What on earth is Gordon Brown doing in Brazil?
By Richard Littlejohn
Last updated at 9:09 PM on 26th March 2009
Butch and Sundance headed for Bolivia. Gordon Brown has opted for Brazil, favoured refuge of Nazi war criminals and Ronnie Biggs. Perhaps he’s planning to apply for asylum.
Gordon’s reckless economic policies have done more damage to Britain than the Luftwaffe’s bombs inflicted on the City of London.
And the Great Train Robbers got away with a lot less than his raid on private pension funds.
What the hell is he doing in Rio de Janeiro?
Having a nice time? Mr Brown is given a Brazil shirt by football legend Socrates
According to the official version: ‘The Prime Minister will hold talks with President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and football legend Pele.’
While Britain goes to hell in a handcart, the Prime Minister is thousands of miles away, indulging in a little light autograph-hunting.
I’m sure this is purely coincidence, but since retiring from the Beautiful Game, Pele has embarked on a second career as the worldwide ambassador for Viagra.
Maybe Gordon is hoping some of the magic will rub off.
His package could certainly do with all the stimulus it can get right now.
It’s been given the thumbs- down by both the financial markets and the Governor of the Bank of England.
While Gordon was gallivanting around the world in a political reprise of Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, stubbornly oblivious to the devastation he’s left in his wake, what remains of his credibility was shattered by the Treasury’s failure to convince anyone to lend it money.
The refusal of any investor to take up £120 million of government debt, offered in the form of ‘gilts’, is a damning indictment of the Prime Minister’s mismanagement of the economy.
Britain is in serious danger of being downgraded from copper-bottomed investment to international basket case.
So he can’t do the sensible thing and cut taxes, even if he wanted.
Brown is still banging on about spending his way out of recession, but simply doesn’t have the money.
That’s why he’s been reduced to printing it, further devaluing a currency which has already collapsed to historic lows on the foreign exchanges.
If this was a casino, Brown would have been escorted from the tables and thrown into the street, his line of credit long since exhausted.
Yet still he has the brazen audacity to pose as the saviour of the world, a fantasy kept afloat by the fawning coverage of the boys in the bubble, who have long since abandoned objective reporting and are now reduced to taking dictation at the back of the bus.
He flits at breakneck speed from boasting in Brussels to breakfast in Manhattan, fuelled by bombast and hubris, on a 17,500-mile odyssey of self-regard.
If this is Friday, it must be Santiago.
What he doesn’t get is that nobody’s listening.
Wall Street bankers may give him a polite hearing, but they’re not taking any notice. Well, would you accept investment advice from a man who’d just bet the farm on the 4.45 at Fontwell, only to see his horse fall at the first fence?
All those ‘Obama backs Brown stimulus plans’ headlines are pure garbage.
When the Prime Minister was granted five minutes with the Messiah in Washington, it may have made the papers here but in America he didn’t trouble the scorers.
Same in Europe. Colleagues who read the foreign press say coverage of Gordon Brown is conspicuous by its absence.
Still, he can rely on the faithful BBC to perpetuate the myth of global colossus.
Great play was made of Gordon’s address to the European Parliament this week. What you didn’t see was the demolition of the Prime Minister in the subsequent debate.
Tory MEP Daniel Hannan utterly dismembered Brown’s selfproclaimed reputation and his ‘pathological’ refusal to accept any responsibility, accusing him correctly of leaving Britain worstprepared of any developed nation to deal with the crisis.
Hannan said that thanks to Brown the whole country was in negative equity and every British child was now born owing around £20,000.
‘When you repeat, in that wooden and perfunctory way, that our situation is better than others, that we are well placed to weather the storm, you sound like a Brezhnev era apparatchik giving the party line. You know and we know and you know that we know that it’s nonsense.’
Gordon sat there grinning, uncomfortably and unconvincingly, like a little boy at the back of the class caught cheating at his homework.
The BBC may not have carried it, but you can check it out on YouTube. More than 750,000 people already have.
Next week’s G20 summit in London is an expensive waste of time and £50million we can ill-afford.
