Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Brown struggles to push his “renewal package”

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. “You’ve been very charming in putting the same question in about sixteen different ways. And no doubt you want to get another question which puts the same question…” But this was the first time Davis had broached the leadership. Crucially, in Brown’s head, every question hitherto had been a coded way of sayin: “you must go”. So every answer he offered was saying “I must stay”. You can listen again here, but here are a few lines that jumped out at me.

“I feel with the record I have had in the past I am in the best position to clean up this political system” Staggering though it may seem, Brown is repositioning himself as a white crusader – hence his ‘Presbyterian conscience’ to which he referred yesterday.

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