April 28, 2010
Gordon’s Gaffe? How politics makes hypocrites of us all.
Today Gordon Brown called a woman a “bigot” when he thought he was off-air. Here’s the video, courtesy of gloating Paul “Guido Fawkes” Staines:
Staines is predictably having a field day. Like most of the Tory blogosphere, Iain Dale is predictably wallowing in schadenfreude:
“Put Gordon Brown with ordinary members of the public and it was bound to end in tears. He has just been caught on mic calling a woman he had just had an encounter with a “bigoted woman”. Her crime was to question him about core Labour party policies. She had always voted Labour but was deeply unhappy. In the clip I heard, she said nothing which could be said to be ‘bigoted’. Interestingly, Brown’s first instinct was to cast blame to whoever had got him to talk to her. He called it “ridiculous”.”
Brown’s gaffe however reminds me of the issues I raised last week about political hypocrisy, and how fiendish a thing it is. Let’s start from the top.
Is Brown a hypocrite for calling a woman, whom he’d just been nice to on camera, a “bigot” when he thought he was off camera? At one level obviously so: surely if anything counts as hypocrisy, it’s being nice to someone’s face and then saying the exact opposite when you think they’re out of earshot.
But is this the sort of hypocrisy we should or can condemn…without being hypocrites? The answer is pretty obviously no. To say otherwise, we would have to entertain the belief that (say) Nick Clegg or David Cameron don’t sometimes complain in private about the people they’ve just met in public. It’s only human to whinge, after all. When you’re on the campaign trail in a very stressful election, letting off steam when you think you’re in private is what everybody short of sainthood does. What’s special about the case of Brown is that he got caught. Clegg, Cameron and pretty much every other politician in the world will have done what Brown did – they were just alert enough to check their mics were off first.
Accordingly, the Tory condemnation – ironically centering on the claim that Brown is a hypocrite – is itself utterly hypocritical. It could just as easily have been Cameron caught out today. Imagine: a gay activist challenges him on his party’s lack of tolerance for homosexuals, and when D-Cam gets into the waiting car he mutters about “the whining gays”. Hardly beyond the realms of possibility, is it? So the Conservative assault on Gordon Brown stinks of hypocrisy because they all know it could just as easily have been their man instead.
But it doesn’t end there. Because we all know this is politics. What matters, ultimately, is precisely who gets caught. If it had been Cameron putting his foot in it, I and the rest of the left-wing blogosphere would be whooping with pleasure. So in calling the Tories hypocrites for calling Brown a hypocrite, I guess that means I am also a hypocrite. Except that I just admitted it, so maybe now I’m not. Or maybe that’s just what I want you to think.
Steve said,
April 28, 2010 at 4:10 pm
I reckon Gordon thought in relation the eastern Europeans, she said ‘where are they all fucking coming from’ In fact she said ‘flocking’ !!
Peter said,
April 28, 2010 at 8:03 pm
And of course, if that had happened to Cameron, I’d be laughing my ass off (I assume you would be too). So that’s another example of political hypocrisy!
Gotta take the rough with the smooth. If the boot were on the other foot, the left-blogosphere would be having great fun, so I guess it’s fair that the right have their laughs today.
Paul Sagar said,
April 28, 2010 at 8:04 pm
Peter,
As I often say to my trolls: it’s helpful if you read the whole post before commenting…
Peter said,
April 28, 2010 at 8:13 pm
Haha, you’re quite right. Or at least, read slower!
Gordon Brown is the worst sort of Hypocrite « Left Outside said,
April 29, 2010 at 12:17 am
[...] the above hypocrisies Brown is guilty as charged. But frankly speaking Paul has things right, Gordon Brown is a hypocrite, but only as far as any other politician ever has been. There’s [...]
captain swing said,
April 29, 2010 at 6:48 am
Paul me old mucker, just in case you don’t go on Liberal Conspiracy today.
From captain swing:
@ paul sagar
Blair was: ‘the most gifted politician of the past 30 years except for Bill Clinton’. What? More gifted than Thatcher?? Than Reagan, ‘The Great Communicator’?? I don’t see many people fighting over his legacy, saying ‘I am the heir to Blair!’.
Compare & contrast with the Tories and Thatcherism (and I detest Thatcher). He is now one of the most discredited & disliked figures in public life in Britain. Even New Labour consider him poison as shown by his solitary appearance in the election campaign. Gifted? Really??
And what do you mean by ‘gifted’? That he had some charisma, a nice smile, was a bit like a sleb and won three elections? What did he do with those victories? We all know the answer to that, we’re standing amongst the ruins and will be paying for his ‘gifts’ for decades. Go and ask the Iraqis if they think Blair was ‘gifted’.
Your definition of a ‘gifted politician’ seems to be a reductio ad absurdum of “errr…well he had a bit of charisma, was a good performer and won three elections”. I won’t draw the obvious historical parallel, let’s just say I’d rather have a dull, old duffer like Clement Atlee that a ‘gifted politician’ like Blair any day. And Rawnsley was one of his biggest cheer-leaders.
