So now we have the defining image of the election campaign: Brown, head in hands, sinking into his seat. It was taken half an hour after he insulted a lifelong Labour voter, and presumably minutes after he realised he had a mild PR crisis on his hands. It is not exactly the image of a dynamic leader, full of energy and ambition, ready to take the country through the recovery.
The scale of this gaffe is unprecedented. Fortunately for Brown, he has a chance tonight to attempt to make amends. The third and final TV debate is his only hope to be able to draw a line under the Duffy affair. It is unlikely he will have much of a chance to tackle it directly, due to the strict rules, but he will have to go on a charm offensive nonetheless. The trouble for Brown is that at the moment, he is more offensive than charming.
The campaign carried on as normal yesterday, though neither Cameron or Clegg need have bothered. They received barely any media, with the entire 24 hour news operation concentrating on Brown, Mrs Duffy and ‘Sue’ – Brown’s loyal aide of two decades, Sue Nye, who Brown initially blames for the ‘disaster’.
With his microphone back on, he has been putting on a brave face at a visit in Halesowen, where he said: ‘yesterday was yesterday, today I want to talk about the economy’.
He’ll be lucky, because the Duffy affair is not likely to simmer down for days, regardless of his best attempts tonight.
For Cameron, this has been a gift. He has had a good week, his campaigners focusing on the problems the country could face under a hung Parliament and offering his party as the only way to avoid political and economic paralysis. Nick Clegg has probably benefitted, too, finally getting the chance to take stock of the last few weeks and take a break from the increased scrutiny that he was facing on hung Parliament pacts.
There is talk that the Duffy incident will put immigration back on the political map – it is a possibility and may well come up in the debate tonight. However, the issue is not as much at the forefront in the minds of the electorate as it was in 2005, not least because so many economic migrants returned home when the jobs dried up in the UK. But it will be interesting to see how this changes things for Margaret Hodge, fighting a strong BNP challenge in Barking.
So tonight will see the final throw of the dice for all Leaders, one week before the country goes to the polls. But only one will have to fight for his actual reputation. Brown has been chewed up by a media age that some modern leaders such as Tony Blair and Bill Clinton understood and were at ease in, even if they did not enjoy it. Meanwhile, the picture of him sinking into his seat was up on some websites and blogs before he had even left the radio studio. As Ben Brogan in the Daily Telegraph wonderfully puts it today: ‘Gladstone never had to put up with this’.
Today’s Polls:
- ComRes/ITV/Independent: CON 36%(+3), LAB 29%(nc), LDEM 26%(-3)
- YouGov/Sun: ON 34%(+1), LAB 27%(-2), LDEM 31%(+3)
- Harris/Metro: CON 32% (-2), LAB 25% (-1), LDEM 30% (+1)
- ICM/Guardian poll of top 42 Lib Dem marginal seats (showing changes from 2005 election): CON 35%(-1), LAB 18%(-5), LDEM 39%(+4)
Campaign activity:
- The third and final Prime Ministerial debate will take place at 8:30pm tonight on BBC1, the focus will be on the economy;
- A group of former civil servants and politicians have written a letter to the Financial Times outlining how the next Prime Minister should approach governing the country;
- Nick Clegg will take part in a Q&A session with students at a college in Birmingham, and will be taking a country walk ahead of tonight’s debate;
- The Lib Dems will be outlining their policies for older people
- UKIP leader Lord Pearson will campaign with Eurosceptic Labour candidate David Drew in Stroud;
- Alex Salmond will hold a press conference on the economy;
- Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell and Shadow Planning Minister Bob Neill will take party in an LSE debate on the future of cities;
- Gordon Brown and David Cameron are both campaigning in the Midlands ahead of tonight’s debate;
- David Cameron will be outlining his party’s policies on cancer drugs;
Newspaper Headlines:
- The Daily Mail – ‘Demonised: The Granny who dared to utter the I-word’
- Daily Express – ‘A hypocrite who shames Britain’
- The Sun – ‘Gillian only popped out for a loaf. She came back with Brown Toast’
- The Independent – ‘Poll latest: Labour loses one voter’
- The Daily Telegraph – ‘Day of Distaster’
- The Financial Times – ‘Brown: That was a disaster’
- The Times – ‘Trouble in Rochdale’
- The Guardian – ‘Brown ‘penitent’ after bigot gaffe torpedoes campaign’
- Daily Mirror – ‘My Gord’s So Sorry’
Reaction:
“The debates will strongly influence any post-election political deals. Electoral math’s suggests there is an outside chance that Labour could come third and yet still win the most number of seats. With Gordon Brown’s position untenable, would the British public allow an outsider, someone who did not even appear in the debates, to become Prime Minister? If not, just three weeks after their debut, the debates will have effectively become a form of constitutional change.”
