British Prime Minister Gordon Brown seemingly did not realize his microphone was still live as he left a campaign stop in Rochdale early Wednesday, and now all of Britain has heard his comment to an aide that a voter he had just talked to was “bigoted.” The woman, 65-year old Gillian Duffy, had complained to the prime minister about immigrants after reportedly heckling him during a television interview. According to the BBC, Brown has apologized to Duffy and says he was just “letting off steam in the car after a difficult conversation.”
Brown directed some of that steam at his own aides.
“That was a disaster. You should never have put me with that woman. Whose idea was that?” Brown said to an aide as his motorcade was leaving the campaign stop. “It was ridiculous.” An aide then suggested that British television “might not go live with that one.” Brown shot back, “They will go live.”
The remark isn’t just problematic because it shows what Brown might really think about some members of his own Labour party, but also because Brown appeared pleasant with the woman prior to calling her a “bigot.”
A blogger at the Guardian warns that ”Brown, with his head in his hands, is likely to be the defining image of the 2010 campaign.” Others see the incident as indicative of a larger problem with the Labour party. Writes John Harris, also on the Guardian:
The incident perfectly captures a plotline that I’ve observed time and again, not least as we’ve been travelling around the country during the campaign: millions of people who are confused, unsettled, and often ragingly angry, faced with a political class that affects to feel their pain, but too often holds them in borderline contempt.
What with the rise in support for the BNP – and that great chasm that divides too much of the country from richer corners of the capital – the metropolitan media is part of the same problem. It tends to portray them as latter-day Alf Garnetts, nostalgic for a world long gone, and fired up by the kind of prejudices that have no place in London W1 or W11.
The full story is here.
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