There is now no doubt that Gordon Brown’s verbal exchange with a voter today, his private reaction and his subsequent difficult apology will be, for the media, the biggest “story” of this, the most important election campaign in decades. The main channels will lead their news bulletins on it. The newspapers will splash it across their front pages. The British arm of the Murdoch empire, in particular, will go wild. (I wonder what delightful discussions are going on at the Sun right now.)
And of course it was bad. Gillian Duffy seems well informed and decent, and did not, relatively speaking, express “bigoted” views, though her concerns about controlling immigration are a right-wing talking point. I am also relieved that Brown — who all too often joins in the right-wing orgy on the subject — showed a bit of passion and admitted that he found anti-immigration rants “annoying”. But, for Labour strategists, the genie of Brown’s private temper is out of the bottle.
However, the Prime Minister’s many opponents should not be too quick to rush to judgement, and assume — as one said to me today — that it is “game over”. As Adam Boulton has been pointing out on Sky News, the public sometimes reacts differently from the media. Ordinary people probably do not obsess about whether Brown is “exhausted”, for example — certainly not as much as middle-class, fluffy columnists do.
And the scene where the cameras moved in on Brown being replayed the painful clip at a radio studio may look all too much like bear-baiting to some, as will the bizarre scene of journalists physically making Mrs Duffy stick around, when she plainly wanted to walk away, and demand the inevitable apology (now delivered, not just by letter but also on the telephone, according to Downing Street). The Tories are hoping Labour’s ratings will fall as a result of this human mistake. We shall see.
PS: To those who think that to suggest there may be a backlash against Brown-baiting is somehow aiding Labour “spin”, I would point out that not only did I highlight Brown’s temper in my last post, as I frequently do, but also that, as I write, the Spectator‘s Fraser Nelson is condemning Brown on Sky News.
I wonder if he would be doing the same thing if it had been David Cameron caught expressing a burst of rage off camera.
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