‘How the Guardianistas changed their tune,’ was the heading to a Sunday Times factbox published in the paper last weekend. The intention was to mock those Fleet Street columnists, erstwhile fans of Gordon Brown, who have turned against their former hero. ‘Only five more dreaming days until Gordon Brown’s coronation,’ the famously independent-minded and fiercely left-of-centre Brown loyalist, Polly Toynbee, was quoted as having written a year ago. ‘Brown’s first month looks like a striking success,’ Jonathan Freedland, always a thoughtful and progressive voice, had written a month later. Hopeful, trusting voices, both.
No longer. ‘On current evidence he is simply not up to the job,’ thought Mr Freedland on 18 June this year. ‘It is not just Gordon Brown who looks like a dead man walking,’ remarked Ms Toynbee (13 June), ‘Labour now looks like a party of zombies.’
All good fun. Those who execute U-turns in British media commentary must expect the same mockery as awaits any politician who does the same, and both Toynbee and Freedland have broad enough shoulders to shrug off the abuse. Elsewhere in that newspaper Simon Jenkins widens the attack to include a range of commentators who ‘were euphoric at Brown’s advent a year ago’, and ‘now dismiss him as useless’. ‘They carried him to power on a chariot of golden expectation. Now he is down in the polls they beat him senseless… It is politics as horror-movie.’
It is, in short, becoming fashionable among journalists to chart — in tones of surprise and shock — the rapid turnaround in the Prime Minister’s reputation among the media and political class.
I was rather looking forward to joining the gleeful chorus. I never did think much of Brown because whenever he spoke one had the sniff of a man of limited courage or imagination: frightened, unadventurous and a bully.
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