Gordon doesn’t get it

Anatole Kaletsky has a cracking column in The Times today about Gordon Brown’s political difficulties. One point is particularly worth noting: Brown doesn’t know how to triangulate. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were geniuses at triangulating because they knew it wasn’t simply splitting the difference between left and right but finding, cliché alert, a third way to address the problem. Brown, however, either goes for straightforward clothes stealing, as he has over immigration, or tries to split the difference between the Tory and Labour positions, as he did on inheritance tax.