Brown in the City

A telling anecdote from Andrew Rawnsley’s book:

Subjects that interested him [Gordon Brown] – such as welfare reform, employment and poverty- received enormous attention. Ministers in areas which did not engage him, such as financial regulation, barely saw him. Ruth Kelly, a young and abl junior miniter put in charge of the City, was labelled a Brownite by the media simply because she worked at the Treasury. In fact the City minister had one ten-minute conversation with Brown a fortnight after her appointment and then did not have another one-to-one conversation with him for two years.

That’s on page 69 and the source is given as “a cabinet minister”. You might, if you were sympathetic to Gordon, try and say that there’s some wiggle-room in that “one-to-one conversation” qualification but that would, I suspect, be an unenviable errand that persuades no-one and achieves nothing except to inspire further ridicule and, perhaps, contempt.