Ostensibly, Gordon Brown’s first Labour conference speech as Prime Minister on Monday was grandly non-partisan: there was not a single mention of the Tories or of David Cameron. In practice, the Conservative party generally, and Mr Cameron specifically, were present in every line.
Though presented as a lofty civic oratory by the father of the nation, this was in fact a brutally partisan speech by an expert Scottish machine politician. Everything was achieved by implication, but heavy implication.
First, Mr Brown presented himself as a sort of Sarkozy from Fife, translating ‘love France or leave it’ into an extended discourse on playing by the rules, British values, the need for migrants to speak English and ‘British jobs for British workers’. As one of the PM’s allies told The Spectator in July, part of Mr Brown’s strategy is to turn his ‘pathologies into assets’: that is, to transform perceived weaknesses into strengths. It was widely assumed, for example, that his Scottishness would be a liability when he became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. In fact he is now using his Kirkcaldy roots as a weapon with which to contrast himself with the metropolitan elite of London, and to align himself with all those who live outside the capital.
So, too, Mr Brown’s battle to save his own eyesight — aided by the NHS — became a metaphor for the struggle of life in which courage and effort are rewarded. He started from the premise that life is tough for most people — no Cameroon ‘General Wellbeing’ here — and that he could identify with that spirit of struggle.
What he really meant was: I understand how hard life is, what it is like to earn everything you have — unlike the foppish, privileged, callow amateurs in the Tory party who dare to presume that they can run the country.
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