Britannia Radio

From Times Online

April 29, 2010

Typical Gordon Brown: 

get in a hole and start digging

Who were the Prime Minister’s advisers? 

This is a sign of terminal decline

Matthew Parris

It was the hypocrisy I couldn’t stomach. “Bigotgate”, indeed. What rubbish. Which party leader, which parliamentary candidate, which newspaper or broadcast journalist has not retreated to their car after a bruising encounter with a member of the public, muttering imprecations about the individual concerned?

“Lord,” I thought as I watched the coverage of the Prime Minister’s gaffe, “it’s lucky one or two of my own constituents, when I was an MP, never heard what I said behind their backs.” I was all set to defend poor Gordon Brown, who, I assumed, would apologise and move on. Fair enough. And quite right too.

Then came his reaction. He went straight back into the hole and started digging. I couldn’t believe that Mr Brown had returned to the scene of the crime to apologise in person to Mrs Duffy, so I turned on Sky News. And there we were, at her front door. A crowd and media pack were gathering.

Forty minutes later we were still staring at the front door; I was admiring the way Mrs Duffy keeps her ivy under control; the crowd had grown; and the media, desperate for words to fill the void, were interviewing each other, and talking up the significance as the story swelled.

BACKGROUND

• Why Clegg needs a showstopper from Brown

• Clegg: I want to be prime minister

• Why keep the audience quiet in the TV debate?

• Tories recover as Labour remain in third place

Who did this to him? Who advised him to centre the day’s campaign coverage on Mrs Duffy’s front door? Are the people around Labour’s campaign so shell-shocked, so battle-weary, so insulated from real people by a Maginot line of marketing and communications advice that they have lost confidence in their own assessment of how the public think? You know — don’t you? — and I know, that the voters, who realise that this kind of thing could happen to most of us — would have forgiven and forgotten within 24 hours if one clear apology had been offered, and Mr Brown had shaken the dust from his feet and carried on campaigning.

But back he went to beat himself up. Did he himself choose this mad tactic? If not, why did he accept advice to do so?

As a one-time Tory tribalist I retain a deep respect for my old Labour opponents’ grip on strategy, and so have been trying to divine some sense or purpose to the way they’re handling of this campaign. But while I stared at the Duffy door yesterday, then cringed as a pale Prime Minister with a deathly, sickening smile advanced from it towards a baying media mob, the truth dawned. There is no campaign. There is no strategy. Labour is all at sea, and sinking.