Gordon Brown steps in to save the other union – with a few tired old gags

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/13/gordon-brown-eu-referendum-speech-leicester-remain

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“Now is the winter of our discontent, made glorious summer by this son of the Manse.” At least, that was the idea. With David Cameron and Jeremy Corbyn driving voters into the arms of the leave campaign whenever they opened their mouths, it was time for remain to play its trump card. After Gordon Brown acquired the reputation of single-handedly staving off independence with his eloquent defence of the union during the Scottish referendum campaign, the remain team were keeping their fingers crossed that lightning would strike twice.

Out of his shallow car park grave he rose, and over to the science building of De Montfort University in Leicester he went. His subjects stood to applaud the arrival of the familiar stooping gait. Gordon flashed a smile and waved. After all these years, he was still their king. Now was the time to reclaim his throne.

“Have you heard the one about Nelson Mandela and Amy Winehouse?” he said, bouncing up and down on the spot. “It cracks me up every time.” It cracked his audience up, too. Gordon does a nice line in after-dinner speaking. Even if he only has five gags that get reused on every occasion. Only it wasn’t quite the time or the place. His Scottish intervention had been all the more powerful because he hadn’t bothered to recycle his jokes and spoken straight from the heart. It had been his obvious sincerity and passion that cut through in Glasgow, not crowd pleasing.

Still, even when Gordon is going through the motions, he’s still a cut above Dave or Jeremy. Low bar and all that. Having warmed the crowd up with a reference to Leicester City knowing the importance of being in Europe and staying in Europe – see what he did there? – Gordon moved on to the reasons why Britain should remain in the EU. The way to combat globalisation was not to retreat into island parochialism, it was to be part of an organisation that would protect people against globalisation’s negative impacts. It was the EU that would create jobs, tackle pollution and climate change, and take on tax havens, and Britain should be proud to take a leading role. Alone, the UK risked being swept to the margins of its own history.

Along the way came the anecdotes disguised as history lessons. Remember the one about George Brown – no relation, ha ha – getting pissed and insulting the French, the Belgians and the Austrians in the course of a single weekend? We did, because he had said it so many times before. Remember the one about George Bernard Shaw and Michael Foot? Ditto. The old ones are sometimes just the old ones.

It wasn’t just Gordon that went missing in this speech – he was only 70% there at best – it was the key message on immigration that he had been sent out to sell to disaffected Labour voters. To tell them that it was OK to think that there was a problem with immigration, but that leaving the EU would do nothing to solve it. However, Gordon wouldn’t go there. Illegal immigration was the only immigration he was interested in.

Just as on the BBC’s Today programme earlier in the day, immigration was the hot topic. Gordon was not amused. Just as he had accused the BBC of having an agenda, he now lashed out at the Sun, saying they too had some unspecified agenda. Picking a fight with the media is never a good idea at the best of times; still less when it is a paper whose readership are the very people you want to seduce. Some nous, some nous – my kingdom for some nous.

Gordon never really recovered from that, though he did manage one last anecdote, which he had used at Hay Festival just over a week ago. “There’s a book by Anthony Burgess called Clockwork Orange,” he said, “and I’ve always wondered why it had such a depressing ending. Then I discovered that the Americans had insisted the final chapter, chapter 21, be deleted. Chapter 21 was the message of redemption.” It was meant to be a story about how Britain should not delete its own chance of redemption, but sounded rather more personal than that. His own search for redemption and understanding is far from over.