Time magazine has produced a list of 100 global movers 'n shakers. McBust and Boris are the two UK politicians to make it into the list. Time/CNN asked a (supportive) celebriddy to write a puff piece on each honcho. Boris's was done by Conrad Black, taking time off from being cuddled by Big Billy Bob in his cell in Canada. I am not making this up. UPDATE: Brown wrote the piece about Obama (yeah, like he knows him well and they are great friends). Read the whole thing if you have the stomach for it.Gordon Brown (left, proving he is NOT gay), had his puff piece written by Jake Rowling, a well-known creator of fantasy stories for children. I thought it worth a fisking. (No, Gordon, don't get excited, I said fisking. There is no T in it).
Gordon Brown by JK Rowling
Back in the mid-1990s, when he was new labour's brooding, intellectual heavyweight, I was a lone parent struggling to get by. Fisked: He was unpopular back then as well, but brighter than Tony; I had got up the duff and had the bairn.
He said he was not interested in stigmatizing the poor but in finding solutions for their predicament. I was tired of hearing government ministers lambaste the likes of me as irresponsible scroungers. I wanted Gordon Brown in charge. I wanted more taxpayer money, no questions asked, and he was the man to give it to me.
He went on to become one of the longest-serving Chancellors of the Exchequer that Britain has ever seen. While our economy grew strongly, he could have stood back and done nothing; on the contrary, he brought in and continually drove up the minimum wage, and 600,000 children and a million pensioners were raised out of poverty. He was given a scoring pass on the economy by Ken Clarke, so no shit stuck to him for years. The Tory legacy and low-tax competitive economy provided the money to raise the levels of welfare considerably, creating a client state. New bureaucracies sprang up, specialising in redefining 'poverty', so that people could be said to have been in it in 1997, but not now.
When capitalism shuddered on its foundations last year, Brownite words like responsibility and morality started issuing from the unlikeliest politicians. When it all caught up on Brown and went pear-shaped last year, more new bureaucrats and Spads were employed, to rewrite the history of his economic malfeasance, and to seek to blame other people in other countries.
Global financial regulation, something Brown had advocated long before last September, shot to the top of the political agenda. One of the first things to do was to pretend that his incompetent dismantling of our banking regulatory system had been a success, but now we needed to go further.
Now Prime Minister, Brown took a lead among European leaders in setting a course for economic recovery. He hosted the most important meeting of the world's major economies in years. In doing so, the British press said, he had become "Chancellor to the world." He had finally engineered the departure of Blair, who could see, anyway, that the economy was well up shit creek without a paddle. Gordon invited lots of people to London, because it was Britain's turn to host an expensive boondoggle, and it took a lot of time and effort to produce a communique at the end of it which was full of absolute whoppers about 'new' money to be thrown after the 'old' money that we ran out of last autumn. One pressman out of about three thousand might have said that he had become Chancellor to the world, at McBride's suggestion.
The son of a Presbyterian minister, with a formidable intellect and a work ethic to shame a nest of ants, the 58-year-old Brown is frequently dubbed "dour." I know him as affable, funny and gregarious, a great listener, a kind and loyal friend. These are strange and turbulent times, but issues of fairness, equality and protection of the poor have never been more important. Mention the God thing, always helps; makes him seem less likely to be ripping off expenses. When you are as wrong headed as him, you find your workload goes up, putting out all those fires. He often invites me to semi-official functions, as I am famous and good for the yoof vote. Because he has managed to increase the gulf between rich and poor since 1997, he sees there is much more to do in that tricky area. Obviously, I do not know what 'gregarious' means.
I still want Gordon Brown in charge. He is my inspiration for Voldemort, and without him I'm buggered.
