The end of Gordon

Even commentators previously supportive of Gordon Brown think they’ve got it wrong. Why so, and what does this say about the importance of the media?

Today’s Guardian contains a critical attack on Gordon Brown by the columnist Jonathan Freedland.

It states that he is simply not up to the job of Prime Minister.

Here is its central claim:

“The most obvious skill gap is in communication. Brown always delivered a speech like an automatic weapon, but his admirers preferred not to notice. They imagined that the wittier, thoughtful man they knew in private would somehow reveal himself to the public once he became prime minister (even if he had never broken surface before).

That has not happened. Brown still reads, rather than delivers a speech, his head down. He does not seem able to deliver three or four plain, human sentences that anyone could understand. The result is an empathy gap: he does not seem able to show any to the electorate and so they don’t feel any for him.

None of this should have come as a surprise: the lack of presentational skills was visible a year ago. But plenty of us thought it might not matter. We reckoned Brown could make a virtue of his lack of glitz, offering himself as a figure of rocklike solidity in a fast and often fake world: “Not flash, just Gordon.”

That approach could have worked. But it was fatally undermined by Brown himself. Having held back for those first three, sunny months, he fell into tricksiness and political game-playing. So he rubbished the Tories’ proposed cut in inheritance tax, then copied it. He popped up in Baghdad during the Conservative party conference, promising troop withdrawals from Iraq. The effect was to show that Brown was as much of a calculating schemer as anyone else in his trade - he just wasn’t very skilful or subtle at it. Not flash, just a politician.”

This suggests that it is okay for a politician to be scheming and conniving so long as they don’t appear to communicate this to the public. Or at least get away with it. It suggests that a PM must be built for the 24 hour media age, where his every move is replayed and dissected not just by TV, radio and the print press, but also the internet. Macmillan spoke half a century ago about the unforgiving eye of the camera, which followed a PM’s every move. He got off lightly compared to what a modern PM has to face.

Brown it seems is unable to play the media game. He has failed to come across as the apparently warm, sincere, and humorous man those who are his intimates claim he is.

I think it’s sad that the extent to which the modern politician can control the media is such an important part of the cv.

It’s sad because what the Tories are offering is not substantially different to what Labour are offering. And certainly David Cameron is not offering anything substantially different compared to 10 months ago. But the public perception of Brown and Cameron has been turned upside down.

Who the electorate “likes” based on a fuzzy notion of personality and perceived competence is enormously important. I wonder where it will end. After London voters projected Boris into City Hall, could things get any worse?

Read the rest of Freedland’s article here