This is why people dislike politicians

There is a revealing snippet on Iain Martin's Wall Street Journal blog today. It highlights how the decision to drop the agreement to a TV debate from Gordon Brown's speech was taken and the consequences of that decision. An exasperated Labour aide said:

Do you know when the decision was finally taken by Gordon to drop the commitment to debate Cameron from the speech? At 1:30 in the morning on the day of his speech, that’s when he decided. At that point there’s panic. Quick, who has some substance we can use to fill the hole in the speech? That’s when they quickly re-heat the stuff about putting single mothers in state-care homes, and chuck it in. At… 1… 30… in the morning of the speech.

So the "bring back the poorhouse" stuff was thrown in at the last minute. No wonder it did not sit well with the rest of the speech and had so many holes in it.

I expect that in the end this idea will be quietly dropped but not before Brown has forced his ministerial colleagues and other underlings to go out on the media and make fools of themselves trying to defend this re-heated and ill-thought through nonsense.

And all so that he could save his announcement about the TV debate until the day before the Tory conference in order to try and cut into their news cycle. This was a rubbish idea anyway as his very belated acceptance of the gauntlet thrown down by Sky News and already picked up by his two main opponents reflects quite poorly on him. It was pretty obvious he was going to accept given all the briefing so its effect was minimal. Also Brown has clearly learned nothing from the debacle a couple of years ago when he flew to Iraq during the Tory conference to announce troop withdrawal. That rebounded on him and made it look like he was playing politics with the war. It was was one of the reasons why he bottled the election. Why does he insist on these risible tactics?

It is exactly this sort of thing that makes people dislike politicians so much. The politicians think they are being oh so clever but people are not stupid and can see through it.

Brown has shot himself in the foot - again!

Back in January I posted about how for all Brown's supposed political acumen he seems to have a knack of shooting himself in the foot.

I cited the examples of the government's bullish predictions for the economy recovering from recession half way through 2009 (although announced by Darling he was doubtless a cipher for Brown). This always seemed very unlikely and they will have these predictions thrown back at them time and again in the run up to the next election. I also referred to his constant claims to have abolished "boom and bust" through years of boom until we hit the bust.

My point was that he always seems to favour short term tactical advantage over the opposition to properly thought through strategic positioning. They are also usually hitched to hostages to fortune.

It has happened again in the last few months. He has been banging on for a while now about how there will be global action to tackle the crisis and took every opportunity to rub David Cameron's nose in the "fact" that mainstream world opinion was with him and his fiscal stimulus plans. From my perspective it was never clear to me that world opinion was on board with him and it has become ever clearer in the last couple of weeks that world political opinion is moving against him (e.g. France, Germany and a fair proportion of the political classes within the US although Obama is still vaguely with him).

The G20 which was being puffed as a great event to sort the problems out has been downgraded again and again through his rhetoric to now being something approaching a photo opportunity which is all it will really be but it is too late. His previous attempts to spin the meeting are already on record and it will now inevitably be a damp squib.

I just wonder how many more bullets he will be allowed to fire into his own foot before he gets stretchered off the field of battle.