What does Jon Mendelsohn know? Enough, it seems, to keep his job. There was muffled laughter in the house when Brown said a “former bishop of Oxford” would look into all this. Who else? Graham Norton? Cameron did well venting incredulity that Brown would use the old Blair-style inquiry device to kick this into the long grass.
Good to see Brown had Harman beside him. Dumping on her seemed cowardly. Perhaps, he has finally decided that he needs to start standing up for his Cabinet rather than using them as human shields.
Cameron was right about 155 days of incompetence and asking if Brown was simply not up for the job (today’s TV soundbite). Brown tried to ignore the prolonged Tory roar that followed and start speaking, but it didn’t die down and the speaker had him sit down and start again.
It is becoming pitiful to hear Brown return to his bleat about Black Wednesday, minimum wage, low interest rates, yada, yada, yada. It is like R2D2 running into battle armed with nothing but a war cry. He later mentioned floods, foot and mouth and terrorism in his defence. How far away those days seemed now.
Human memory is rationalising and, therefore, treacherous. I suspect Brown knows the history of his ten years in No11 is being rewritten in the minds of those who now consider him a dud. His handling of the floods certainly has been.
Good to see Vince Cable cheered by everyone before he stood up. His simply fantastic critique of Brown for going “from Stalin to Mr Bean” had the Tory half of the chamber in stitches. (It was all the more cutting for its memories of Blair’s point about how he went from “Bambi to Stalin” in the eyes of the media.) What bathos for Brown.
Brown told Peter Tapsell that “this job is an important job and I will continue to do it to the best of my ability”. Yes, Prime Minister, that’s what we’re all worried about.
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