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The news team at the Daily Telegraph can often display a wicked but funny edge when setting topics for the “Your View”discussion board on their web site. Today they came up with a real classic and it being a Saturday, someone mailed questioning whether their aim was to make people choke on their cornflakes.

Apparently and whilst there may be some who are not taking their medication who might say; “It don’t seem a day too long”, come next Friday Gordon Brown will have been Prime Minister for a whole year. The question the DT posed was “What do you think of his first year as PM ?”

A Tidal Wave

…of total abuse would best describe the flood of responses that followed. Some were short and witty, others far more detailed and pained, there weren’t any of the usual “Labour Trolls” either who normally mail in to annoy the mainly right wing readership of the DT so all quite amusing. However I felt that this was clearly all too one sided and sent the following in:

My Input

“I am appalled by all the negative comments concerning our Glorious Leader and his first solid year of achievement. If Blair had still been in charge, being a bigger EU bum suck than Brown, he would have signed and ratified the EU Constitution in a week also, Northern Rock would never have been nationalised because Gordon would have prevented it just to spite Blair. Overall whilst not at his peak, Blair and NuLab would have been in with a good shout at the next election.

Thanks entirely to the heroic efforts of Gordon in his first year, what a hard worker that man is, he has totally destroyed Labour’s reputation for sound money, practical policies and having sufficient talent to form a Cabinet. On the next Cabinet reshuffle, apart from the odious Balls and Miliband, nobody knows who they are anyway and wouldn’t notice any change (of course Straw would survive Armageddon!)

To cap it all and we must give credit for considerable courage here, he ran away from an Autumn election he most certainly would have won in favour of driving the Labour Party into the ground and giving the Tories a +20 point lead in the polls. I don’t know the size of the bung David Cameron gave him but worth every penny. The main problem with Gordon having achieved so much in one year, how can he top it in the next 12 months, he already destroyed the economy when he was Chancellor ?”

It Is Extraordinary…

The British public has a strange collective consciousness that kicks in often, in surprising ways. There is a preference for the underdog and especially if they are being bullied and I suspect that early on, Cameron had to ease off at PMQs because Brown was clearly not up to dealing with it which was odd considering he had been Chancellor for 10 years. Blair had become unpopular and at that time, apart from people like me, few and not even the media, questioned just how good Brown had been as Chancellor so the public were very prepared to give him a chance to make his own mark which he duly did.

The Tipping Point

I suppose there will be those that argue that in fact Brown was the “Patsy left holding the bag” by Blair and that it was the sudden reversal of the global economy that has damaged him most but, whilst there is some truth in that, it is not the real reason for his fall from grace.

The real “tipping point” was the Autumn election that never was and the events that surrounded it. You can go into the ins and outs of it all but the simple truth is that whilst he might have got away with cutting and running by itself, combining it with the obvious lies he told about his intentions after he had abandoned the idea neatly packaged him as just another “lying spiv” like Blair.

Whilst being dour and taciturn maybe be totally acceptable in a Chancellor, it just won’t work with being a Prime Minister. When the economic picture turned against him, because he lacked any personal charm and charisma, he could not be seen as the brave underdog battling to do the right thing, he was the bullying creep who was getting his just deserts.

As I have written previously, I suspect that Brown has even given up on himself as “The Labour Leader”and his policy is to try and minimise the damage he has inflicted on the Labour Party through a “scorched earth” policy to frustrate and make life as difficult as possible for an in-coming Conservative Government. The more difficult he can make it for them to start to implement even the smallest of their election manifesto promises, the more awkward he can make them look, the quicker the public might become disenchanted with them, the faster Labour can recapture “power”.

I Would Rather Be Wrong…

I would love to think that when Gordon Brown talks about only going for one election and then stepping down before the next, he genuinely imagines that both he and the Labour Party are in with a shout at the next election but if so, he is bonkers. I suspect that he actually is going for a scorched earth policy, the EU Constitution was the proof. If he wanted to be popular with the electorate and showed that he was “actually listening” to them, he would have handled that differently and earned lots of support right across the political spectrum by taking a “You Will Decide” approach.

The EU is not a pressing issue for the average voter right across the EU, both the “Pro and Anti” camps seem tired and tawdry so there is no political mileage to be got from adopting either path, the game has moved on and left even both the French and German Establishments way behind.

The Irish voted the Lisbon Treaty down for one simple reason, the document is deliberately incomprehensible and as such, all it generates is total mistrust and whilst Ireland was the only one to be allowed to vote because their Constitution requires it, apart from Belgium and Luxembourg, a NO vote would have been the result in the vast majority of EU countries if they had had a vote.

Happy Anniversary Gordon

That Gordon Brown is so out of touch with the Zeitgeist on Europe is not a major problem, most EU Presidents, Prime Ministers etc are too, they live in a modern equivalent of Versailles before the “Revolution”, “Let them eat EU Directives” just doesn’t play any more across Europe. That he is totally out of touch with the British electorate though is, very concerning. Given the “Mid-Lothian Question” and Gordon Brown being within that, why have we not heard any positive comments on it ? It is rather like an unmarried mother having no opinion upon being an “unmarried mother”.

For us who are right of centre, your first year has been a great boost and we thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Twelve months back, if you had called that election, 5 more years of you, further unsettled Tory ranks, who knows how long it would be before the Right could get power back ? Wholly thanks to you, although a hung parliament is still a possibility, there is absolutely no chance of another Labour Government for a decade or two.

I have always betted that this Parliament would go “full term” – May 2010 but increasingly, I suspect not, it could be the Autumn of 2009, you having been deposed as Leader by early in that year. The Labour Party may well decide to hand the whole economic mess you have created to the Tories to sort out early so that they can concentrate on rebuilding the party for a serious assault in 8-10 years hence.