MARK SIMPSON .com

After yesterday’s disastrous Nantwich by-election defeat for Gordon Brown by David Cameron’s resurgent, re-branded, made-over, moisturised Tories, which came hard on the heels of the drubbing the Brown One received a few weeks ago in the English local council elections, the media - and a substantial part of the Labour Party itself - is now baying for his head.

I hate to say I told you so.

But I told you so.

Twenty months ago, in the dying days of Tony’s Premiership, when the media was getting all excited about Leader-in-Waiting Brown and giving rave reviews to his dreadful speech to the 2006 Labour Party Conference - and dissing Cameron - I predicted that His Brown-ness couldn’t win the next election:

The delivery of his speech yesterday was full of visual proof of this. I have no idea what Brown is like in the flesh, but on telly - i.e. the real world - Brown looks like a loser. Dead, hooded eyes which offer no contact with the audience or the camera, choreographed but strangely ill-timed, clawing hand movements and weird goldfish-like gulps at the end of each line. After nine years of Tony’s glamorous drag queen charisma, he looks like a particularly deluded punter auditioning for X-Factor while Simon Cowell pulls faces.

Brown may well, as he says, ‘relish’ the opportunity to ‘take on Cameron’, but Cameron looks increasingly likely to simply sweep him aside. After a couple of years of Brown-ness the electorate will stampede to elect the smooth, moisturised, green-ish manipulator Cameron, someone who knows exactly what we want to hear and how to coo those sweet nothings in our ears. By then he’ll be seen as Tony Blair without Iraq. Tony Blair without the TUC. Tony Blair without the haggard face.

Tony Blair without Gordon Brown.

Of course, Brown has been rather unlucky of late. But then, politicians are supposed to make their own luck. Or at least tell us stories we want to hear - and want to believe. Brown has proved singularly, catastrophically unable to do this. And it was staggeringly, appallingly obvious all along. True, things could perk up for Brown before the General Election in a year or so.

But I don’t think it very likely. Do you?

Excuse me, but who is our Prime Minister? No, really, who is he?

Yesterday I saw a dour looking Scottish geezer who looked like he’d spent too long working in the basement of a bank give a painfully awkward speech outside Number 10 about the changing need for change and how he will try us to his utmost, before grimacing for the cameras and scurrying inside. People tell me that he’s now our leader for at least the next couple of years.

That’s funny, I don’t remember voting for him at the last election. He wasn’t even elected by his own Party. And didn’t he rule out, just before he became our unelected PM, the possibility of a referendum on the new EU constitution/treaty? I get the feeling that whoever this guy is, he’s not exactly a great democrat.

Judging by his performance outside Number 10, one he’s had ten years to prepare for, I can see why our new PM might not be keen on public scrutiny - or elections. He’s never going to win any popularity contests. Odd also how after all the coverage of the handover from Blair to Brown in the last few weeks, not to mention his ten years in No.11, we don’t really have any idea who this man lording it over us is - or much real curiosity. His name could be Gordon Beige.

Yes, I know the official line. I know that we’re not a Presidential Democracy, that we supposedly vote for parties and not persons, but, frankly, that’s a tosh, and everyone knows it. It was already tosh in 1997, but ten years on it’s tosh on toast. As far as most voters in this ‘press your red buttons now’ age are concerned, Brown is someone who managed to rig the phone-voting and end up winning X-Factor (albeit the lower-rating, digital channel political version).

A ‘cabinet of all the talents’ as proclaimed by Brown won’t disguise the fact that his own talent as a leader in an age of mass media is hidden under a bushel. The more people are exposed to Brown’s charisma-deficit - and on TV he looks like death defrosted - the more they will rebel. Brown can talk as often as he likes about ‘the end of celebrity culture‘, and pray that people will be glad to be rid of Blair’s Hollywood ways, but it won’t change the fact that in this mediated age politicians have to be actors and performers who have to offer us - however simulated, however faux - intimacy. And have hair that doesn’t look like it’s been styled by a 1970s local authority.

Enter, stage-right, glistening with hair gel, moisturiser, and bottled shamelessness, whispering sweet nothings in our shell-likes, David Cameron who has successfully metrosexualised the Tories, and made them a more desirable, wearable, and almost shagable party.

Adding to New Labour’s woes, Brown is not just dull and unelected he’s Scottish - and representing a Scottish constituency. Not because the English are now plagued with Scotophobia (Scottish people are much more popular in England than the English are in Scotland), but because the Scottish are able to elect their own government. And a Nationalist one committed to independence at that. While the English are not - and Scottish MPs, like Brown, continue vote on English-only issues. Every time our Prime Minister opens his mouth it will remind English voters of their disenfranchisement.

Brown is aware of this. That’s why he plans to introduce a ‘British Day’. Which, of course, is not for Scotland or Wales: they would, anyway, have no truck with such arrant nonsense now that they are busy being Welsh and Scottish. It’s aimed squarely at England and the English. At keeping them deprived of their own identity and under the thumb of a Scottish-led New Labour dependent for power on Scottish votes. It’s not ‘Britain Day’ at all, but ‘Brownish Day’.

