Boris v. Brown

The free sheets in London are leading on Boris’s attack on Gordon Brown in his Telegraph column this morning. The column is full of good knock-about stuff but what has attracted the papers’ attention is this passage—the banner headline on one of them ‘Like a drunk’:

“He is like some sherry-crazed old dowager who has lost the family silver at roulette, and who now decides to double up by betting the house as well. He is like a drunk who has woken to the most appalling hangover, and who reaches for the whisky bottle to help him dull the pain.”

One of Boris’s gifts is that he is a politician who can tap into the anti-politics mood which is what, I suspect, he has done here with his column. The image of Brown as a reckless man taking huge gambles in a desperate attempt to save his own skin is a potent one as it draws both on negative sentiments about Brown and politicians more generally.