David Blackburn

Lance Price: Brown became PM when his skills were declining

Gordon Brown is a creature of habit. Every morning at 7:30 he holds a telephone conference with his cabal of Shakespearean fools, who review the papers for him. I imagine a scene of domesticity, of coffee and muffins, an adoring wife and child milling about offering tactile affection – a hand on the shoulder, a kiss on the head. But then again Brown is a latter day John Knox and this morning he must have sat in pale fury as an aide summarised the extract from Lance Price’s latest book, published in the Independent.

Price, Andrew Rawnsley and Peter Watt share the same lexicon. ‘Unforgivable’, ‘not a nice place for people to work’, ‘psychologically flawed? It doesn’t come close’, ‘self-pity’, ‘bottler’, ‘reign of terror’, and ‘psychologically and emotionally incapable of leadership’. The picture of Brown is conflicted as his remoteness and self-pity compete with stridency – as if Rowan Atkinson had pretensions to being Attila the Hun.

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