The Prime Minister was interviewed on the Today programme

Above: this village has preserved its medieval stocks, moved from the green and kept in the church behind the font (note the intrusive fire extinguisher - health and safety gone mad).

The Prime Minister was interviewed on the Today programme this morning. Interviewer Jon Humphries talked about the way Gordon Brown has been assailed by critics over the last seven months. He (memorably) told Gordon Brown that he was like a medieval miscreant held in the village stocks and pelted with rubbish.

The Blairs have used the unpopularity of Gordon Brown to try to bolster their own “legacy” (Terry: “The last thing anyone wants is those two shits back again - Gordon might be unpopular but the Blairs were hated”).

Gordon Brown suffers because he is an intellectual in a society that (broadly speaking) no longer values intellectuals. What he tried to do with the tax restructuring was the right thing from an economic point of view, but could not be defended because it was so complex that even his own team of middle-brow front benchers didn’t seem to understand it. And if some of them did understand it, they didn’t have the skills to explain it in simple language illustrated by “stories” (it’s a cliché, but human-interest case-studies are everything).

David Cameron, on the other hand, has learned to hide his intellectual elitism beneath a veneer of “ordinariness” and inclusive down-to-earth imagery (as “Boris” has demonstrated, the height of cleverness is to avoid appearing clever).



Above: Rory Bremner satirising Gordon Brown last Sunday on Bremner Bird & Fortune - the Prime Minister was ridiculed, but the satire hasn’t (yet) reached the cruelty that was meted out to Tony Blair.