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The stench of fear   » Permalink  |  TrackBack (0)

So, according to Iain Dale in The Telegraph,

"We face an opponent whose aim is not just to beat the Conservative Party, but destroy it."

Well, I'll drink to that one. Iain goes on to add....

"Conservatives should make no mistake. Brown is the most ruthless prime minister of this country since Francis Urquhart, Michael Dobbs's Machiavellian PM in House of Cards."

Dale's message is quite clear. Gordon Brown is a superb and ruthless political opponent (notice the ludicrous comparison with Stalin) and the Tories underestimate him at their peril. This from a man whose blog entries over the last couple of years are peppered with references to why Brown will never be Labour Leader or Prime Minister, describing him as the hapless Gordon Brown, or the dour one, and the man who sends Iain Dale back to sleep when he appears on Breakfast TV.

I'm sure the Conservatives will be delighted to get a lecture from Iain telling them that they shouldn't be complacent in the face of a bumbling, dour, accident prone ruthless, calculating political opponent. That's the same Iain Dale who wrote this in the New Statesman nearly exactly one year ago:

The revival is almost entirely down to Cameron himself. A cult of personality has been consciously engendered. He, not the party, is now the Conservative brand. He is a thoroughly modern man whose marketing persona aims at direct comparison with one man - Gordon Brown. The media perceive Cameron to be where the zeitgeist is. By comparison, Brown looks like a man of the past. And that's exactly the way the Cameroons want it.

Dale finishes his Telegraph piece with this corker:

Gordon Brown does not yet believe the next general election is in the bag, but among his foot soldiers you can smell the stench of complacency.

Yes, well, from this perspective, and from comments across the blogs and the mainstream media, there is a stench coming from the Conservative Party, and it drips from every word of Iain Dale's column in The Telegraph. It is the stench of fear.