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I suppose I can’t ignore the electioneering of the past week since all the newspapers are stuffed full of it, and the television channels have joined in with their collection of experts and pundits and daily opinion polls which jump up and down like the value of the pound to the dollar.
It’s been a bad week for Gordon Brown is the basic message, followed by speculation as to whether or not there will be a hung parliament between the Conservatives and Lib-Dem. This, in my view at any rate, may not be a bad thing since it might rein in the wildest of Tory ideas. There is also much merit in Nick Clegg’s oft-repeated plea to get the financial wizards of the three main parties together to sort the economy out. A bit of cross-party co-operation on other issues might not also come amiss.
But to return to the main story, one reviewed both by the columnists and the cartoonists this weekend. Gordon’s bad week.
I said earlier in the week that some of Gordon’s problems were brought about by the Labour party spin-doctors; the return to Gillian Duffy’s house to apologise in person for calling her a bigot was a case in point. Having telephoned her with an apology, he should have carried on with his campaign trail and not been deflected into what became a public humiliation for him. But ‘Duffygate’ derailed his campaign and ‘that woman’ has now confirmed she has thrown away her postal voting card despite a grovelling invitation to go to Number 10 for tea with Gordon and Sarah.
Of course, I should have said that most of Gordon’s problems were brought about by the Labour party spin-doctors. He was, after all, mainly following the scripts given him.
It has to be said that Gordon is not a natural television personality even though he sincerely believes in what he is fighting for. The accident which caused his blindness hasn’t helped his facial expressions and his Presbyterian upbringing probably suppresses any passion the man feels. Given this, the spin-doctors should have put him into situations where these two things didn’t matter though, to be truthful, I can’t think of any except for radio broadcasts where the studios were not monitored by television cameras to record every grimace or look of despair.
Then there was the line-up of senior party officials who, along with Gordon, all looked as glum as glum could possibly be, all photographed beneath posters which were of such insignificance that no-one remembers what they said. A scene made all the more bizarre when some hapless and distracted motorist crashed into the bus shelter nearby. Whatever message those posters were meant to convey was obliterated in a moment; the actual message received by the media was that Labour was crashing and the looks on the faces of their seniors showed just that.
Worst of all has been Gordon’s appearances at the ill-conceived leaders’ debates which have mainly distracted voters’ attentions from party policies to the performances of the three main personalities. How could Gordon have outshone the polish of the other two men? Gordon did his best to get across complicated financial figures and statistics but overdid them to the point where any memorable response to a question was obscured and, bizarrely smiling in the wrong places, he came across at times as decidedly odd. None of this helped his or the Labour cause and one assumes that some spin-doctors have been ‘spoken to’ subsequently. I guess too that the spin-doctors who suggested that a bronzed Tony Blair be parachuted in to make a couple of insignificant speeches realises now that this may not have been the best idea of the campaign so far either.
Labour was never going to be ultra-popular in this election. Thirteen years of Labour misrule have seen to that. Much of the odium for the past, and most certainly the current economic situation, falls on the shoulders of Gordon Brown and, sad to say, it is Gordon Brown who will lose this election for the Labour party.
I actually feel sorry for Gordon who I think has been very poorly served by the spin-doctors, though it has to be said that his initial cock-up for calling a Rochdale matron a bigot was entirely his own fault. Compared with the slick campaigns across the country by those advising Cameron and Clegg, that of the Labour party has been something of a shambles.
Is there any way of Labour surviving from this point? I can think of only one and, sadly for the man himself, that surely can only be Gordon’s speedy announcement that after this election he will stand down as leader of the party.
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