'Can Gordon Brown handle the real world, honestly?'

Hugo Rifkind in masterly form in The Times:

'I worry, a bit, about what’s going to happen to Gordon Brown. When they let him out, I mean. People serve a life sentence in jail; they come out and the world is a bit baffling.

When Gordon leaves Downing Street, that’s surely how it’s going to be. All those new things he’s going to need to worry about. Keys. Broadband connections. The gas man. And honesty.

It’s the latter that worries me particularly. I started thinking about this on Wednesday, when he apologised for misleading the Chilcot inquiry over defence spending during his time as Chancellor. Because planet politics, I reckon, is actually quite a forgiving place. “I do accept,” the PM told the House of Commons, “that in one or two years, defence expenditure did not rise in real terms.” And that seems to be the end of the matter. Even though it wasn’t “one or two” years at all. It was four.

Call me a pedant, but “four” isn’t a bit like “one or two”. It’s at least double. I mean, demonstrably. And out in the real world, you just don’t get away with pretending the one is the other. Think about what’s going to happen the first time he goes to Tesco on a Sunday morning, to pick up some brunch. “I have one or two bagels,” he’ll say, plonking down his basket. “But you have four bagels,” the checkout man will say. And what’s going to happen then?

Because what won’t happen, you can bet, is the former Prime Minister blushing, and admitting that yes, actually, he does have four bagels, but he was pretending to have fewer for his own personal advantage. No. Either he’ll flatly deny the existence of the latter two bagels, while doing that weird thing with his jaw, or he’ll try to pretend they’re only nominal bagels and he’s planning on setting himself a legal obligation to give them back in a fortnight. It won’t work. He’ll get carted off. '

Masterful stuff.