Armistice Day suits Brown down to the ground. When everyone is obliged wear funeral-director garb, his grey hair and sombre jowls fit the mood perfectly while Dave’s polished and youthful glow looks a trifle out of place. Gordon performed confidently at PMQs today. So did Dave, as it happens, but the skirmish came to nothing because neither was prepared to fight on the ground chosen by the other.
Dave led on the youth unemployment figures. He wanted Brown to admit that his promise ‘to abolish youth unemployment’ had failed. Brown ignored this and took comfort from the thought that without Labour’s policies even more youngsters would be out of work. Dave went into sci-fi mode and told the PM he was ‘living in a parallel universe.’
He reminded Brown that our youth unemployment is far worse than Germany’s or France’s.
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