Remarkably prescient blog post about Gordon Brown from 2004

Max Atkinson on Twitter has drawn my attention to this piece that he wrote about Gordon Brown and what a disaster he is as PM. He absolutely nails the major flaws that have led to his downfall and how the Labour Party were crazy to just allow Brown to become PM by default.

Oh, and he wrote the piece in 2004, 3 years before the handover even happened! No newspaper would publish it at the time though apparently.

Here's a snippet:

For at least two decades, viewers and listeners have had put up with the sight and sound of politicians treating interviewers’ questions as prompts to say anything they like, regardless of what they were asked, or as yet another opportunity to dodge an issue. As an exponent of how to carry this depressing art to its limits, Gordon Brown has no serious competitors among contemporary British politicians. When he was still shadow chancellor, one commentator noted that if you asked him what he had for breakfast, his most likely response would be ‘what the country needs is a prudent budget’ – and that would merely be the preamble to a lecture about his latest thoughts on the matter. I recently asked one of the BBC’s most experienced and best-known presenters what it was like to interview him. His answer was rather more outspoken than I’d expected:

‘Brown answers his own questions, never the interviewer's, and is utterly shameless. He will say what he wants to say and that's it. And he'll say it fifty times in one interview without any embarrassment at all. I've never met anyone quite like him in that respect. I once spent 40 minutes on one narrow point and still failed to get him to make the smallest concession. He's extraordinary and is never anything but evasive and verbose.’

It is one of the most prescient pieces I have ever seen (in retrospect) and it is well worth reading the whole thing.