Matthew Parris, who has been consistently right about Gordon Brown, is on brilliant form in The Times this morning. Matthew points out how Brown seems quite incapable of admitting error.
Considering that Brown created the 10p tax band, abolished it and then reinstated it he must have got something wrong at some point. Here Parris analyses Brown’s answer to this question: “To my incredulity, he told his interviewers that the £2.7 billion tax cut, financed by borrowing, was a response to the world economic downturn: a measure to stimulate domestic growth by putting extra money in people’s pockets. Brown said he wanted to ease the financial squeeze being faced by hard-working families. Asked why the need for this had only been discovered since the Budget, he could give no answer. It was pitiable.
It was also scary. I’ll tell you what scares me, and scares (I believe) a wider public who may not always be consciously aware why. It’s not the thought that the Prime Minister may be lying. It’s a more disturbing thought: that he may not. That under the terrible internal pressure created in his own head by a refusal to accept either that his will may be thwarted or his judgment questioned, the PM is having to warp the external world to make it fit.”Now, I’m not sure whether things are this bad or if the Prime Minister is just too proud to publicly admit a mistake or fearful that admitting to one will open the floodgates. But Brown’s inability to ‘fess up is a problem for him.
Take the early election, if Brown had called in Andrew Marr that Saturday and said yes we did get rather carried away with how well everything was going, we did get distracted by the thought of an early election and the speculation did get rather out of the hand in the hot-house atmosphere of the party conference but I’ve told my colleagues to go back to their departments and concentrate on governing and can assure the British people that this won’t happen again then I think the whole fiasco would have caused him much less damage. Instead, he suggested that he was constitutionally obliged to think about having an early election as the Tories were calling for one and denied that the polls had had anything to do with his decision. Both assertions were risible and helped create the current credibility gap.
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