Anthony Barnett (London, OK): We are now witnessing the end game. The idea that it will last another year is too excruciating. Just watch this video of Brown! Rarely can a disease have presented itself so unconvincingly as the cure.
And this is a speech that should be made to parliament not to video - its existence is itself a constitutional catastrophe. But Parliament is now thoroughly broken and won't speak out against it. See today's column by Iain Martin in the Telegraph and the comments. As Peter Oborne wrote in a powerful guest column in the Observer (declaration of interest, he quotes me but this is not an incestuous point) Brown made it his calling card when he became Prime Minister to deal with the corruption of the political process. He understood it in a way that Blair didn't. Perhaps that is an added reason why this vid is so hideous to watch, Brown lacks Blair's artless capacity to believe in his own bad faith.
And he laments that young people don't want to enter parliament when a 22 year old is being shoe-horned into a safe seat. After ballot boxes were tampered with and the selection halted Georgia Gould, daughter of the famous Lord, said, "We saw these tactics in the old days in the Labour Party from people who thought they could prevent change just because they don't like the outcome". The arrogance, to present herself as "change" when she is the pure product of a clientalist continuity. And she has not even had the grace to take a year or two in a think tank. Change in these circumstances would be replacing a electoral college of 279 local party members with an open primary. For a close up of what this is doing to the Labour Party read Susan Press in Grimmerupnorth on her experience in Calder Valley and the Mahon affair; "I cannot, in truth, blame her for being sick of the stitch-ups, the smears, and the tactics of those whose arrogance sickens ordinary Labour Party members".
