SNAFU

Same old rubbish

I only managed to catch a few snippets of the Barroso/Brown joint press conference, but it looks like Brown really is out of the game at the moment. This was a much safer environment for Brown, despite the subject matter, when compared to the full assault by the press core earlier in the week, or his Commons destruction, but still he seemed unsure, hesitant and distinctly not Prime Ministerial.

Daniel Hannan's blog post at the Telegraph may be taking it a little far, but it does seem as if the events of recent weeks have opened up a whole new range of psychological flaws in Brown.

Sadly the media kicking I was expecting looks unlikely to materialise, other than in the usual quarters, simply because in essence, bereft of anything useful to say, they fundamentally said nothing new at all. At least someone seems to have beaten it into Barroso's thick skull that the 'R' word is one best avoided entirely by people such as himself whose democratic legitimacy is so thin.

One thing that both failed to do in any sense whatsoever was to add even the slightest semblance of credibility to Brown's almost universally derided position.

What I heard was, frankly, incredibly dull even for someone interested in the subject, and I suspect that was the plan. For more interesting thought on matters Brown a propos the EU treaty, you'd be better off musing on Dizzy's interesting hypothetical.

It sounds quite plausible, but fundamentally it's hard to assess the likelihood of such a play, you'd need to know which Brown has in greater abundance, cowardice or a propensity to cynical opportunism and that's a damn tough call.