Brown-Bashing: Decent? Ha ha ha.

Alan Johnson on his evil overlord… sorry! Sorry! My bad... Alan Johnson on Gordon Brown:

"He's not interested in that dimension of politics which people like me kind of like: showing off a bit to the camera. That's not Gordon. But you've got decency, you've got intelligence, and you've got dedication, and I really think those are the important qualities in a prime minister - not some kind of PR exercise on legs."

Which pretty much sums up exactly where Gordon Brown is going wrong. He is not intelligent – at least not in a practical sense – he is not a decent man, and he is not dedicated – at least not to anything other than the furtherance of Gordon Brown. And, more than anything else, he is a PR exercise on legs – he is just shit at it.

Witness the debacle of the election that never was. Brown and his minions flirted with the media over a supposed election last year, only to bottle it when the opinion polls suggested victory might not be 100% certain. It was all PR – just bad PR for the Prime Minister. Or witness the PM on American Idol – he looked like a stilted fool. Or the whole fucking debacle with the Olympic torch… oh, I could go on. And on. But everyone knows it. Brown is shit at PR. When he tries to take the initiative or court the media, it all blows up in his ashen, jowly face. But that doesn’t stop the fella. Relaunch after relaunch after relaunch; each and every one of them undermined by the fact that there is an imbecile at the heart of the project.

There is an image of Brown – not doubt propagated by the monocular git himself – that he is in someway above the fray, and that whilst he may be a bit awkward, at least he isn’t like that Blair. At least he is good and decent hearted. At least he means well. Of course, that idea could best be defined as total fucking shite. Brown is just as nakedly self-serving and PR driven as Blair. The big difference between the two is that Brown lacks Blair’s skill with the media, and every time he tries his hand at spin, it all goes hideously wrong.

Brown is obsessed by the media, by spin, by polls. He is a PR exercise on legs; and he shows the limits of what PR can achieve. No matter what spin Brown demands and what spin he gets, he will be forever undermined by the age old maxim:

“You can’t polish a turd.”