The Times
“Yesterday was not a good day for the Labour campaign. But it was not a good day for politics either. It was a revealing moment, a snapshot which captures much that is wrong with the whole political environment. And yes, it was a disaster for Gordon Brown”
The Guardian
“All the parties have programs for shunting investment into favored sectors. Only Labour has come closest to articulating an industrial policy which is nevertheless too static. The Lib Dems and Tories need to explain their own ambitions for the state; otherwise voters will cast their ballots without being told what economic choices they have.”
The Financial Times
“There is intense anger among large parts of the electorate at what is happening to this country, and in Mrs Duffy that discontent found its voice. In her encounter with Gordon Brown, she raised the two issues – the deficit and immigration – that have until now hardly featured in the campaign, even though they are of overwhelming concern to millions of voters. Rarely has the gulf between the political elite at Westminster and the people they are supposed to represent been more graphically illustrated.”
The Daily Telegraph
“Mr. Brown’s unguarded remarks have the potential to cause particular electoral damage. First, because they chime with the Prime Minister’s reputation for being rude and short-tempered. Second, because they reinforce a widespread view of politicians as contemptuous of those whose votes they must periodically solicit. And, third, because they demonstrate the extent to which campaigning has become stage-managed. Mr. Brown took it for granted that he should have been protected from awkward customers. If there were more encounters between party leaders and “ordinary” voters, perhaps both sides would be better able to take the less-than-perfect ones in their stride.”
The Independent
“There are at least three reasons that this will have caused Gordon Brown and his advisers such dismay. It highlights a huge gap between the prime minister’s public and his private demeanours. It catapults the issue of immigration to the top of the political agenda. Mrs Duffy had expressed concerns to him about the high level of East European immigration and her feeling that her home town was becoming like “a third world country”. Finally, the leader of the Labour Party has insulted one of the very type of voter it’s so vital for his party to hang on to – older, white and traditionally Labour.”
Nick Robinson, BBC political editor
“I don’t know what the fallout from ‘bigotgate’ will be, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it resulted in a rise in support from the BNP. And I don’t say that lightly. But look at it this way. Brown has not only insulted Mrs Duffy, he has effectively branded everyone in this country who is concerned about immigration a bigot too. Brown and Labour already have a problem with the white working class vote in areas like Dagenham, Barking, Burnley and West Yorkshire. It is those areas where the BNP is already reaping electoral benefit.”
Ian Dale, political blogger
“Gordon was angry because he is a malevolent weirdo, unable to relate people like a normal human being, unable to interpret the emotional signals and body language that we all do instinctively. He is a bonkers, not like an eccentric old aunt, but like a dangerously paranoid political psychopath. Privately aides were grateful yesterday that he hadn’t launched into a foul mouthed tirade or hit anything other than the car “it could have been worse” they were saying yesterday.”
Guido Fawkes, Political blogger
“On the pressures of politics: We should acknowledge that we are in uncharted territory. Consider what we are witnessing. Under pressure Mr Brown says the kind of things that politicians say all the time. A microphone picks it up. It is replayed instantly. And now Mr Brown is forced to have the tape replayed to him while he is on the radio with Jeremy Vine but with cameras on him to record his reaction, head in hands. In under an hour, blunder to firestorm. Gladstone never had to put up with this. Blimey.”
Ben Brogan, Daily Telegraph
“If this election is about character, Gordon Brown’s actions yesterday showed that he is doomed.”
Jonathan Isaby, ConservativeHome
“Note that it happens because he stresses over the trivial and becomes infuriated by anything or anybody that disturbs his idea of himself as a man in iron control. Mrs Duffy was far from the most tricky customer ever to confront a politician. In fact, he dealt with the initial encounter reasonably well. She even said she was going to vote Labour. Calling it “a disaster” was an over-reaction to a fairly humdrum moment on the campaign trail. We see also a glimpse of Brown’s tendency to instantly assign fault for a setback to someone else. Brown’s problem is that this episode shows him acting not out of character, but entirely in it.”
Andrew Rawnsley, political commentator and author of ‘End of the Party’
