I imagine you're all up to speed on what's been going down today regarding Gordon Brown and the abruptly-famous Gillian Duffy. In case you're not, I'll summarise. In brief, GB was approached by the aforementioned pensioner in (Christ preserve us) Rochdale, and after deflecting her rather forthright views on immigration he fled to his car. Unfortunately, he failed to realise that there was a Sky News mic still attached to his lapel, and once in the back seat he let fly a couple of fairly juicy lines about "that bigoted woman".
What're you waiting for? That's it. That's the whole story.
GB has now spent the rest of his day frantically apologising for this tiny gaffe, whilst Duffy has shamelessly milked her fifteen minutes and, by refusing to accept his immediate press-conference apology, actually necessitated a home visit by GB - let us be clear, one of the G8 world leaders had to go and grovel to this silly old woman because she wouldn't let him off the hook for being rude.
More to the point, why on earth ought he to be apologising? I can count on one hand the number of people who I have met but never subsequently been catty about - it's simply to my advantage that the chaps at Sky News very rarely have me wired for sound. And why shouldn't GB mention to an aide, in private, that he found someone's company unpleasant and their views unsavoury? I wouldn't want to have a conversation with Gillian Duffy.
The villain of this piece is whichever unconscionable little shit at Sky or News Corp decided it was in everyone's best interests to release the soundbite - presumably big papa Rupe is so desperate to regain control of the election that he decided to arbitrarily twist the knife in GB's bruised and broken back. I'm also hugely irritated by the outpouring of emotion regarding Gillian - she's being touted as a salt-of-the-earth Northern grandmother archetype, the sort of slightly grubby but possessèd-of-a-heart-of-gold pensioner who holds the country together. Everyone's carefully ignoring her unpleasantly fruity views on immigrants, not to mention the dizzying ineptitude of her question "And all these Eastern Europeans, where are they flocking from?". Last I heard, they were from the West Indies. Sneaky fuckers.
Ooh, there's more! Twitter tells me that apparently Niall Paterson 'broke the story' (read: snitched to the old lady, like a dirty tell-tale) and is now scolding Emma Kennedy for having the temerity to call him a twat. Which he is. Mr Paterson, you're a twat.
Mr Brown, if you want to call someone a bigot, a yobbo or a snivelling pig-faced twazzock, nobody has more right. Sock it to 'em.
Absolutely spot on. And apparently Newscorp just gave her £50,000 for her 'story'.
ReplyDeleteFuck's sake.
Mind-bending, isn't it? To think, we've got a week to go until perhaps the most important general election in forty years, and a whole day of press coverage has been spent worrying about one woman being slighted. I despair.
ReplyDelete