Honestly, Gordon

Since his brush with political death, Gordon Brown has made ‘candour’ his word for the month. So it was extraordinary to hear how brazenly the Prime Minister distorted the truth in his address on Tuesday to the GMB’s conference in Blackpool: a thunderous campaign speech which sought to draw the sharpest of ‘dividing lines’ between virtuous Labour and wicked Conservatives.

Using the age-old New Labour technique of the anecdotal case study, Mr Brown congratulated his government for saving the life of ‘a woman called Diane’ who had written to him to thank him, he said, for ensuring ‘that there is proper breast screening in the National Health Service’. Yet the PM somehow neglected to mention how appallingly patchy screening remains for women aged 50 to 70 and how coverage for screening of those aged between 50 and 64 actually declined between 2001 and 2008. He scorned the supposed Conservative dogma ‘that says that you must cut public services in order to fund inheritance tax for the richest people in this country’ — apparently forgetting that he himself bounced Alistair Darling into increasing the allowances for inheritance tax in October 2007 in a panicked response to George Osborne’s popular proposals to allow us to hand more of our wealth on to our children.