Gordon Brown & The Thick of It

A lovely catch and telling observation from Iain Martin* on how the Prime Minister’s speech to the Labour party conference was put together and how this exhausted government is, essentially, a real-life satire:

My favourite [part of The Thick of It] is the episode in which, after a Prime Ministerial resignation, increasingly frantic meetings go on all night around Whitehall as various spin-doctors try to find a suitable replacement leader. Well, over to that exasperated Labour aide: “Do you know when the decision was finally taken by Gordon to drop the commitment to debate Cameron from the speech? At 1:30 in the morning on the day of his speech, that’s when he decided. At that point there’s panic. Quick, who has some substance we can use to fill the hole in the speech? That’s when they quickly re-heat the stuff about putting single mothers in state-care homes, and chuck it in.