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Leading articles

From clunk to cluck

Wednesday, 10th October 2007

The Spectator on the week's events

Rattled, hoarse and angry, Gordon Brown did not look a happy man at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday. Small wonder: it is only weeks since his clunking fist was pounding the Tories into submission. Now, he has allowed himself to be caricatured as a clucking chicken, as fearful of an election as he is of an EU referendum. ‘How long are we going to have to wait till the past makes way for the future?’ David Cameron asked — and the PM had no convincing reply.

It may be true that Mr Brown’s decision not to go to the country this November will fast fade from public memory, and that the nickname ‘Bottler Brown’ and the jokes about ‘bottle banks’ will not last. But the impression of the Prime Minister as a diminished, hesitant and defensive figure is likely to prove more durable.

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Frank Leader

October 11th, 2007 10:01pm

He has gone from Prime Minister to Prime Idiot overnight

Letters

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

Diary

Penny Smith

Penny Smith gives a rundown of her week

The NHS needs its Reformation

The Spectator on reforming the NHS

Glasgow East is Brown’s dirty little secret: a hideous, costly social experiment gone wrong

Fraser Nelson

Glasgow East symbolises — as few other places in Britain can — the fact that the problem Labour faces is not just lack of leadership but lack of mission. What is to be seen in this constituency encapsulates and dramatises Labour’s abject failures to comprehend, let alone tackle, the nature of the poverty which grips our council estates.
For all the latest on the Glasgow East by-election, visit Coffee House