Monday, November 12, 2007

Why don't we just stick with Vince Cable as leader?

There is great praise for Vince Cable from Andrew Rawnsley while relating the tale of the Queen's speech debate:

The most wounding comment at the expense of Gordon Brown came not from David Cameron, who was predictably rude about his lack of 'the vision thing', but from Vince Cable...What he had to say about Mr Brown was the more personally hurtful because the MP for Twickenham and the Prime Minister go back a long way: they were collaborators in a publication called the Red Paper on Scotland - yes, they go back a very long way indeed - in the 1970s.

Mr Cable observed that his old friend had waited for more than a decade to deliver his first Queen's Speech and he'd spent more than 30 years working on ideas for it. Mr Brown liked that, beaming a smile across the Commons to the Lib Dem. But his face then froze in hurt and fury when Mr Cable went on to describe the result as a 'deafening anticlimax'. In his quiet but deadly way, the Lib Dem remarked: 'I fear that the Prime Minister now cuts a rather sad figure.' ...nothing said by the Tory leader cut to the quick of Mr Brown as deeply as that observation by an old friend - or former old friend as he may now be.

Rawnsley also makes a pithy observation on the Conservative response to Brown's programme:

...the Tories' ....contradictory responses to the Queen's Speech. One Tory attack was to say that it contained nothing fresh. Another Tory assault was to say that the ideas had been stolen from them. Uncertain which of these lines would work best, the Conservatives decided to go for both of them. So, according to the Tories, the Queen's Speech was a pile of purposeless rubbish and they thought of it all first. It's crap and it's our crap - that was what they seemed to say.

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