It will achieve nothing and has been convened largely as another chance for Gordon to have his photo taken with Barack Obama, before the President’s political Viagra wears off.
Platitudes will be uttered, communiqués will be signed and then everyone will go home and do whatever the hell they want, in the best interests of their own country.
Yet while other leaders put their own people first, Gordon concentrates on what he does best — putting Gordon first. It’s always all about him.
This farcical Superman act is designed purely to distract us from the complete pig’s ear Brown has made of the economy and his lack of any sensible idea how to get us out of this mess.
The man who bragged about ending boom and bust has bankrupted Britain. He has no one to blame but himself.
That’s why instead of attending to the crisis of his own making on the domestic front, he’s on the other side of the world, posing for pictures with Pele.
It’s over, Gordon. The game’s up. No one is buying it. Not since Butch and Sundance has there been such a spectacular leap off a cliff.
If I were you, I wouldn’t bother coming back.
And if Rio won’t have you, I hear Bolivia is very nice at this time of year.
This column has been derided for claiming that belief in global warming is a religion, not a science.
But can anyone still deny it, now that the Archbishop of Canterbury has thrown his mitre into the ring?
To be honest, Dr Rowan Williams has always looked more like a Druid than a clergyman.
So it was no surprise when he signed up to the whole ‘climate change’, warning that not even God can save us from the effects of global warming.
He doesn’t seem to have noticed that the world has managed to look after itself for the past few million years through plague, pestilence and Ice Age.
Meanwhile, if further confirmation were needed, an Oxford environmentalist has been given permission to claim that he was unfairly sacked because of his views on climate change.
Tim Nicholson was made redundant from his job as head of sustainability at a local firm. He refuses to take flights because of the harm he alleges planes do to the planet.
A tribunal has ruled that he can make a claim under the Employment Equality (Religion and Belief) Regulations 2003.
If he loses, he can always apply to be the next Archbishop of Canterbury.
It’s time to dial Harrow 1212…
Getting away with it: Tony McNulty
Is that it, then? The Prime Minister has complete confidence in thieving minister Tony McNulty. Time to move on.
Since it was revealed that McNulty has fraudulently claimed £60,000 in expenses for visiting his parents, I’ve heard from a number of serving and ex-coppers.
They’re all convinced that he’s guilty of what used to be called ‘obtaining pecuniary advantage by deception’ and is now covered by the section of the Theft Act about misappropriation of public funds.
McNulty doesn’t even have the tenuous excuse that he sometimes sleeps at the property, which has so far proved enough to get corrupt liar Jacqui Smith off the hook while she continues to pretend that her sister’s spare bedroom is her ‘main’ residence for the purposes of claiming allowances.
Labour can’t have any objection to the police being called in.
After all, it was Smith herself who was behind the arrest of Tory immigration spokesman Damian Green simply for doing his job.
Scandalously, Green is still on police bail, more than three months later.
In any event, the House of Commons guidelines are no protection against criminality. This is taxpayers’ money McNulty has embezzled.
The police will argue that they can’t investigate unless they receive a formal complaint.
If you’re one of McNulty’s constituents, the phone number for Harrow nick is 020 8423 1212.
- This week’s edition of You Couldn’t Make It Up comes from Gloucestershire.
More than 2,000 people may have lost their jobs in the county recently, but the local council is still hiring.
It is looking for a ‘Recession Support Co-ordinator’ on £40,000 a year.
Keep calm and carry on.
Probably the worst advert in the world
You might have thought that it would have dawned on ministers that wall-to-wall sex education, with free condoms and abortion on demand, hasn’t actually prevented Britain becoming the teenage pregnancy and STD capital of the world.
Quite the opposite. Yet their recipe is more of the same.
We’re now going to get adverts for condoms and abortion clinics on primetime television.
Call me old-fashioned, but I thought sanitary towel adverts were a bridge too far.
What’s wrong with confining them to women’s magazines?
Who wants to sit through endless commercials for rubber johnnies and abortion clinics? Thank goodness for Sky+ and the fast-forward button.
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