A telling anecdote from Andrew Rawnsley’s book:
That’s on page 69 and the source is given as “a cabinet minister”. You might, if you were sympathetic to Gordon, try and say that there’s some wiggle-room in that “one-to-one conversation” qualification but that would, I suspect, be an unenviable errand that persuades no-one and achieves nothing except to inspire further ridicule and, perhaps, contempt.Subjects that interested him [Gordon Brown] – such as welfare reform, employment and poverty- received enormous attention. Ministers in areas which did not engage him, such as financial regulation, barely saw him. Ruth Kelly, a young and abl junior miniter put in charge of the City, was labelled a Brownite by the media simply because she worked at the Treasury. In fact the City minister had one ten-minute conversation with Brown a fortnight after her appointment and then did not have another one-to-one conversation with him for two years.
If the Tories aren’t compiling a “Rawnsley Dossier” cataloguing Brown’s errors, character flaws and general dreadfulness then, well, they really should be.
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