Blog
Brown eggs: pick of the papers
23rd March 2008
Continuing the theme from earlier this week about Gordon Brown, the focus here is on two excellent articles from this weekend’s Observer
I think both of these articles will help Politics students make sense of their studies and will hopefully also reveal how the subject knowledge built up in the classroom is important and relevant to understanding how our country is goverened.
The PM is apparently working furiously hard within Number 10 to get his premiership back on track. According to one article:
“As the opinion polls worsened, Brown worked ever harder in a futile attempt to get on top of things - one civil servant was astonished to get an email timed after 4am - and became sucked directly into trying to orchestrate his own PR.
‘On a daily basis he worries about the running order on News at 10, and if his initiative is running lower than the Tories’ someone gets kicked,’ says one Whitehall source. ‘He’s the Prime Minister, he should stand back.’”
The fact that Brown may have his office running more smoothly but doesn’t appear to be able to change public perception about his level of competence is the subject of Andrew Rawnsley’s weekly column:
“Last week’s session of the cabinet ran so over schedule that the stomachs of hungry ministers were grumbling for their lunch by the time they were told they could go. It made some of their number almost nostalgic for the days of Tony Blair when cabinet meetings could be so brief that there were occasions when ministers barely had time to gulp down their coffee before being shown the door. This was a ‘political cabinet’, so called because civil servants are sent out of the room so that ministers may discuss not what to do with power, but how to hang on to it.
Stephen Carter, the Prime Minister’s powerful new chief of strategy, introduced the cabinet to the idea of smashing up the usual ritualised discussion around the table and splitting ministers into smaller groups. ‘Breakout sessions’ are long familiar in the world of business from where Mr Carter came, but they are something of a novelty in Downing Street. The groups were set fiendish problems to solve, such as: how do we make a virtue of being in power for more than a decade and how on earth do we win the next general election? It will not surprise you to learn that they did not produce the definitive answer; they were hardly likely to in one morning. But Labour has little more than two years before it must find an answer or lose power.”