Britannia Radio

This is a tellingly accurate assessment of our deeply flawed prime  
minister who has never been elected either as leader of the Labour  
Party much less as prime minister.

Iain Martin , however, misses the significance  - and the importance  
- of the e-mail / McBride disaster.  This was not anything  
political.  It was complete collapse of all morals and principles in  
government.  The ‘meejah’s’  simplistic emphasis on the “Sorry”  
question shows how little the hacks understand and how the national  
collapse of moral values has reached the very top of government.   
This collapse will haunt Britain and Britons for ages to come.  It’s  
a terrible legacy.

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TELEGRAPH                    17.4.09
Gordon Brown's mask has slipped and it's not a pretty sight
The McBride scandal sheds a penetrating light on the PM, says Iain  
Martin.

There, that wasn't so difficult now was it? Gordon Brown finally said  
sorry yesterday. [In fact he didn’t.  He said he was sorry that “it”  
had happened  not that he had caused “it” to happen -cs]  But as soon  
as he tried this extraordinary innovation – apologising – his critics  
were questioning his motives. "I think it is spin management again,"  
said Nadine Dorries MP, one of the Tories defamed in Damian McBride's  
vile emails. "He did not say he was sorry to me, he said he was sorry  
to a camera crew in Glasgow."

The Tories should be on guard against voters thinking they are  
stretching out this scandal beyond its natural limits. But the fact  
that even the Prime Minister's apology is not taken at face value  
tells you much about the extent of the damage done. That damage is  
severe and will endure.

The best that Mr Brown might hope for is that recent events feed into  
a wider narrative (as they say in New Labour) about all politics  
being sleazy. I suspect that it will be much worse. This scandal  
exposes to public view what many who have made it their business to  
study him have long known: that Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll  
and Mr Hyde is a useful metaphor when discussing Gordon Brown.

There is his public face, the son of the manse and highly moral  
scholar, obsessed with doing for the nation what his paternalistic  
minister father did for a community in Fife. You have to be consumed  
by dislike not to accept that this is the spirit in which Brown  
entered public life – but at the same time, that kind of Scottish,  
middle-class, Leftie presbyterianism is ultimately controlling in  
character. It requires that the noble masses submit to the will of  
the professional or do-gooder – be he churchman or politician –  
because he knows what is best for others. Witness Brown's love of tax  
credits and handouts, and refusal to trust people with proper tax  
cuts: we might, after all, spend the money we are allowed to keep on  
frivolous enjoyment.

There is a second persona, however: Brown the eternal game-player, a  
man reliant on spinners, loyal MPs and officials who practise the  
black arts. The playing area – more a battlefield, really – is  
littered with corpses, particularly in Scotland. Many of them are  
loyalists who were dedicated to helping Brown but found themselves  
dispensed with when expediency required it. One departed minister,  
who found himself whacked after years of devotion, likes to say: "If  
this is how he treats his friends, I would hate to see how he treats  
his enemies."

The answer is: even worse. Brown has become addicted to the  
demolition of opponents both internal and external. The origins of  
this run deeper than the tactics of guerrilla warfare he licensed  
against the Blairites in government. Brown was of the generation that  
had seen Labour lose repeatedly, and was determined to ensure it did  
not happen again. The Tories, he calculated, started with so many  
advantages, such as press support and backing from the City, that  
Labour would have to be twice as cunning and robust to destroy them.  
He and Peter, now Lord, Mandelson, were well ahead of Tony Blair on  
this, pioneering the techniques of rapid rebuttal, spin and an  
obsession with a strict adherence to the message.

But then, after the death of John Smith,  Mandelson and Blair – at  
least in Brown's imagination – turned that weaponry on him. They  
denied him the leadership – his destiny. He just about suppressed his  
rage until Labour had been returned to power in 1997. Then he built a  
black-ops team to defend his interests. In time, with practice, they  
were able to remove the Prime Minister and kill off the possibility  
that Brown would face any challenge from another candidate. The  
effect of this has been gradually to distort his approach to politics  
and make it unnecessarily mean.

What happened to the young idealist, as he aged, is nothing new. Like  
so many politicians, he convinced himself that the realisation of his  
dreams required that he take a walk on the dark side. As someone who  
has observed him up close puts it: "The only piece of Marx he has  
retained is that the ends justify the means."

In retirement, Brown will likely become obsessed with emphasising his  
moral side and extinguishing the memory of Damian McBride and the  
rest. He will no doubt over-compensate, writing many books about  
politics and morality, advising charities in Africa and taking a post  
as a visiting academic at a great university in the US.

The immediate cost to him is that any remote thought that the G20  
would concentrate public attention on the public-spirited leader  
supposedly "saving the world" is gone. In time, it will come to be  
thought of as a personal tragedy that such a career is finishing this  
way.

His long journey, from young idealist to the dominant figure of his  
age – in which he petrified those on his own side even more than the  
opposition – is winding to its end. Ultimately, the journey has led  
him, this week, to a black place.

Just as with the election that never was, in autumn 2007, the McBride  
scandal sheds a penetrating light on the driven, needy figure who  
runs Britain. It is not a pretty sight – and certainly not what a  
country looking for any form of fresh start would dream of turning to.