A torrid week for Brown, stiletto & all

14 June, 2009 16:15:00

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It was the sort of week in British politics that cartoonists and headline writers would die for

Hasan Suroor

And, sure enough, they went simply berserk at the sight of a charmless, unloved, grumpy leader sink deeper and deeper into the hole while insisting: “I will not waver”!

As Prime Minister Gordon Brown struggled to hang on to his job in the face of a nasty party revolt, he was caricatured as a “dead man staggering” with knives (or were they daggers?) sticking out from his back; a “twitching corpse” being wheeled out of a “cabinet” (alluding to his shambolic cabinet reshuffle), a stunt man dangling from the Big Ben; and a Julius Caesar-like figure blinking at his assassin and asking: “Et tu, Brutus?”

The Times even managed to anger some of its readers with a front-page cartoon of Mr. Brown dressed up as Susan Boyle, the fellow-Scottish singing sensation who needed psychiatric attention after crashing out of a TV talent show. And, it is a measure of how much Mr. Brown’s stock has fallen, that their criticism was not that the newspaper had ridiculed him by showing him in a woman’s dress (and with “hairy arms” to boot) but that it had sunk to the level of “caricaturing Susan Boyle as Gordon Brown”!

A nervous Times (in these difficult days when people are deserting newspapers without provocation even The Thunderer can’t afford to offend those who pay to keep the Murdoch empire afloat) urged its upset readers not to lose their sense of humour over what was, after all, just a silly cartoon, for heaven’s sake. And, “Hang on everyone. The butt of the cartoon wasn’t Susan Boyle. It was Gordon Brown. We were ridiculing him. Those were HIS hairy arms, not her,” explained The Times feedback editor Sally Baker pleading with readers to get the joke.

If the cartoons were cruel, the headlines were no less brutal and dramatic. Most read like breathless blurbs from a cheap thriller with references to “stabbings”, “murder weapons”, “guns”, “knives”, “secretive meetings in dark rooms” and “blood-letting”. Day after day, newspaper readers woke up to front pages dripping with gore-and-blood stuff: “Brown knifed”, “Drive to flush out suspects”; “A Pugin Room plot to oust Prime Minister” (a reference to a House of Commons bar-lounge where women ministers allegedly plotted against Mr. Brown) and “The smooth assassin strikes”.

The ‘smooth assassin” was James Purnell, a high-profile Cabinet minister who dramatically resigned late one night in what was seen as part of a plot intended to spark a wave of more ministerial resignations to force Mr. Brown to quit. Excited political pundits called it the “last nail in Gordon’s coffin.” But, as often happens in thrillers, the plot didn’t quite go according to plan. With Mr. Purnell’s accomplices developing cold feet at the last minute, Mr. Brown survived the night. It was dubbed “The Great Escape” for him.

Meanwhile, the Daily Telegraph led with the banner headline “Stiletto in the heart of Brown” the morning after Caroline Flint, the glamorous (now former) Europe Minister with a taste for sharp suits and high-heels, resigned accusing Mr. Brown of “sexism.”

Mr. Brown has been called all manner of things but this was perhaps the first time that one of his female colleagues had publicly accused him of being “sexist.”

In one of the mostly-widely quoted resignation letters of the week (in case anyone missed, more than half-a-dozen ministers quit within hours of each other after falling out with their boss), she said that Mr. Brown treated his women ministers as “little more than female window-dressing.” She suggested that two other ministers — Jacqui Smith and Hazel Blears — who quit before her had also been victims of Mr. Brown’s “sexist” attitude.

Example: he singled out Ms Blears for public criticism over her expenses claims while giving a clean chit to his male ministers though they had been guilty of similar behaviour. And then there were those anonymous Downing Street briefings about the so-called “Pugin Room plot” by female ministers and MPs.

“In the wake of the timing of Hazel Blears’s decision to leave, the Westminster rumour mill started up about a conspiracy, a ‘Pugin Room plot’; so much so that I had to appear on television to kill the story. The sad thing is that it almost certainly originated from people who see themselves as allies of the Prime Minister,” Ms Flint wrote in a Sunday newspaper.

Ms Flint — with Ms Smith and Ms Blears — is part of a group of women MPs dubbed “Blair Babes” for their loyalty to Tony Blair, the former prime minister, and are now branded “WAG” (Women Against Gordon) by Brown loyalists. In recent days, Ms Flint has emerged as a symbol of what the media with its own mix of sexism sees as the Westminster “Sisterhood” trying to fight Downing Street’s “laddish” culture.

Beware, Mr. Brown, stilettos can hurt.