Our Dismal Politics: Charlatanry and Deceit All Around

Fraser rightly draws our attention to the highly entertaining extracts from Peter Watt’s book published by the Mail on Sunday. Granted the whole enterprise is accompanied, as is traditional in these matters, by the sound of many an axe being ground and some of the details – to say nothing of the quotations – are close too being in the too-good-to-be-quite-true camp. Nonetheless, the general spirit of the thing seems persuasive.

So it’s worth highlighting another, minor, passage that actually doesn’t have anything to do with Gordon Brown at all:

Some of our politicians could be touchingly naive. During the 2001 General Election campaign, some bright spark came up with the idea of campaigning at motorway service stations, to show we were so determined not to take votes for granted that we had Ministers campaigning on the way to and from their higher-profile appearances. The main photo opportunities were at Fleet services on the M3, and we arranged for Tessa Jowell to call in on the way back to London from an event in Dorset.