Glasgow East is Brown’s dirty little secret: a hideous, costly social experiment gone wrong

Glasgow East symbolises — as few other places in Britain can — the fact that the problem Labour faces is not just lack of leadership but lack of mission. What is to be seen in this constituency encapsulates and dramatises Labour’s abject failures to comprehend, let alone tackle, the nature of the poverty which grips our council estates.
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When Tony Blair was Prime Minister he used to joke in private that his writ — like that of the Roman Empire — ended at Hadrian’s Wall. Beyond that lay Gordon’s land, a graveyard for Conservatives, home of the murky Scottish Labour party and a press corps whom Mr Blair once described with a phrase unprintable in this magazine. Scotland, everyone accepted, was Mr Brown’s personal fiefdom. As far as Mr Blair was concerned, he was welcome to it.

Like many of the myths swirling around Mr Brown, it is possible he believed this himself.