Letters | 20 June 2009

Built on a lie

Sir: J. Alan Smith (Letters, 13 June) points out that Churchill from 1940-45 was, like Gordon Brown today, ‘a prime minister who was “unelected”’ — as though that should allay concerns about the democratic legitimacy of Mr Brown’s premiership. But the main concern about Mr Brown’s democratic legitimacy is not so much that he is ‘unelected’ as prime minister, but that at the last general election the then Labour leader, Tony Blair, promised expressly on 30 September 2004 that he, Mr Blair, would serve as prime minister for the full parliamentary term

Logically, of course, that entailed a promise that no one else, and therefore not Mr Brown, would be prime minister during the term. But it is worse even than that: when Tony Blair made his promise, everyone understood that he meant, specifically, that Gordon Brown would not be prime minister in this parliamentary term — a direct rebuttal of the Conservatives’ (all too prescient) accusation ‘Vote Blair, get Brown’.