Today Brown claimed that every two-year-old will have a free nursery place – by 2018. Coming from a guy who’ll be lucky to be in power by December 18, it’s just a joke. I wonder if John Major is thinking: ‘that’s what I should have done, announced wonderful things to happen by 2007’. It would cost £1 billion and he doesn’t have £1 billion. He doesn’t have the money he’s spending right now. In my News of the World column today (now online) I explain how the danger facing Brown is that he’ll exit not a hated figure but one derided by anyone. Already Alan Johnson has started talking about him as Les Dawson did his mother-in-law.
In his Marr interview there were so many Brownies that it will take a while to compile them all – so bear with me. And to hear him say he was talking to the Chinese leader about the way voters have their say… oh, I give up.
“It’s the global economy, stupid” was his message. No, it was stupid policies by a Prime Minister who didn’t recognise a bubble, let Britain run up the largest household debt any G7 country has ever known and then led us into the mother of all downturns. He’s helping people get on the housing ladder, he says, as if there still is a housing ladder. Would Brown advise any of his friends to buy a house right now, in the way his government is trying to lure low-paid public sector workers into the housing market with shared (negative) equity scheme?
There is an increasingly narrow band of people who take Brown seriously, but for now I’m staying as one of them. And I’ll report on the latest set of fake figures he gave to the nation later today.
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