DAVID CAMERON led a sustained and highly personalised assault on Gordon Brown yesterday, confirming the Conservative Party’s intention to make the prime minister’s leadership an issue all the way to the general election.
Accusing Mr Brown of losing control of his own cabinet and presiding over “a government in terminal decline”, the Conservative leader also challenged him to follow the example of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair after four years in power by calling that election now. “No one doubts he might have come in to politics for the right reasons, but isn’t it clear he’s just not up to the job,” Mr Cameron said.
“The public know it, his party know it and now the cabinet knows it, so why not do the last bold thing that’s left to him – call an election?” The alternative, he said, was “a wasted year with an utterly busted government”.
Brushing aside the fresh embarrassments and public relations disasters of recent days, Mr Brown said he was “getting on with the business of governing” and “ashamed” of the Conservative Party’s treatment of the Commons. Noting Mr Cameron’s failure to use his permitted six questions to ask anything about the economy, or the problems faced by home owners and businesses, Mr Brown accused him of having “nothing to say about the big issues of the day” and reducing everything to personalities.
But that cut no ice with Mr Cameron as he launched an even more painful attack on communities secretary Hazel Blears, citing her weekend article apparently joining in the mockery of Mr Brown’s YouTube appearance and criticising the government’s “lamentable” failure to communicate.
Seizing on this as evidence of Mr Brown’s declining authority over his own ministers, Mr Cameron said: “Given she is openly mocking you and your authority, what’s she still doing in the cabinet?” Mr Brown replied that “what would be lamentable” would be for the government to adopt the Conservative policy “for doing absolutely nothing” about the economic crisis.