Mary Ann Sieghart has written a comment piece in today's Times which isn't particularly bad about the whole "Blair/leadership" thing. Interestingly she quotes an unnamed Minister referring to Tom Watson by saying that he was "playing student politics with the future of the Labour Party. It’s just pathetic, pathetic. What idiots we’ve got!"
However, there were two quotes which leapt out at me when I read this piece because, well, they seem to me to be hideously wrong. Firstly, she says that "Unlike Margaret Thatcher in 1990, the polls don’t suggest that he is an electoral liability; his likely successor, anyway, is no more popular." Errrr.. which polls has she been reading that say that?
Secondly she says that the comment on the matter made by Blair yesterday was "widely agreed to be masterly". Was it? it looked like aman shaken to the core and utterly out of touch with his own party and the world that was falling down around him to me and many others. True he did kind of give a big "f*ck you" to Brown, but "masterly"? Surely not?
3 comments:
Mary Ann (wrong on this, as so often) has been in love with Tone for years, so you have to pity her, really.
In the last days of Margaret Thatcher, the Tories were 12 points behind Labour, and the polls showed that, if Heseltine took over, they would be eight points ahead. In other words, she was a personal electoral liability. Now, the polls show that replacing Blair with Brown will make little or no difference.
Thanks for commenting Mary (I'm pretty sure it really is you as I checked the tracking logs), if it wasn't then it was somebody in your office having a joke.
For me there's a problem with what you say though. It seems that you're re-defining what you mean by liability to fit in with your argument (an argument which I should add I do not disagree with when it's self-contained).
However, in your published column that's not actually the argument you seem to have put forward (although I acknowledge you might believe it was).
In your column you actually made two independent statements.
1: Blair is not an electoral liability like Thatcher was.
2: Gordon Brown doesn't look like he'll do much better anyway.
The first is patently not true. Labour are behind in the polls. Blair is an electoral liability. The second statement, whilst accurate, could also be quite easily stated as "Brown is an electoral liability as well".
If, as you say, you were actually making a comparison between Heseltine and Brown I'm a little confused as to why you didn't just say so.
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