LOOKING TIRED, if not utterly exhausted, after some of his worst days in office, following his accidentally-taped insult to a lifelong Labour voter in Rochdale on Wednesday, British prime minister Gordon Brown last night mixed contrition with steely determination in a last-ditch bid to turn around Labour’s flagging election campaign.
Unwilling to risk letting Conservative leader, David Cameron, or the Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, to score points off him about his description of pensioner, Gillian Duffy, as “a bigoted person”, Brown moved in his opening remarks to neutralise the issue.
“There’s a lot to this job. And as you saw yesterday, I do not get all of it right. But I do know how to run the economy, in good times and bad.”
Equally, Brown used the advantage he enjoyed by being the last one to make concluding remarks both to underscore the threat Labour faced to its place in power and to lambast his opponent by declaring that in eight days’ time, Cameron, “perhaps supported by Nick Clegg”, could have taken over in No 10 Downing Street.
“I have got to tell you that things are too important to be left to risky policies. They are not ready for government,” said Mr Brown, at the end of the third and final TV leaders’ debate.
A ComRes poll for ITV News directly after the debate put Mr Cameron as coming out on top, closely followed by Mr Clegg.
The threat posed by the Liberal Democrats to both the Conservatives and Labour was underlined throughout the 90-minute debate by the number of times both Brown and Cameron focused on Clegg’s policies and past comments.
Under the onslaught, particularly about the Liberal Democrats’ plans to offer an amnesty to immigrants in the UK for a decade or more, Clegg occasionally faltered, forced to interject repeatedly, “Let me explain . . .”
In the wake of the Duffy debacle, immigration has moved centre-stage in the final days of the campaign, and some polling figures hint the far-right British National Party is gaining support.
Cameron, who must reduce the Liberal Democrat surge in support to have any chance of a majority government, declared: “It is perfectly clear that the Liberal Democrats do want an amnesty.”
Not only that, he said, but the illegals, if subsequently granted citizenship, would be able to “bring in a relative. That just doesn’t make sense”.
One could almost hear the Tory whoops in the corridors around the thronged press centre.
Clegg sought to explain, arguing that hundreds of thousands were already in the UK illegally – they should, he said, be brought into the tax net, if they had obeyed British laws since they arrived.
Brown declared, “I agree with David.” Both men know that an increased vote for the Liberals in 150 marginal constituencies could decide matters when the public goes to the polls on May 6th.
Despite repeated questions from the audience, none of the party leaders, predictably, gave a full account of the cuts that will be made after the poll, no matter who wins.
However, they will not have needed to be reminded, as they have been by Bank of England governor, Mervyn King, that whichever of them wields the knife risks being out of power “for a generation”.