Lady Scotland: Brown has failed us punters

Stumbling across a radio phone-in yesterday and listening to what us ordinary voters have to say about Lady Scotland's crimes and misdemeanours, it is clear that Brown has failed to understand the public disgust with what has been going on.  It is not only him.  Mandy has also failed his so called master in mistakenly mixing up personal circumstances with professional judgement.

Mathew Norman, after sweeping away the Lib Dems in three paragraphs, deals with what is fast becoming known as “cleanergate”.  First, he rightly lays into the Cabinet Secretary:

No one would expect this government and its apparat to respect the precepts of natural justice themselves, so one can hardly fake astonishment that cabinet secretary Gus O'Donnell – a man with larger stocks of gleaming white paint than Dulux – cleared her of breaching the ministerial code in half the time it takes Usain Bolt to run downstairs.

Although the maid had scarpered before the immigration thugs smashed down her front door for the benefit of attendant press photographers, it would have been nice had Sir Gus waited for her capture and affected to listen to her version before coming to his judgment. Purely for appearance's sake. After all, this poor, frightened woman has been accused of forging official documents. So by acquitting Lady Scotland solely on her own evidence, Sir Gus implicitly convicts the maid of an imprisonable offence.

And then to the rub of it:

The arrogance inherent in this is surpassed only by the sheer exhaustion that explains her ladyship's survival. Gordon Brown cannot have been unaware for a moment that keeping her is a colossal political mistake.

Unless Sarah Brown has a phalanx of Marigolds-clad Filipinas chained to the No 10 basement walls, the only plausible explanation is that, what with finding trophy cabinet space for his World Statesman of the Year award, he no longer has the energy for domestic trivia of the kind.

This is precisely the point.  Brown is too focused on strutting the world stage rather than having a feel, as a leader should, for how this plays out on Main Street.  As discussed, Brown can’t win however “cleanergate” ends.

As Norman correctly concludes:

But it is as an unwitting, yet richly talented, seamstress that I will remember Patricia Scotland. In knitting together the myriad of flaws that will soon drive Labour from office, Baroness Scotland has produced nothing less than the Bayeux Tapestry of her party's demise.