Mincing His Words
I watched Gordon Brown's intervention in the Labour leadership contest yesterday which amounted to a heavily trailed speech before an invited audience of party members and journalists.
The delivery was strange to say the least as Gordon paced back and forth, like some kind of crazed circus animal, while setting out his key political message which was that Labour had to become 'credible' and 'electable' once again for the party to stand any chance of forming the next government in 2020.
Rather oddly, Gordon failed to mention Jeremy Corbyn by name, even though he had spent 32 years in the House of Commons with this fellow Labour MP, yet there was no mistaking the fact that Corbyn was the intended target of Brown's political attack:
"I have to say that if our global alliances are going to be alliances with Hezbollah and Hamas and Hugo Chavez's Venezuela and Vladimir Putin's Russia, there is absolutely no chance of building a world-wide alliance that can deal with poverty and inequality and climate change and financial instability, and we've got to face up to that fact."
Yet for all that Gordon pulled his punches, perhaps because he feels guilty that much of the personal nastiness that now pervades the Labour Party began in the years when 'Brownite' supporters (Damien McBride and Charlie Whelan to name just two) set out to undermine Tony Blair by labelling their own leader and Prime Minister as a 'Tory'.
In any event, I doubt Gordon's speech will have much effect because it seemed too little too late to me, although I came came across this intriguing quote from Friedrich Durrenmatt who, like Brown, was the son of a Protestant preacher.
How weird is that?
