"What a phoney"

Having listened to PMQs live today but not able to blog, I find that the blogosphere and the MSM are in uproar over David Cameron calling Gordon Brown a phoney. Now the context is important, David Cameron was contrasting Gordon Brown's return to quoting from third parties with Gordon Brown's comments, as reported by me yesterday that:

"I personally have always said that modern politics, with its focus on who said what, when, how and why, is far too divisive for the problems that a country's got to meet"

Yesterday I wrote:

"So the politician who has made a career out of attacking the opposition, both in other parties and within his own, with ferocity and from dredging up old quotations from opponents at almost every PMQs says that

"I personally have always said that modern politics, with its focus on who said what, when, how and why, is far too divisive for the problems that a country's got to meet"


The word chutzpah comes to mind along with the phrase - is he f***ing serious? If Gordon Brown seriously believes what he said then he must be delusional, otherwise he is just telling yet another Brownie. "

So for David Cameron to call Gordon Brown a phoney for the sheer two-faced way he went against what he said in his Guardian interview seems more than fair to me; maybe "liar" would have been closer to the mark.


Of course the BBC and others are up in arms at the effrontery of David Cameron, indeed the Guardian go into full prim Auntie mode with this:

"The barb from the Tory leader is all the more remarkable since Brown had prefaced his remarks by talking emotionally about the death of Cameron's son, Ivan, three weeks ago."

I blogged about Gordon Brown's commiserating at the time and said that

"I just didn't buy it yesterday, Gordon Brown is not a nice person and he hates "Tory toffs". He may be able to hide it for a week or two but it seems too apparent that he viscerally hates the Conservatives and sees it as his role to keep them out of power for ever. Underneath his expressions of sympathy he and his team will be judging how best to benefit from the situation. Gordon Brown is not above using the death of David Cameron’s child for political advantage, he runs an unpopular government that is presiding over the economic collapse of the Country, he will not shirk from finagling any small political advantage out of this situation that he can."

It looks as though the Guardian are working the angles for Gordon Brown.


The other part of David Cameron's questioning that I liked was his use of the word "bunker"; it seems likely that David Cameron was alluding to the "Downfall" videos that are all over Youtube; I still think the best is the one I blogged about last December, here's a welcome reprise of the house price crash one, as it is now worse than under the Tories.



So at PMQs we had a weak, blustering Gordon Brown having to be protected by the worst Speaker of the House in living memory and the BBC concentrate on the rebuke to David Cameron. The BBC seem to have bound themselves so tightly to the Labour party that they will have to continue to do all they can to keep them in power; and as the economy slides further and further into the mire that will require more and more blatant bias. The next 14 months should be interesting and if I were David Cameron I would be planning what form my revenge against the BBC should take, and any revenge would have to be taken very very swiftly once elected, because the BBC will be attacking the next Conservative government from minute one.