In spite of Anatole Kaletsky's cunning plan to extricate Gordon Brown from New Labour’s all too obvious malaise, the Chancellor of the Exchequer is a man with substantial, serious, previous form.  It was always going to be a very hard, almost impossible task to put clear, blue water between him and the failed policies of New Labour and his erstwhile co-conspirator, Mr Tony Blair.  A reinvigorated Official Opposition is not about to let him slip off the hook, for a start.  Worse (for Mr Brown, but not for us) like all good, old fashioned villains he managed, to use the vernacular, to “stitch himself up” in an interview, whilst trying to be clever.

 

Mr Brown was “verballed” during an interview by Lally Weymouth of the Washington Post on 14th May 2006.  He was trying to convince the Americans that he was a regular sort of guy,  just like Blair, a man they could do business with.

“If you become Prime Minister, what will be the main difference between you and Blair?” 

asked the interviewer.

 “It's not so much that the method will be so different as the challenges…”

replied Mr Brown.

 

Well that’s fairly clear, then – we shall receive more of the same.  When asked,

“What do you think of the war in Iraq?”

Mr Brown replied,

 “I was a supporter of the war in Iraq.”

And so the interview continues.

 

It has been a favoured myth of the pro-Brown lobby that their hero really never had anything to do with the worst excesses or mistakes of “Blairism” or its methods and much has been made of the differences of opinion, constant battles of will and “feuding”.  In fact it has been plain all along that Gordon Brown was Blair’s willing accomplice in the New Labour project.  The evidence is overwhelming.  Any defence just won’t wash. The public are no longer blinded because the scales have fallen from their eyes.  We have it from the horse’s mouth.