Former Labour General Secretary Peter Watt was in charge when Gordon bottled having an election. Over six pages the Mail on Sunday runs extracts from Peter Watt’s devastating inside account of the madness in the heart of Downing Street:

• Mr Brown’s Cabinet ally Douglas Alexander said the PM’s inner circle wanted an early Election partly because even they didn’t like him – and they feared the British public would soon form the same view.
• The day Mr Brown called off the 2007 Election, denying he had ever intended to hold one, Labour chiefs had a fleet of limousines circling Parliament Square ready to take Ministers on the campaign trail, and had 1.5million leaflets ready to be posted. Brown brazenly lied about the planned election to an incredulous press conference.
• No. 10 is ‘completely dysfunctional’ under Mr Brown, who runs the country ‘by making it up as he goes along’.
• After witnessing Brown behave bizarrely at a dinner, Watt’s wife told him “he’s bonkers”.

Guido had lunch with a former senior Downing Street adviser, who when Guido asked him directly did he “think Brown was bonkers?” went into a long soliloquy about the different Freudian personality types.  He concluded, in a matter of fact way, that Brown was a narcissistic, manic depressive. There is lots more of this to come out about Brown…

Pre Order copies: “Inside Out“.

Douglas Alexander said…

“… we have spent ten years working with this guy, and we don’t actually like him.  We have always thought the longer the British public had to get to know him, the less they would like him as well.”

Given Hannan and Carswell’s heroic status in the eyes of young Conservatives something tells Guido that  there will be a lot of applicants for this job.

“Direct Democracy” was a book, now it is going to become a campaign…

Darling has to be given some credit for stating what should be axiomatic “Many departments will have less money in the next few years.. [The cuts] are utterly totally non-negotiable.’ £57 billion in cuts is going to mean that “the next spending review will be the toughest we have had for 20 years”. For months now the kamikaze economics advocated by Balls and Brown has been terrifying, they seemed set on destroying the economy to advance their factional interest over the national interest.  Will Balls and Brown stick to the Mandelson-Darling line?

Peter Mandelson’s speech on Wednesday was overshadowed by events, parts of it sounded more right-wing than anything Cameron has said in years:

The 1980s saw the timely privatization of industries that were long overdue for return to the commercial sector. Industrial relations underwent a sea change. The quality of management in our best firms improved, and with it, corporate profitability.

First and foremost we need to foster a new climate for enterprise in Britain. There is no substitute for this – no substitute for the drive and ambition that it brings … it is the single most important engine of economic progress. The recovery cannot be driven by consumer debt or public spending. It will be driven by private sector investment and private enterprise.

Enterprise and reward go hand in hand. Much as it shocked many of my friends when I said I was comfortable with people making themselves “filthy rich”, in the context I was speaking I was simply stating a simple truth: that enterprise and effort should be rewarded. It sets goals to spur people and brings gains to us all … there is never a case for punitive taxation. There is never a case for rates of tax that remove the incentive to self-improvement or to build a business.

Mandelson sounded positively Thatcherite. Can you imagine Cameron delivering a speech written by Steve Hilton which sounded like that? Cameron’s opening speech of the year promised a new high-speed rail network and the creation of 100,000 apprenticeships. Dave sounded more like Gordon Brown than Maggie.