Gordon Brown - the great pretender

Take a read of Mark Lawson in the Guardian with a piece on Gordon Brown's interview with the ever fawning Andrew Marr. Read the whole article but here is an excerpt:

"But the fascination of the encounter lay in body language. The paradox of Brown's short time in office is that a leader whose champions promised an end to the Blairite obsession with presentation has been forced, by falling approval ratings, to watch himself as assiduously as a man in a hall of mirrors.

There was a sense that hours of thought had gone into every minute of screen time. Brown sat in right profile, keeping from the camera the rugbydamaged eye which can make him look cold and unresponsive . And someone seemed to have addressed the most common criticism about the PM's style - his tendency to twitch when uncomfortable - by deciding that he would It was 'fiscal arithmetic' that led Brown to believe that MPs must accept a pay rise of less than 2% keep as still as possible. The two mannerisms which get the Bremners and the Culshaws instant recognition - the mouth stretching like a competitor in a toff ee-eating contest, and the forehead furrowing as if in sudden fury - were absent during most of the half-hour .

As Brown listened to the questions, his features were so motionless that you wondered if Sarah had given him Botox for Christmas. And, presumably because of the newspaper coverage given to a hand that seemed to shake on the despatch box during one of his parliamentary reversals, Brown's left paw was often employed as a clamp to keep the right in place."