I won’t go into all Blair’s wars, and he was the greatest war-mongering PM we’ve had in recent times. Let’s just say I am opposed to that amorphous and noxious concept ‘liberal interventionism’ and I don’t really think you are. But then I am a mere mortal and you: ‘happen to have the political and analytic acumen to be able to make basic distinctions and employ a functioning concept of nuance’ (this condescending, de haut en bas, amour-propre style is a hallmark of your site. Keep it up and in 20 years time you could be the new Hugo Young, or Simon Jenkins)
But despite all your gifts that you modestly list you don’t really want to commit yourself on Blair’s wars cos it’s a bit ‘complicated’ like….Yeah…right….
My position is the same as that of the elder-statesman of columnists Alan Watkins, to wit: “if we still had National Service we would not get involved in wars because the children of the middle-class would be in the army”. Quite. Maybe even you! (I don’t really see you in Elvis Costello’s word as being one of: ‘the boys from the Mersey and the Thames and the Tyne’)
‘As it happens, I opposed the Iraq war’ Good for you Paul! So did I and a few others too.
‘I think Rawnsley got that call very wrong.’ Me too! And I just went to a secondary modern while Rawnsley was a product of Rugby and Oxford. But I won’t hold me breath and wait for the products of state schools to replace the Oxbridge mob as political columnists.
You’re educated aren’t you Paul? I see you references to “my first masters” and “my proposed PhD” on your site. But you can overdo this and end up like John Redwood or Oliver Letwin. Some cynics say an intellectual is “someone educated beyond the limits of his, or her intelligence” But I’m sure this doesn’t apply to you Paul.
So I’m a ‘Dunning-Kruger case study’ eh? I admit I had to look that one up, because I did only go to a sec-mod and I’m a prole
I have to be frank here. I was disappointed. It smacked of a university students common room in-joke, type-gag. But then I remembered your site which is pretty much like a university students common room with students politics too boot. In fact if I had to sum up your site I’d paraphrase Henry Kissinger: “University politics are so vacuous precisely because the stakes are so small.”
Toodle pip!
From the Common Room said,
April 29, 2010 at 10:32 am
Yes, it’s a terrible, terrible thing to be an “intellectual”. I, myself, have been educated so far beyond the meagre limits of my intelligence that I am simply unable to produce the sustained invective that characterises Cap’n Swing, or to remove any trace of nuanced argument and issue a vicious ad hominem (I don’t know what this means but it sure sounds smart) attack.
If only I had the salt-of-the-earth common-sense to see through all of Paul’s interesting analysis and reach the undoubted conclusion that he is just a public school twat. Of course if I’d reached that conclusion I’d have managed to say it in three words rather than a hundred. Oh, and without all the pseudo-intellectual quoting.
Liberal Conspiracy » ‘Should have never put me with that woman’-gate said,
April 29, 2010 at 10:35 am
[...] What’s truly appalling about Brown’s words is not that he called Ms Duffy a bigot: as Paul and Matthew point out, all candidates have badmouthed voters behind their backs at sometime, maybe [...]
Paul Sagar said,
April 29, 2010 at 11:02 am
Just for the record I didn’t go to public or even private school. I went to a normal comp until I was 16, and then the local state sixth form college.
I do find it wonderfully hilarious that people so often assume I must be posh on the basis that I use long words and went to Oxford.
Paul Sagar said,
April 29, 2010 at 11:09 am
Dear Cap’n Swing,
Did you stop to consider that I may have been rude to you in response to your telling me to ‘stick to writing prolix bollocks on your own site son’? At the risk of sounding childish, you started it and it’s a bit rich to piss and moan because I threw some invective back in your direction.
Nonetheless, none of your substantive replies here actually deal with the points I made over at liberal conspiracy, so there seems little point in my repeating myself.
Glad you find the site so irritating. I must be doing something right – if everyone liked it then that would mean it was bland and boring.
Cheerio squire.
Paul Sagar said,
April 29, 2010 at 11:29 am
ps regarding Elvis Costello, I actually grew up on Merseyside – admittedly in Southport, which is north of the River, but it’s funny how class-based assumptions can be rather off, isn’t it?
Peter said,
April 29, 2010 at 12:14 pm
Loving Captain Swing’s attempts to be prolier-than-thou here.
If you don’t think that Blair was a gifted politician (most gifted is more difficult, as comparative judgments often are) you’re an incompetent witness to how the world is.
Bad Conscience said,
May 7, 2010 at 4:01 pm
[...] at dinner with a bigoted bore of a boss. But it’s just another way that politics makes hypocrites of us all. Thank God I won’t have to do it again for a couple of years, and can instead go back to [...]
Ignorant Sensible Voters? « Bad Conscience said,
May 28, 2010 at 7:33 am
[...] that’s just another way that politics makes hypocrites of us all. But it may also be a chance for Blair’s protegé to be the thing many leftists and Labour [...]
La plus ça change « Bad Conscience said,
July 6, 2010 at 7:32 am
[...] debarred because they are EU citizens, this does not stop popular hatred being directed at “flocking” eastern Europeans. The main political parties compete to show how tough they are on (non-EU) [...]
Pointless or Damaging, and Depressingly Boring « Bad Conscience said,
November 23, 2010 at 11:58 pm
[...] skilled foreign labour – but at poor ethnic minority communities in inner cities, or “flocking” Eastern Europeans – is rather besides the point. What the Tories need is a concrete [...]