Friday 20 August 2010

WHAT THE PAPERS SAY. AFP, HE'S BACK.

"GORDON BROWN  'SEEKS LUCRATIVE SPEAKING DATES.'
LONDON — Former prime minister Gordon Brown is offering himself for speaking engagements at a cost of 100,000 dollars (£64,000, 78,000 euros) an hour, a magazine reported Thursday.
Brown, whose book on the global financial crisis is due out in November, has asked a London agency to look for possible engagements for him in the Middle East and Asia, the Spectator said, quoting an unnamed "impeccable" source.

The former head of the Labour party, which lost May's general election, is also said to be asking for five-star hotel accommodation, a first class plane ticket and three business class ones as part of any deal.
His wife Sarah is reportedly available to present prizes at events where he speaks for a further 20,000 dollars."

Brown said before leaving the top job in British politics that he wanted to do "something good" afterwards, indicating this could include working in the charity sector or education rather than business.
He has kept a low profile since the election defeat, writing his book at home in Scotland, but last week appeared on television appealing to Britons to donate to Pakistan's flood relief effort.
The fees reportedly being asked for by Brown are significantly lower than those thought to be commanded by his predecessor Tony Blair, one of the most popular speakers on the international circuit.

Blair said this week he would give the proceeds of his forthcoming autobiography, set to total millions of dollars, to a project helping the rehabilitation of military veterans injured in conflicts like Iraq and Afghanistan.

Much is made, currently, of children - or students -  leaving school unable to read,  write or add-up, especially add-up. So pity, then, poor Reverend and Mrs Brown, all those years ago, their eldest son and light of their sanctimonious,  hypocritical lives, Gordon, the nail-biting, snot-eating freak, despite his hothouse education, couldn't even speak. The Browns should not feel as short-changed as the senior Camerons, whose son CallHimDave, despite costing them tens of thousands of pounds a term, doesn't know what day it is,  but even so, a boy who cannae speak, surely won't do well in politics. And Gordon didn't;  he did well in the Gang of Four which hijacked the labour movement and dressed it in a pinstripe suit, but even in that, left to his own devices, his gob failed him, time and again, I saved the world, that bigoted woman and so on, it was Gordon Brown's gob which visited upon us these Ambassadors from Satan's Engine Room.

From his earliest days in government, Gordon had a disagreeable manner of speaking;  legitimate parliamentary questions, from all sides - people scrutinising the Executive, as they then sometimes did -  were met with fevered bombast and bullying, clunking, inelegant, stagey sarcasm, coarse evasion, to me he was always an unconvincing giant;  I always thought him an arsehole, even when skymadeupnewsandfilth hailed his miraculous Prudence; still, the press only prints what it's told to print and people who read Andrew Gobsley or Rupert's Barrowboy, Jeff Randall,  obviously feel well-informed, Quite so, Andrew, Couldn't have put it better myself, Jeff, apparently unmoved by the fact that both of these seers were Brown cheerleaders, once over, when it suited, and would be again, were the price right.

In his brief absence, I had forgotten quite how awful Brown was.  I hadn't forgotten his sins, his lies, his betrayals, his shiftiness, his cowardice,  his breathtaking, almost incredible incompetences, I had just forgotten how fucking awful he was as a human being, a truly ghastly, sermonising, know-it-all fuckpig. But it wasn't to last, this blessed oubliette into which I had fallen. Roaring my head off at the Jimmy Reid Funeral Jamboree, at Connolly weeping,  I found myself in a BBC interlude, plucked from the posturing mourners and watching, instead,  Gordon himself, lecturing some poor, hapless Muslims at a Glasgow charity, urging that people dig deeper for the Pakistan flood victims.  Jesus fucking Wept, the man is impossible, intolerable.  To a purpose unimaginable he was barracking those in the hall and those watching with his trademark Vaaahl-ewes speech.  If he learned his sermonising from his old man then Brown senior's congregants must have endured a lifetime of truly shitty Sundays, miserable beyond the normal, purse-lipped, tut-tutting, two-faced, penny-pinching, Godless, heathen bastard  Presbyterian  existence,  theirs must have been a weekly agony, hardly eased at all by the minidster singling-out some poor, defenceless Jezebel for shaming.

But the poor Pakistanis, twenty million of them paddling about in a sewer and their government so bent it can't organise relief, and now, as champion, they have this monster, putting people's backs up with his every bloated, phoney sentiment.  The country is better when it does as I say, he may as well have been saying; other people can do things, of course, but it is only under my direction that things are done properly, over and over and over again, only I can tell it like it is, be worthy of me; the world is better when it does as I say, only I, out of all the people, all the people in the world, have Vaaahl-ewes, share my Vaahl-ewes and I will make you fishers of men. All the world's great religions are Brown at heart; I am the right thing for the World. It was an example grotesque of mr mongoose's CNN charity.

Ninety seconds would have done it better, less is sometimes more and  - setting aside the fact that there should be a global fund and a global army of workers for such events, likely to increase, as they are  - a dignified appeal for money may well have been productive, both for the halpless millions and for Brown's partial rehabilitation, should there be such a thing on this Earth; Brown, typically, playing to an uninterested gallery, showing-off, I-Know-Besting,  made a grim feast of it, there not to relieve Pakistani suffering, but  his own.


