No, since you ask, he wasn’t drunk. I read with some interest that the former Home Secretary had been on the sauce when he told me that the Chancellor’s behaviour last week had been ‘absolutely stupid’ and attacked his suitability for the leadership.
Like Shakespeare’s Menenius, Mr Clarke is well-known as a politician who ‘loves a cup of hot wine/ with not a drop of allaying Tiber in’t’, but on late Thursday morning when we sat down to discuss the revolt against Mr Blair and its consequences, he didn’t touch a drop. What he was doing was something altogether more calculated and dangerous than lashing out after a drink. He was consciously putting on to the agenda one of the most dangerous challenges for a politician — a question mark over his character.
This is not like the routine business of having views and competences put under the microscope. If you are accused of being insufficiently ‘New’ Labour, you can emphasise your devotion to the modernisation of the party, as the Chancellor did with Andrew Marr on BBC television on Sunday.
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