It is official: Gordon Brown has run out of things to cover up. The Prime Minister whose reputation for double-dealing has flourished of late is now facing a crisis of confidence, as he searches for new departmental policies and secret deals to hide or to deny ever existed.
Brown is currently defending himself from claims by the Tories that he mis-led parliament during a month-long campaign in which he accused them of planning 10% cuts to public services. A recently leaked Treasury document shows that at the time officials were themselves forecasting 9.3% cuts.
The Prime Minister's determination to move away from the spin of Old New Labour to the straightforward lies of New New Labour has undoubtedly borne fruit, most notably in the case of the Al-Megrahi release where he denied that an oil deal with Libya was in any way involved. Since that time, Brown has more or less universally been acknowledged to be a double-dealer.
But is it possible that time is running out for the man who has governed Britain for the past two years on a diet of untruths, cover-ups and denials? Can there be anything left to hide for the man who is assumed to be lying almost every time he opens his mouth nowadays?
Perhaps, the man who started out as he meant to go on when he denied back in 2007 that he was planning an election, could have just one more card up his sleeve. The ultimate denial for this Prime Minister would be the denial that there is going to be a general election in the next nine months and that he is going to lose it. But in the case of Gordon Brown it is not totally inconceivable.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Nothing is ever inconceivable in the case of Brown. You could have mentioned the case of Damian McBride, the man whom he hired to slag off the opposition and then claimed shock when he heard that McBride had done exactly that.
ReplyDeleteBrown has been rigging / fiddling things for years - even when he was Chancellor. His definition of headline inflation was a total con and allowed the housing bubble to occur. This is because he would not allow house price inflation to be included in the figures. Therefore monetary policy was effectively oblivious to the overheating housing market.
ReplyDeleteAdd to that PFI and the off balance sheet nature of much of our debt. Brown has not been straight over levels of debt for years
ReplyDeleteHow exactly would you expect the Tories to do things differently?
ReplyDeleteOr is Cameron going to be Thatcher mark2 and confront the unions?
The Labour MP for Folkestone has just said publicly:
ReplyDelete“Top of the reasons for the euro [elections] disaster must surely be the Government’s failure to honour its Manifesto pledge to call a referendum on a New European Treaty. Such serious pledges once given must never be denied.”
Brown's going to like that.
Another example of his double dealing
They're all at it...
ReplyDeleteExpenses scandal anyone?
The thing about Brown is that it looks very much like his lying is pathological
ReplyDeleteWe have a broken political system and none of the main parties have any real strategy to address this.
ReplyDeleteThe system itself can never offer anything radical enough to tackle this country's problems, thus we are left with a 'best of worst' choice
Brown's lying is not all that's pathological. Apparently he's on lots of medication...
ReplyDelete