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Leading article

The right stuff

Wednesday, 26th September 2007

Ostensibly, Gordon Brown’s first Labour conference speech as Prime Minister on Monday was grandly non-partisan: there was not a single mention of the Tories or of David Cameron. In practice, the Conservative party generally, and Mr Cameron specifically, were present in every line.

Though presented as a lofty civic oratory by the father of the nation, this was in fact a brutally partisan speech by an expert Scottish machine politician. Everything was achieved by implication, but heavy implication.

First, Mr Brown presented himself as a sort of Sarkozy from Fife, translating ‘love France or leave it’ into an extended discourse on playing by the rules, British values, the need for migrants to speak English and ‘British jobs for British workers’. As one of the PM’s allies told The Spectator in July, part of Mr Brown’s strategy is to turn his ‘pathologies into assets’: that is, to transform perceived weaknesses into strengths. It was widely assumed, for example, that his Scottishness would be a liability when he became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. In fact he is now using his Kirkcaldy roots as a weapon with which to contrast himself with the metropolitan elite of London, and to align himself with all those who live outside the capital.

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Mind your language

Dot Wordsworth

Queen Victoria complained of Gladstone: ‘He speaks to Me as if I was a public meeting.’

A child of our time

From the economic and psychological bedlam of the global downturn has emerged a particularly dangerous false dichotomy: namely, that there is somehow a choice for ministers over the next few years between economic reconstruction and the repair of Britain’s broken society, and that the government (whether Labour or Conservative) must prioritise the former at the expense of the latter.

Diary

Anne Robinson

The daughter and I spent the last few days before the American election in Arizona.

Politics

Fraser Nelson

Fraser Nelson reviews the week in politics

The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore

‘A money-financed tax cut is essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman’s famous “helicopter drop” of money.’ So said Ben Bernanke, now the chairman of the Fed, in a speech about how to ward off the ‘extremely small’ chance of deflation, which he delivered in 2002.