Feeling empathy for Gordon
Let me confess: I have a stressful job, that involves interacting with the public often at inconvenient moments for me, and sometimes, afterward I mutter things about them under my breath, out of ear shot…
I hope this doesn’t make me a bad person. I admit I have a temper – not in a fists and spitting type way – but I sometimes rant to let off steam. So I can’t condemn Gordon Brown (whose situation’s similar but heavily exaggerated) for what he did yesterday – barring the silliness in not realising he had a microphone on.
Those who say “it shows he’s two-faced, he says one thing in public another in private” are talking out of their bums. We’re all two faced, we all put on a polite show with others but then reveal our true feelings with our nearest and dearest.
If any of you have seen the Ricky Gervais film “the invention of lying”, you’ll see the farcical world we’d all live in if everyone told the truth to each other’s face. What do we want, political Tourettes?
It isn’t about if she’s bigoted
Much of the debate is about “is she bigoted?”. I haven’t watched enough of the interview to know whether she was or not, but I don’t see it being the point. He wasn’t making a policy statement about this, it was a private aside, where he was having a go at his spin doctors for putting him in that position – a knee jerk, unthought about reaction.
Had he made a considered public statement calling her a bigot then the debate is relevant. Yet do we really want our politicians to be so anal that every private word uttered must be perfection? I prefer humans to robots.
This is of course a fantastic media story, which is amusing as having worked in many newsrooms and heard stories about others, he’d be thought rather wimpy to use such mild adjectives rather than blue-blooded expletives in a full blown rant. And certainly with much less respect for the public.
In an election time though, minor slips can turn into landslides. It’ll be interesting to see if the polls reflect that.
