Portrait of the week | 27 February 2010

Mr Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, had sworn at senior aides and ‘roughly shoved aside’ an adviser and hit a car seat, according to an extract in the Observer from a forthcoming book by Mr Andrew Rawnsley.

Mr Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, had sworn at senior aides and ‘roughly shoved aside’ an adviser and hit a car seat, according to an extract in the Observer from a forthcoming book by Mr Andrew Rawnsley. ‘I have never, never hit anybody in my life,’ Mr Brown said. ‘I throw the newspapers on the floor or something like that.’ The question then moved on to whether bullying went on in 10 Downing Street: ‘three or four’ telephone calls had been made to the National Bullying Helpline in recent years, according to its chief executive. Lord Mandelson, the First Secretary of State, said that Mr Brown ‘doesn’t bully people’. Mr Alistair Darling, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said that when he warned in August 2008 that economic conditions were ‘arguably the worst they’ve been in 60 years’, the ‘forces of hell were unleashed’ by Downing Street and the Tories. Mr Brown said it was not by his command. Earlier Mr Brown had unveiled a new party slogan: ‘A future fair for all’. He had spoken under the same slogan at a party conference in 2003. A sharp rise in government spending and a drop in tax receipts took government borrowing to £4.3 billion in January. Mortgage lending in January fell to its lowest since March 2001. BAA, the owners of Heathrow, reported a loss of £822 million, £277 million from its forced sale of Gatwick. British Airways staff voted again to strike, though not over Easter. A Eurostar train was stranded near Ashford, Kent, leaving passengers in the dark for hours.