DUFFIED UP

What an astonishing and misdirected fuss. Gordon Brown, boldly canvassing on the streets of the Lib Dem-held marginal of Rochdale, is caught up in a conversation with Mrs Gillian Duffy who, the press informs us, is a “granny” and a “pensioner” as well as a life-long Labour supporter. It seems a genial enough encounter, at the end of which Mrs Duffy takes Brown’s hand in both of hers. There’s been a slightly sticky moment when she brings up the matter of East European immigrants and wants to know how the foreign students can be afforded, even though her own grandchildren will have such high tuition fees; it emerges later, when Gordon (who’s remembered this detail) asks how old her grandchildren are, that they are still only twelve and ten.

In the privacy of his car, Gordon immediately turns sour, unaware that his radio mic is still on his lapel and broadcasting. He clearly isn’t satisfied with how the encounter went, surrounded as it was by what he later calls a mêlée of press, and, as one is apt to do, he sprays his irritation around, landing some of it on the innocent head of Mrs Duffy, whom he characterises as a “sort of bigoted woman”.

"That was a disaster"

So far, so what? What all changes it and makes it into the greatest political crisis since Suez is that the broadcasters fall over each other to get the overheard grumbling onto air. Not long afterwards, Brown is sitting in a Radio 2 studio for a phone-in and Jeremy Vine takes palpable delight in playing back the recording to Gordon and the world while the PM crumples into a dejected heap. The pundits immediately wheel in, announcing that the general election is over and that Gordon Brown is dead, buried and erased from the official record. Meanwhile, Max Clifford is on the blower to Gillian Duffy, offering his services at very reasonable rates.

This is a farce. Everybody – Cameron, Clegg, the editors of newspapers and broadcasting news, Andrew Rawnsley, you and me – says things that are unguarded, loose, disobliging, unfair and that pass no test of scrutiny when we fondly imagine that we are talking in private. The supposed insult to Mrs Duffy was perpetrated not by the Prime Minister, whose words were intended for no one but those in his car, but by the editors who decided to transmit them to the world, in the spirit of little boys ogling an oblivious woman in a state of undress. I wish Gordon had had the smarts to seize on that as soon as Vine played his trump card, that he had pointed out angrily that he didn’t say what he said for public consumption and that, if he gets back into government, he will instruct MI5 to install recording devices in every office (not forgetting the club) at the BBC so that, whenever anything is said that is confidential, it can be released to the public.

Poor Brown looked so pole-axed that maybe there is yet some sympathy mileage in it, similar to that sparked by the campaign in The Sun to discredit him over his handwriting in a letter to the mother of a killed soldier. But feeling sorry for the man is not much of a basis for an election victory.

"He called me what?"

What I found much more telling and much more of concern was how, in their public conversation, Brown repeatedly tried to steer Mrs Duffy away from actual politics, trying to get her to agree that “it’s nice around here” (not as nice as Fife, Gordon) or asking about her family. I know he doesn’t have much in the way of people skills or small talk ease; indeed, it’s his authenticity and lack of a silver tongue that distinguishes him from the slick slipperiness of David Cameron. After rewarding the latter style in a similar mismatch between John Major and Tony Blair in 1997, you’d think the public would be conclusively wary of a snake-oil salesman this time around. But it doesn’t do to try to avoid discussing issues with voters. The nettle of European immigration has to be grasped, both in word and in deed. None of the leaders wants to grasp it for fear of seeming ... well, bigoted.

Something else I thought ill-judged was Brown’s demeanour after he had come to Mrs Duffy’s house to have a conversation with her, a conservation that I hope will remain private. Perhaps they got on very well, perhaps he found a form of words that satisfied her, perhaps she graciously accepted what I do not doubt was a heart-felt apology. Brown emerged grinning, perhaps with relief, perhaps because he had been charmed. But it made him seem as though he felt he had had a triumph and that looked all wrong.

"I'm a penitent sinner"

None of this amounts to a hill of beans, of course, but you’d think from the coverage that Brown had at least killed somebody with his bare hands. The other parties will have hugged themselves with glee but it would be a mistake for either of their leaders to try to capitalise on it in the leaders’ debate tonight. They know very well to mutter: “There but for the grace of god …”

There remains the larger matter of the morality, responsibility, taste and judgment of the media. How skewed our values have become when an innocent expression of candid frustration is universally condemned while underhand and treacherous opportunism passes unremarked. I think this heartless roasting of the Prime Minister is only one up from Rory Bremner’s stunt, four or five years ago, of contacting Margaret Beckett, then Foreign Secretary, and convincing her that he was really the then Chancellor, one Gordon Brown. I thought that hoax the lowest of the low but this ugly compromising of the PM is nearly as shabby.

And really, does this silly episode, blown out of all proportion, signify when set against our solemn responsibility to elect a new government?