Brown is not the problem — it’s his thuggish henchmen who need to be reined in

Wednesday, 24th February 2010

Martin Bright reviews the week in politics

How has it come to this? Part of the answer is that the job of Prime Minister is a unique one. Gordon Brown is not the first to be prone to paranoia and he will not be the last to suffer the indignity of those he works with telling tales to journalists behind his back. But there is more to it than that. There is something about this that is peculiar to Gordon because of the culture of threat he has allowed to develop around him.

The reality is that we will never know the real Gordon Brown, because he is constitutionally incapable of projecting his own personality without the help of a fiercely loyal cabal of human ciphers. His greatest weakness has always been allowing those who speak on his behalf too long a leash. One eminent Labour peer, who worked closely with Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, once told me that Gordon Brown’s biggest problem was that he chose to surround himself with people who were ‘not good citizens’.

When he was in an intense period of internal opposition just after the 2005 election, I was always amazed by the latitude he gave others to brief on his behalf against Cabinet colleagues and political enemies. This tendency carried on long after he entered No. 10.

As Alistair Darling so eloquently put it in his Sky News interview on Tuesday, Gordon Brown is quite capable of allowing the ‘forces of hell’ to be unleashed, even against his friends. Rawnsley’s picture of the fury of Darling and his wife at their betrayal over the summer of 2008 is entirely accurate. There was a concerted attempt by the Prime Minister’s anointed ‘bad citizens’, Damian McBride and Charlie Whelan, to destroy the Chancellor for telling the truth about the gravity of the recession to Guardian interviewer Decca Aitkenhead.

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A. MacAulay

February 25th, 2010 8:01am Report this comment

The devil will fulfill his part of the bargain but only in a way that exposes the vanity of the contractee. Brown's Faustian tragedy is his naive belief that one such as Blair would ever tell anybody, and least of all a rival, the truth.

The beleagured egocentric attracts poisonous, self serving courtiers. Minions will be trampled on to extract the last drop of the elixier of power. Truly amazing is the Tory capacity of making itself look fluffy in the face of this.

Boudicca

March 7th, 2010 9:10pm Report this comment

So we have a petulant, childish, liar in No. 10. One who cannot control his temper, likes to lob equipment and furnishings around the room and shove staff to one side if he is in a hurry and a bad mood. He is paranoid, has no social skills or empathy for people, he employs a raft of nasty attack dogs who do his dirty work for him ..... yet we are supposed to excuse him all this because he is so 'passionate' about the job.

Come off it. There has never been a man less suited to the office of Prime Minister. Every Labour MP should hang his/her head in shame that they allowed such a dreadful specimen to enter No.10 unopposed.