Sir Liam Donaldson, Gordon Brown and booze prices. How did that all happen, then? I could find out, probably, but only by asking one of those proper political journalists, you know the ones, who wear shiny suits and mysterious plastic passes, and use the word ‘lobby’ in myriad, self-satisfied ways, as though it were a weapon. ‘You can’t go into the lobby because you’re not in the lobby,’ they’ll say, smugly, before telling you that they spend half their life in the lobby with the lobby, but not lobbying, because only lobbyists lobby. God knows what any of it means. I suppose they’re usually pissed.
But anyway. Sir Liam Donaldson, Gordon Brown and booze prices. Odd. Chronologically, I mean. It seemed to me, as somebody not in the lobby, who wouldn’t know how to do a proper lobby even if he had the right kind of racket, that there was something quite mysterious there. First, on Sunday, word gets out that the chief medical officer, Sir Liam, is about to recommend booze price fixing. Then, on Monday, ministers start saying they aren’t up for it. ‘We don’t want the responsible, sensible majority of moderate drinkers to have to pay more or suffer as a result of the excesses of a minority,’ Gordon Brown said, quite madly.
I say ‘madly’ because this sort of thing suggests that ‘the responsible, sensible majority of moderate drinkers’ are currently doing their responsible, sensible drinking with 70p bottles of White Lightning and suchlike, and it’s hard to see how anybody, even Gordon Brown who probably doesn’t get out much, could consider this to be the case.
It also, as an argument, seems to run entirely counter to basic New Labour political instincts.
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