A Campbell was waiting for the Prime Minister at a Manchester hotel for a prepping session ahead of tonight's crucial economic debate when Brown was heard calling Mrs Duffy - a solid Labour supporter - a "bigoted woman". Brown, says Campbell, was advised not to go back to Rochdale to apologise in person to Mrs Duffy, but he insisted on doing so. "There were some members of his team worried about him going to see Mrs Duffy face to face - he had already apologised on the telephone - because of how the media might interpret it and what she might say afterwards," Campbell blogged last night. "But he was determined to see her, because he knew he had hurt her, and wanted to atone for that, however humiliated others would say it made him." Campbell went on: "I just heard a PR adviser, Phil Hall, saying he felt it was a bad thing for him to go to see her, that he had apologised and he should have moved on. He then gave all the pros and cons. "But it overlooks the fact that, in the end, GB was reacting less as a calculating politician than a human being who knew he had done something wrong. GB felt a very human need, for himself and for Mrs Duffy, to go to see her. It really was as simple as that." Campbell assumes that Brown's motives for going to Number 6, the little terraced house with the PVC front door that will be the symbol of Brown's disastrous campaign if he loses, were honourable. But Brown - more even than Blair - has always been obsessed by headlines. As yesterday’s sound clip made devastatingly clear, his first thoughts when he stepped into the car after cheerily waving Mrs Duffy goodbye in their first encounter were about the way the media would use it to damage him. That is why he was angry. His visit to Mrs Duffy's terraced house was his way of drawing a line under the incident before tonight's debate. It is another example of how Brown steamrollers over colleagues' advice, whether it is against him abolishing the 10p tax band - a move that hurt millions of low-paid Labour core voters - or going to say sorry to a widow in Rochdale. Campbell will be busy with Lord Mandelson today, prepping the Prime Minister to get him through tonight's TV debate with David Cameron and Nick Clegg. If Brown hasn't gone into a blue funk over today's headlines from Rochdale, he would do well to listen to them this time for they are certain to advise him not to bring up Mrs Duffy again. Anything he now says about the incident will be squirm-making. The Mole's advice to the Prime Minister is simple: "Get back onto the policy, Gordon." The shame for Brown is that the Duffy Moment has obliterated what were relatively encouraging results for Labour from the latest ComRes poll for the Independent. While the survey shows the Tories inching ahead, the poll suggests that the Lib Dem bubble may have burst, allowing Labour to at least gain second place in the popular vote next Thursday – something that was beginning to look impossible at the height of the Clegg surge. ComRes has the Tories on 36 per cent (up three points), Labour on 29 and the Lib Dems down to 26. And on the eve of tonight's big economic debate, Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling are seen as the most trusted on the economy (31 per cent), followed by David Cameron and George Osborne (28 per cent). Intriguingly, Nick Clegg and Vince Cable trail on 20 per cent - lower than the 'don't knows'. Brown ignored aides to visit Mrs Duffy at home
The Mole:
‘Bigoted woman’ headlines mask poll that shunts Lib Dems back into third place
Thursday, 29 April 2010
LAST UPDATED 7:59 AM, APRIL 29, 2010
listair Campbell has revealed that it was Gordon Brown's decision to humble himself by going back to Gillian Duffy's house to offer the mea culpa that reduced the Prime Minister to a grinning clown yesterday afternoon.
Posts
