Letters | 7 July 2007

Sir: What is this ‘Brown bounce?’ There would be no bounce at all if our media had not reverted to their favoured toecap-kissing mode.

Brown-nosing

Sir: What is this ‘Brown bounce?’ There would be no bounce at all if our media had not reverted to their favoured toecap-kissing mode.

When Tony Blair came to office ten years ago he was new and fresh and merited a honeymoon period, though seven years of it was outrageous. Ditto David Cameron 18 months ago, whose media honeymoon just ended in roadkill. But Gordon Brown has been co-premier for the past decade and is co-equally responsible for every shoddy aspect of the worst ten years of living his-tory. It is like saying in 1945: ‘Adolf’s gone at last so let us welcome the marvellous Mister Goering who knows nothing of the recent unpleasantness.’

Come, fellow reptiles, please forsake this stomach-turning idolatry and get back to serious investigative and analytical journalism.

Frederick Forsyth
Hertfordshire

Sir: Fraser Nelson seems to have fallen hook, line and sinker for the infantile attempt, over recent weeks, to present a new, sanitised Gordon Brown (‘The Tories have underestimated Gordon Brown’, 30 June). OK, so they’ve taught him to smile without gurning; they’ve told him about the Arctic Monkeys; he’s suddenly written a book about courage (another New Labour lie — it was ghosted), but none of this can change the fact that this is the man whose foul-mouthed, bullying temper tantrums have dominated Whitehall for a decade, who cannot abide even the smallest opposition without bearing a lifetime grudge, all so carefully documented in Tom Bower’s recent biography. The man who suffers some grievous psychic wound from deep within his childhood and whose baleful anger, festering like Achilles’ in his tent at the Treasury has, we are asked to believe, suddenly transformed on the Damascus road from No.