"for all I care, Mr Brown can be a bean-counting, flak-ducking, procrastinating, tunnel-visioned, trainspotting monster. These are human qualities. I like human qualities. It's vacuums I despise. What is unforgivable is the empty space in Mr Brown's head where an idea ought to be. One big idea, one bold, brave, all-consuming purpose, one gripping sense of political direction, would outweigh all the carping criticisms we may have of Brown the man.
But where there should be thought, there is only calculation...
Forgive my returning to a column I wrote here in September 2005. Recounting the story of the Wizard of Oz, I reminded readers that when the great curtains in the Emerald City were finally pulled back, Dorothy and her friends found... nothing. Just a small, anxious figure who had until then been able to project a big, confident illusion. The (then) Chancellor of the Exchequer, I submitted, “may be hiding a dreadful secret: that he has nothing to hide, nothing to propose”...
...had never heard him say anything remotely courageous, interesting or new. From his table-banging, shapeless speeches not the ghost of an outline of a distinctive political philosophy could be discerned. In interview he was defensive. On the rostrum he was blustering. In print he was opaque. And time and again the claims he did make didn't stack up: there was niggling, small-scale dishonesty in the way he used facts and figures. Watchful, prickly, aggressive, yet in some strange subterranean way (I guessed) scared, I saw in him a paralysing failure of intellectual confidence: a yawning absence of creativity.
What was not absent was ambition. A craving to be boss consumed him. And the result was a bike-shed-style bullying of his parliamentary party: “Join my gang because... uh... we're going to win, and if you're not in the gang you'll get a kicking.” They did join, and now he's Prime Minister."
The last two paragraphs deserve to be repeated again and again:
"Speeches are made and columns written urging the wizard to hurry up and show us his magic. But the wizard hasn't got any magic. Poor wand-less Mr Brown isn't concealing or delaying his abracadabra moment. There's nothing there: nothing to get cracking with, nothing to communicate, nothing to explain.
I think his premiership is disintegrating. With no belief in the human at its centre I doubt the disintegration can be halted or reversed. I think this will become plain by autumn. One way or another, and very possibly before the next election, I think Mr Brown will go."
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