Skipper

I'm sure Brown's staged meeting with Maggie( and God, don't they both look miserable old gits?) was a none too subtle ploy by both parties to de-stablise the Tories and bite a rancorous chunk off Cameron respectively, but the bit which concerns me is his contention that he admires her as a fellow 'conviction politician'. I'm sure no-one would challenge Maggie's claim to such a description- we heard enough of her ranting, strident assertions during the eighties for that. No, the bit I find hard to accept is the inclusion of Gordon in the same category. I've been reading Tom Bower's biography of Brown over the last 10 days or so (I'm a slow reader) and from it, it clearly emerges that:

*Brown was an unreconstructed Old Labourite along with John Smith throughout the eighties and the early nineties: public service funding would be vastly increased, privatisations would be renationalised etc, etc.
* After the traumatic loss in 1992 Brown began, influenced by the American economic model, to re-examine his economic ideas and came to accept, no embrace, the tenets of a genuine market based free enterprise economy.
* Along with Tony Blair, he led the 'modernizer' faction in the Labour Party to create 'New Labour': a centrist political enterprise which entailed convincing voters that 'New Labour' had exorcised every hint of socialism from its beliefs. Brown and Blair began their 'charm offensive' in the City.
*Once in power, Brown embraced many of the Thatcherite instruments including the Private Finance Initiative which has provided such huge benefits to big corporations.

And then we hear, yesterday, that Labour have engaged as advertising agents, none other than the hated Saatchi and Saatchi agency. 'You couldn't make it up' one is tempted to say.

So what kind of 'Conviction politician' are we talking about? Is Gordon still claiming to be a socialist? Probably not, but it would be nice to be told. So is he a New Labour sort of 'conviction' guy? But that would make him identical to the dreaded Blair person, so that can't be so either. So is he a Thatcherite? Clearly not in the sense of cavalier public spending and concern to redistribute wealth. So his convictions cannot be clearly identified, which I rather thought was the basic thing about being such a type of politico. I suspect that the major way in which he resembles Maggie, is an unstoppable thrust to achieve power and hang onto it for as long as possible. But you don't need 'conviction for that, only ambition and ruthlessness.