Jealous at Last?

For once I suspect that the great clunking clumsy fist will be crashing down on a Downing Street desk in a fit of pique.



Yes I apologise to those who cannot follow the dialogue, as there are no subtitles for the French, but in a way it doesn't really matter as its pretty easy to follow the sentiment anyway, at least when you understand that it pertains to a real event. If you don't recall it, it doesn't surprise me, yet it is based on a very real story as detailed in the Sunday Times.

It's not that I'm trying to claim that Sarko is the real life John McLean, and, in fact the original Times article points out that he did milk it a bit at the end, but it did show a sense of knowing what the right thing to do was.

Even given the NuLab spin machines ability to ignore, modify or perform wholesale rewrites of recent history, I suspect they know they cannot top this one. I vaguely remember the original story first time around, but even having followed the French presidential elections quite closely I don't remember it getting that much of a revisiting of it by either side, other than vague allusions.

I suspect that Sarko was confident enough to keep his powder dry, and let's be honest, Ségolène had a snowball's chance in hell anyway, with her Kinnockesque ability to turn every silk purse into a sow's ear.

I can't envisage Team Bullshit's efforts being quite as convincing, in their attempts to present Broon's attempts to stamp out the evil of people saving enough to give themselves a dignified old age without state assistance, in the same faux-superhero style.

That said, given the inability of any serious contender to land a punch on someone for whom any claim to probity, honesty or good-old fashioned decency lies only in comparison to his forebears, means that they really don't have to try that hard.

Gordon got a fairly easy ride yesterday with Marr, yet I won't scream 'BBC Bias'. Lib Dems and Tories alike have allowed him, to an extent more freedom than holding the top job should allow, to dominate the agenda. I'm 95% in agreement with the Conservative agenda, maybe 75% with that of the Lib Dems, but the NuNuLab machine plays so cleverly on the 40% of NuNuLab policy which I either agree with, or at least find hard to be offended about that I find it easy to understand the current 'Brown Bounce'.

I don't want a return to unalloyed 'Punch and Judy Politics' but there are real questions over Brown's abilities and judgement. Even his basic honesty is open to question, not simply over the issue of an EU referendum, but in other ways too, such as the ways he mislead everyone, Parliament included, over the advice he received over the impact of his policies on pension provision.

I have a feeling until the undeserved 'trust me, I'm not Tony' bubble is burst the battle against the Labour Juggernaut will be a losing one. At the moment the heady mixture of cheap ad hominem attacks, statistics twisted to breaking point, and worthy sounding but ineffective policy is working well for Brown, but all the opposition parties seem to doing is to wait for the whole thing to collapse under its own weight.

It almost certainly will but, as many precedents tell us, it could take a bloody long time.