What Gordon Brown and Sarah Palin have in common

Gordon Brown and Sarah Palin are not two politicians one thinks of as having much in common. But reading Robert Draper’s New York Times magazine essay on Sarah Palin’s political organisation and Rachel Sylvester and Tom Baldwin’s piece on Brown’s Downing Street I was struck by the similarity between the two at least in terms of being disorganised and the boss’s refusal to delegate.

It was a reminder of how much of politics is about organisation, about having the right team in place. Of course, no operation is perfect. The Blair one, which was far better than Brown’s, had its own imperfection as Andrew Adonis sets out in his review of Jonathan Powell’s book. But if the current Downing Street takes one things from The Times’ write-through of New Labour it should be the importance of setting up government to deliver the reforms that you want.