April 2009 Archives

GORDON BROWN'S "animated" performance on YouTube yesterday certainly caught people off guard. Whether he was forced to rush out his expenses announcement because minister Hazel Blears "did a Quick" by having her notes on show as she left Downing Street doesn't really matter, although it would explain his rather odd manner on the video. Not enough rehersal time.

But Brown's appearance isn't what bothers me. I suspect most of us would rather have a dour Gordon in charge than Flash Tony, who political commentator Chris Moncrieff today commented could be given "a sow's ear and he would magic it into a silver purse. With Alistair Darling, it remains a sow's ear."
ers to be happy with a no-receipts, money-is-yours-for-just-turning-up system instead?

BACK IN my days as a trainee reporter, I used to supplement my income by working at a large, well-known chain store. An American outfit by birth, each of its huge stores was run on a shoestring budget, but because it had the monopoly in its market, it didn't need to worry too much about customer service.

That is, apart from the when the MD announced he was visiting. His inspections took place about twice a year, and each time the general store manager would get a call warning him of the visit. This would be the cue for round-the-clock shifts for all staff as store rooms were tidied, products were set to plan and staff from neighbouring stores would be parachuted in ahead of the visit.

The purpose of the visit was to ensure the store was being run to his satisfaction, and the MD in question, who more than just a little like Mr Burns from The Simpsons would stride in, a clutch of Smithers-type characters behind him and proceed to walk about the store and the store rooms in search of faults.

He rarely found one (I once saw him crunch the sole of his shoe on a piece of grit in the loading bay before he turned and asked a manager how it got there) and left, generally, quite happy. About 15 minutes later, the legions from neighbouring branches would be on their way too.

At the time, the pending visit was always good news for part-time workers like me - plenty of extra hours, but I did always wonder if the MD really thought he was getting a real picture of his stores by giving a week or two notice of his pending arrival.

The same can be said of ministerial visits. Although the public may only get to hear of a visit when the crush barriers go up outside school/hospital/town hall/upwardly mobile business, the head's up to those directly involved will have happened months before.

SOMEBODY, somewhere, within the corridors of power in Westminster, did a good job convincing Gordon Brown that taking the cabinet "on the road" would help win over voters.

In theory, a blog called "Outside the Bubble" should be full of praise for efforts to get those in power out of their bunker and out into the country.

But as people in all the places where Brown has taken his cabinet on tour will tell you, it's not so much a case of the cabinet climbing out of their bunker as the government simply moving the bunker somewhere else for the day.

PERHAPS the funniest ironies are the ones involving people who don't realise they are being ironic at all.

Yesterday was supposed to be all about Gordon Brown trying to move on from the McBride "scandal" with handwritten letters being sent to the Tories who were apparently to be smeared in the near future.

But it seems a giant penny dropped in the Blairite camp, which still doesn't seem to have got its head around the fact that no matter how badly Brown performs, people would still rather see him in charge than a return to the cultured fakery of the Blair era.

THE DAMIAN McBride affair appears to have been a gift for so many people: It has further enhanced the reputation for blogger Guido Fawkes, it's helped fill newspapers and news bulletins during the normally quiet Easter period and it's just the sort of story the Tories will seek to eek every last drop of life out of.

But in repeatedly demanding apologies from the prime minister for what has gone on, the Tories are in danger of looking their political gift horse in the mouth.

To keep insisting that because McBride reported directly to Gordon Brown, therefore he must have known what was going on, and therefore he must apologise, is both foolish and counterproductive.

IF voters were split up by personal interest, rather than by geography, it's a safe bet those who fell into the commuting constituency would never vote to re-elect the incumbent government.

And that statement couldn't be more true for than for those commuters who have to suffer the battle up and down the West Coast Mainline week in, week out.

The arrival of privatisation of the rail network came with a string of promises about faster train journey times and plush new trains. To be fair to the Government, it has delivered on both of those promises, but massively late and even more massively over budget.

The Government, however, never mentioned that its consultants had failed to take into account that plush new trains travelling at greater speeds would lead to more passengers wishing to go places on these trains.

The closest I got to the G20 summit was traveling to Canary Wharf two days before the seven-hour meeting to save the world began.

Our company had put out a memo, reminding people to be security minded at all times, so it was a little harder than usual to get into the office.

If that's the only impact the G20 summit has on my life, it will have failed, and perhaps that is why holding such an event - and allowing the spin doctors to make a lot of big claims ahead of the occasion - was such a big risk for Gordon Brown (now seemingly known around the world as Prime Minister Brown thanks to his new pal, Barack).

For at what point can the G20 summit be described as a success? It's all well and good for it to be likened to the Marshall plan which rebuilt the world post 1945, but only once it passed into history was it described as a success.

The suggestion by some that the G20 is already a success because it got the 20 world leaders in a room and got them to agree on something is little short of bobbins. After all, them working together for the good of the wider world should be part of the job description, not a noble gesture in times of hardship.