Sixty-four grand an hour and a bung for  Sarah-George to keep her onside, seems like a lot to pay for a sermon from the UK's most hated man; he'd do better working down the Oxfam shop, for others and for himself.

11 comments:

jgm2 said...

Mr Ishmael, as you say people have lost sight of how truly, shit beyond description, Brown is/was.

I remember reading and laughing at Blair conspiracy theories years ago about how, for no fucking reason at all, Blair gave up Maggie's hard-fought EU rebate just for some French 'promise' of a shot, at some time in the future, at being EU president.

No fucking way I thought. Tony is perfectly happy as PM. What do these conspiracy nutters know I thought. Ha ha, EU president? Fuck no. You're projecting a few steps too far I thought.

Fuck me, how wrong can you be? Five years later Blair is tossing his hat in the ring as EU president. And the French are laughing their socks off at the naivety of the arsehole handing their farmers another 5 billion quid a year just so they don't SPAM-filter his CV.

Brown is the same. Pissing away tens of billions. Publically bedwetting with billions of pounds of tax-payers money in an attempt to buy himself presidency of the UN.

Billions of quid in aid to any tin-pot fucking African country with the same thought as he had when attempting to buy the UK with one million pretend, invented jobs in the 'public service' or a fat grant in a marginal constituency.

A billion quid of your cash to a few african dictators plus a left-wing bloc-vote plus a European bloc-vote and there he is with a diplomatic passport waltzing into the UN building like Kurt-fucking-Walheim.

Brown isn't after the IMF job. He's after the UN job. President of the world. In his fucked-up head.

call me ishmael said...

I know it's not up to much, the UN, and gets worse with each bent General Secretary but they wouldn't, would they? Not Brown, a fully fledged, criminal lunatic who sought to make citizen-opposition to him an offence. But then they might, mightn't they? No, they won't. But then the ConDems are digging-up that monster, Leon Brittan, aren't they, so anything's possible.

Mike said...

Mr jgm2: you've hit the nail on the head.

In the good old days, the payoff was a sinecure as VC or Warden at some Oxbridbe college. No real harm there.

Today its more venal. Money laundering payoffs via the lecture circuit, and jobs with jets-n-stuff at any of the plethora of useless international bodies the bastards helped to create whilst in office, anticipating a warm welcome down the track. Meanwhile kissing supermodels and rock stars and pretending to save the world from some imaginary evil.

Corrupt - the word doesn't do it justice.

PT Barnum said...

I can just about imagine paying Brown 100k never to appear in public again, but for him to demand that for a single appearance, in which one would not have to listen to that voice but try not to look at the jaw drop and strange strange smile, and that's before we ever get to the content of any speech, is an act of delusional bravado too far even for Brown. Perhaps the shoes in the Oxfam shop told him that what was he was worth.

call me ishmael said...

It is fascinating, isn't it, in its awful temerity? Him AND Sarah-George; and there was me thinking that Neil and Christine Hamilton were as bad as it could ever get in the field of self-abasement for money, truly grotesque, they were. But they had no option, skint and bankrupt, Mr al Fayed kicking Neil deservedly up and down the Strand. The Browns are already loaded, pensioned up to the ears. Disgusting's what it is, the moreso, coming after Blair.

mongoose said...

If we can find sixty-three others, I hereby pledge one thousand so that the bastard keeps quiet for an hour... while we throw cabbages at him.

And if George Robertson can run NATO, if Kurt Waldheim can run the UN, if the fucking Popenfuhrer can be the Popenfuhrer, well, folks, McDoom running the UN is just that bit easier to contemplate.

Oldrightie said...

great and pin pointedly accurate portrayal of Snotgobbler extrodinaire. Before any speech he might give, his audience ought to contemplate their summer pudding whilst watching his snot eating video!

yardarm said...

The Nokia hurling, the bullying, the tantrums, the beard; all these points abide but I first realised Brown was not just an average political idiot but a fully fledged nutcase was when he announced " No return to boom and bust "

So the economic sycle that has persisted since the Hittites invented money three thousand years ago has ceased beacuse Gordon Brown has decreed it ? Fuck help us; he, and many others believed it.

call me ishmael said...

Fully fledged nutcase is a view we have long promoted, here and in stanislavia - ignored, sadly, then and now, in preference to a diagnosis of villainy.

yardarm said...

Yes, Mr Ishmael, he had to be a villain too, to ignore his own inadequacies and promote himself, indulge his colossal sense of entitlement rather than confine himself to obscurity and comparative harmlessness. But no, he had all the sol u shuns, only he could save us and the world. He still believes he did.

call me ishmael said...

Hatred, I often think, is just another word for nothing left to lose, mr yardarm, but in Brown's case I am happy to be bereft.

Somehow, his implacable rottenness transcends my well-nurtured and, to me, essential belief that we must love the sinner and hate the sin, leaving me almost devoid of reason, knowing that Reason cannot prevail against the likes of Brown, but a fucking good kicking might; I think he actually exhausted my lifetime stock of invective and spleen in the Sagas of Gordon the Ruiner. A pox on him, I hope he dies a death worthy of his life.