Straight talk

Why is Gordon Brown so unpopular? There are of course a number of factors, including luck - Blair was P.M. during an economic boom that was partly global, partly the legacy of the Tories' administration up to 1997; Brown's own chickens are coming home to roost now, at a time of a global slowdown.

Every time Labour has a sustained influence on this country, it goes horribly wrong - you can't solve problems simply by throwing money at them, especially when that money is in effect being transferred from the most productive to the least, disincentivising or ruining the former, and incentivising the latter to remain unproductive. Power corrupts, and the bigger the government is, the more corrupt it and its offspring will be. But it takes a few years, a decade this time round, for these things to become undeniable.

However, I hope there's another reason. Blair liked to pretend he was a 'pretty straight guy', and occasionally he even was straightforward in his speech. Brown is the worst practitioner of political bullshit and waffle I have ever heard, and he has made it the hallmark of his office. Here's how the question 'Is the Prime Minister happy' was answered recently:

... the PMS said that the Prime Minister, as he had said himself before, believed that he had the best job in the world and he was focusing on meeting the priorities of the British people; that’s what we were doing today and what we would be doing for the days and weeks ahead.

Part of the reason people detest Brown is that he talks like this.