John Rentoul writes a typically-perceptive piece in the Independent on Sunday, doubting that Gordon Brown will ever seize back the political initiative. For Rentoul, Brown’s major problem is that he’s not engaging in “the drama of a dialogue in his own defence” – mainly because he hasn’t identified a position to defend:
“If he was a ‘change’ from Blair, what had he changed to? Brown himself made a telling mess of answering that question on the BBC’s Politics Show last weekend. ‘The changes that we are making are to recognise that the world has changed over the last 10 years. We didn’t have the environmental problems we have now. We didn’t have the global restructuring; we have got it now. We didn’t have the sense of rising aspiration.’ In each case: oh yes we did.
If Brown is ‘the change’, he has not changed to something more left wing, as another howl of anguish from Polly Toynbee, keeper of the social-democratic flame, confirmed last week.
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