Not to worry though - it will probably be cancelled due to lack of interest.

Gordon Brown, Labour’s leader-in-waiting, can’t win the next election. This week’s address to the Labour Party Conference might as well have been his speech conceding victory to David Cameron.

Why is Gordie such a liability? Not because of the disdainful verdict of dodgy Newsnight focus groups, or his recent impatient unleashing of political-suicide bombers on Number 10, or even because his Conference speech with its liberal use of the word ‘aspirations’ sounded like that of an ambitious TUC chief, but because he’s such a bad liar.

The proof? The most embarrassing, excruciating lie from that speech – “It has been a privilege for me to work with and for the most successful ever leader and Labour prime minister” – has dominated the coverage of it.

That it should have been Cherie Blair, wife of the most successful ever lying Prime Ministers in British history who pointed this out to the world is entirely appropriate. After all, she must, by now, be something of an expert. She was though entirely right when she claimed she was misheard: she didn’t say, ‘Well, that’s a lie.’, you see. What she actually said was, ‘God, you’re such a bad liar’.

Certainly, we all squirmed and tutted when we heard him. It may or may not have been an endorsement that was wrung out of Gordon by the application of a hot poker to the Chancellor’s red box, but it was definitely torture for the rest of us. Even though Tony has yet to relinquish the reigns of power, and despite the fact that we’re all, in one way or another, as tired of him as he now looks, it was difficult watching Brown’s near-autistic delivery not to feel like we were missing Tone already. A feeling only enhanced by Blair’s Hollywood performance the following day, complete with his trademark, quavery-voiced sincere insincerity and impressively shameless use of the word ‘truth’ in the first few seconds of his final speech to Conference.

Those who complained that ‘Blair lied to us!’ after it emerged that there those Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq were so fiendishly well-hidden that they, er, actually didn’t exist at all, slightly miss the point. It’s his job. Tone has been so successful and so popular for so long precisely because he lies, and lies so well. Even after he has been caught lying in Lying Town, as with Iraq, he comes up with other lies that are equally if not more persuasive, or at least momentarily diverting. He was, if you remember, re-elected with another thumping majority after the criminal Iraq debacle.

Iraq aside, Tone usually tells us the lies we want to hear – and he tells them extremely convincingly. That’s what a politician’s job is. That’s what we elect them for. That’s what ‘aspirations’, the things Brown kept referring to in his speech, really are. Otherwise known as ‘illusions’. It’s the basis of most relationships. Like most suffering wives, however, what we don’t like and will not tolerate is having our faces rubbed in it . This is why the Hungarian PM and Blair pal Ferenc Gyurcsany got into such a pickle. Not because he lied but because he admitted – even behind closed doors – that he lied.

Admitting he lied is not a mistake Blair is likely to ever make. Blair’s special talent, the thing that puts him ahead of most other politicians, certainly in British political history, is that he can convince himself his lies are literally the god’s honest truth, at least for as long as he’s telling us them. And – truth be told – in his mind, he never actually ‘lies’ to us at all. He’s an actor – an actor of the Stanlislavsky school: the emotion he shows us is ‘true’, it’s just usually attached to something that is not. This is why he’s such a great performer and politician – we appreciate and are flattered by the energy and the psychosis he puts into his performances. He is a great manipulator. (His final tear-jerking address to the Labour faithful demonstrated that.)

Brown on the other hand is a great operator. And operators, unlike manipulators, are painful to watch. They resent having to manipulate us and we resent having to watch them resenting having to manipulate us. Tony is Princess Di to Brown’s Prince Charles. Brown, who tells us he is ‘quite private’ and who prefers ‘substance over celebrity’ as if these were reasons why we should be interested in him, clearly wants power but he doesn’t really want to become the thing that power is in this mediated day and age: an actor. He won’t be forgiven for that by the electorate/audience. Clearly he will lie and lie to get the top job and to keep it – he has already proved this to us by carefully parroting Tony’s lies about Iraq, for example – but unlike Tony he won’t do us the courtesy of lying convincingly, let alone entertainingly.

The delivery of his speech yesterday was full of visual proof of this. I have no idea what Brown is like in the flesh, but on telly – i.e. the real world – Brown looks like a loser. Dead, hooded eyes which offer no contact with the audience or the camera, choreographed but strangely ill-timed, clawing hand movements and weird goldfish-like gulps at the end of each line. After nine years of Tony’s glamorous drag queen charisma, he looks like a particularly deluded punter auditioning for X-Factor while Simon Cowell pulls faces.

Brown may well, as he says, ‘relish’ the opportunity to ‘take on Cameron’, but Cameron looks increasingly likely to simply sweep him aside. After a couple of years of Brown-ness the electorate will stampede to elect the smooth, moisturised, green-ish manipulator Cameron, someone who knows exactly what we want to hear and how to coo those sweet nothings in our ears. By then he’ll be seen as Tony Blair without Iraq. Tony Blair without the TUC. Tony Blair without the haggard face.

Tony Blair without Gordon Brown.
© Mark Simpson 2006