Is Gordon Brown up to the job?

[T_i_B]

For those of you wondering what has happened to UK politics since Tony Blair stepped down, here is an article about the current British PM and his current woes.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jun/18/gordonbrown.labour

A settled view, among the electorate as well as the commentariat has formed, one that will take an earthquake to shake. I can see its distortions and exaggerations and yet, no matter how much I would like to, I cannot depart from the substance of it. I find myself in sympathy with those who admired Brown through his 10 long years as chancellor and who keenly awaited his premiership, and yet now conclude that they got Brown wrong - that, on the current evidence, he is simply not up to the job.

The most obvious skill gap is in communication. Brown still reads, rather than delivers a speech, his head down. He does not seem able to deliver three or four plain, human sentences that anyone could understand. The result is an empathy gap: he does not seem able to show any to the electorate and so they don't feel any for him. The lack of presentational skills was visible a year ago. But plenty of us thought it might not matter. We reckoned Brown could make a virtue of his lack of glitz, offering himself as a figure of rocklike solidity in a fast and often fake world: "Not flash, just Gordon." That approach could have worked. But it was fatally undermined by Brown himself. Having held back for those first three, sunny months, he fell into tricksiness and political game-playing. So he rubbished the Tories' proposed cut in inheritance tax, then copied it. He popped up in Baghdad during the Conservative party conference, promising troop withdrawals from Iraq. The effect was to show that Brown was as much of a calculating schemer as anyone else in his trade - he just wasn't very skilful or subtle at it. Not flash, just a politician.

But it's not only a weakness in political warcraft that counts against him. One year on, Brown has to be judged by his record. In too many areas, he has been guilty of the very triangulation voters had grown so tired of under Blair. He drove through the abolition of the 10p tax band, seeking to win the plaudits of the tax-cutters, even at the expense of the poorest - thereby trampling on his reputation as the champion of the vulnerable. He has trashed the principle of habeas corpus in order to outflank the Tories on security, by locking people up for 42 days without telling them what they are supposed to have done.

After a hopeful start last summer, when he seemed to signal a break from his predecessor, Brown has retreated into a kind of cautious Blairism. Monday's joint press conference with George Bush was a case in point. When he first met the president last year, Brown stood a welcome arm's length away from him, frostily describing their talks as "full and frank". But on Monday, he was in Blair mode, lavishing praise on Bush, insisting that they were best pals with not a flicker of daylight between them. There have been similar retreats into the Blairite comfort zone, or at least indecision, on public service reform.

[BrklynLib at work]

1. At least England does not have to wait for a term to end before getting rid of a PM.

[Captain Hilts]

2. I don't 'get' the transition vis a vis Prez Bush either. Can someone 'splain it to me?

[Bravo Zulu]

3. * lost his poodle but gained a monkey