Gordon Brown v Evan Davis this morning – and while most Brown interviews before 9am have a soporific effect, this one was (by Brown’s standards) a belter. The Dear Leader had come with an announcement: he is proposing a National Council for Democratic Renewal and was inviting questions on it. Davis had other questions, and you could hear Brown’s irritation grow. “I want the BBC to join a debate about the future,” he said at one point – Davis just didn’t care. He wanted the PM to join a debate about a whole range of topics: McBride, expenses, the whole shebang. And as for democratic reform, “When a criminal says ‘I’ll stop being a criminal’ we say ‘well, thanks you for that’ but we don’t then say ‘you can go on to be a judge’” he said – why should this Parliament, with people like Nick Brown and Margaret Beckett who voted against reform to expenses, be the Parliament to find a solution?
For me, the most revealing question came right and the end, he asked if Brown would make way for Alan Johnson for the good of the party.
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