Peter Hoskin

Brown comes under heavy fire on Today

Woah. I doubt Brown will endure many tougher twenty-minute spells during this election campaign than his interview with on the Today Programme this morning. You could practically hear the crunching of his teeth, as John Humphrys took him on over Labour’s economic record; practically smell the sweat and fear dripping down his brow. It was compulsive, and compelling, stuff.

Humphrys started by putting a grim story to Brown: that his “handling of the economy was not prudent … your record suggests that the economy is not safe in your hands.”  The PM’s mission was to deny all this, and he did so with his usual stubborness and disingenuity.  His pitch here was all about inflation: about how we’d avoided the high inflation of recessions past, and how we should be grateful for that.  Indeed, I lost track of how many times he said “inflation” around the 25 mark.

But Humphrys spotted the trick. 

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