On Thursday I thought that Gordon Brown had pulled off a masterstroke by inviting Margaret Thatcher to tea at Downing Street, but now I’m not so sure. Marina Hyde’s column is a good guide to the shifting reactions to it and is well worth reading. As Hyde writes,
“This piece of gesture politics – even that description flatters – reveals nothing more nor less than a total contempt for the voter. What is the slackjawed electorate supposed to divine from this cynical dumb show? Perhaps that Gordon is above anything so unseemly as ideological difference, or that some sort of tea-based transubstantiation has given him new prime ministerial gravitas, or that it’s OK to vote for him if Maggie will allow him into her exclusion zone….We can say an awful lot less about what Gordon Brown truly believes in than we could before 3pm on Thursday. But we know an awful lot more about him.”
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