magnificent nine-year premiership, and Mr Brown a disastrous three-year one. It shouldn’t console a single English voter that the present Prime Minister would be only half right.

Simon Heffer is a columnist for the Daily Mail.