Gordon Brown - orator or fool

Matthew Parris has an excellent column on Gordon Brown's recent speech to the EU:

"I've just read one of the worst speeches by a British prime minister it's been my misfortune to encounter in 40 years following politics. Wilson had folksy evasiveness; Heath, wooden principle; Thatcher, tin-eared persistence; Blair, slimy charm. In every case you could tell why they'd got the job, even when you hated what they were doing with it.

But this? This hole in the air encased in a suit of clunking verbal armour? This truck-load of clichéd grandiloquence in hopeless pursuit of anything that might count as the faintest apology for an idea? Words fail me.

They certainly failed Gordon Brown, addressing the European Parliament this week. No wonder everybody's now watching the MEP Daniel Hannan's riposte, uploaded on to YouTube - for the sheer, blessed relief of finding anyone still standing as the grey ash came bucketing down.

Where shall I begin? Shall I bother? Is he worth it?

...

Enough. There's something wrong in our politics, something big and bang-in-the-middle: a howling question that is not about the global economy at all. It's about domestic leadership. It's about Mr Brown. He isn't any good. He's failing. He's embarrassing. He's dreadful. His colleagues know this. Yet they are gripped with a terrible fatalism, sliding towards election defeat as though catastrophe were unavoidable."

Do read the rest, the usual masterful stuff from Matthew Parris.