I SHOUTED, ‘ANSWER THE BLOODY QUESTION’ – BUT HE WOULD NOT
BEWArE the rambler. Ancient Mariner Gordon Brown was unleashed on a blameless Leicester yesterday. His mission: Save The World (Part III), this time begging Britain to vote for Brussels. Labour’s last leader-but- one had been flown in to speak to an afternoon crowd, replacing David Cameron (retd. hurt). The remain camp calculated that the Prime Minister is now a liability. They realise many Labour voters are angry about immigration and may want to leave the EU as much as the rest of us.
And so the remainers turned to that Great Horse Whisperer of Middle England, that lithe charmer of the English shires – the Broonster. First Nicola Sturgeon, then Eddie Izzard, now grumpy Gordon. Jings, it’s a winning streak.
Alas, Gordon’s excursion was not a resounding success. Having in the morning accused the BBC of having ‘an agenda’ on immigration, he now picked the same fight with The Sun newspaper.
He repeatedly wriggled out of immigration questions (from not only the Sun but also the Left-wing Daily Mirror and Guardian – no doubt they, too, have agendas). I lost patience and shouted at him to ‘answer the bloody question’, but he would not.
He did later say, however, that it was our duty to help solve unemployment throughout Europe. Get that, folks? If the Greeks and Spaniards and Co lose their jobs on account of the euro, it’s our duty to hire them. Now get on with it.
There was high-flown stuff about Nazi concentration camps and how such horrors could recur if we left the EU. He reached for a vaunting tone when he spoke of First World War graves and the Western Front and the Warsaw Ghetto. The EU was a bulwark against such atrocities, allegedly.
This was threaded with personal, comic anecdotes of an after-dinner tone. The juxtaposition was most peculiar.
He spoke for 40 minutes in the slightly poky science block at De Montfort University. Above us were metal-banistered walkways, painted green. Shades of HMP Wormwood Scrubs.
About 100 people had been squashed into an area surrounding a small patch of floor where Mr Brown – introduced by a local MEP – prowled while speaking. He did a lot of groin-thrusting and kept flattening his jacket to show off his barrel chest.
Was he perhaps a little less stressy-vexed by life than in the recent past? Maybe. But if he was more relaxed, he was also excessively garrulous.
He told us stories about Nelson Mandela, Elton John, Oprah Winfrey, George Bernard Shaw, Amy Winehouse, Michael Foot, John Kenneth Galbraith, various Austrian economists, Jacques Delors, and the drunken 1960s Foreign Secretary George Brown.
FOr that last one, he gave us the hoary and apocryphal yarn about tipsy George asking a cardinal archbishop to waltz to a country’s national anthem, having mistaken him for a scarlet woman. He also reproduced the old John Kennedy line, ‘ask not what your country can do for you’. Was this a referendum speech for a troubled remain campaign or was it snatches of some stump speech for corporate dinners?
When recounting such stories, Mr Brown laughed delightedly at his old jokes, the jaw dropping and his shoulders heaving in delight. Mike Yarwood used to do his Ted Heath impersonation like that. The Leicester spectators, being polite, chuckled. But it was hard to see how many of these mouldy tales had much to do with the EU referendum.
At one point he started citing Lulu. I suddenly woke up, but drifted back to sleep when I realised he was talking about Brazil’s ex-President Lula and some jest he had made about how he liked to blame the Americans for all his country’s problems. ‘Ho ho ho!’ roared Gordon at his own anecdotage. From the rest of the room? Silence. Towards the end he told us that he had recently had a DNA test done and it had concluded he was Swedish.
If Stockholm wants him, they are more than welcome.