The Spectator’s Notes | 27 February 2010

Last year, this column relayed a story about a civil servant who entered a room containing the Prime Minister and narrowly avoided being hit by a missile thrown by Mr Brown at another official who was departing. It occurs to me that when Mr Brown says that he has never hit anybody, he is telling the literal truth: he always misses.

In his claim of lifelong non-violence, Mr Brown is being disloyal to the grand old Labour tradition of thumping people. His protestations leave John Prescott, who punched a voter in the 2001 election, out on a limb, if that is the right phrase. And Neil Kinnock, Labour leader from 1983 to 1992, used proudly to relate an incident in the lavatory of the Grand Hotel, Brighton, in 1981. He was approached there by a youth who aimed a high kick at him, hurting his elbow. The then shadow education secretary retaliated: ‘I beat the shit out of him,’ boasted Mr Kinnock to his biographer Robert Harris.