To see just how hopeless a politician Gordon Brown is, watch this clip of him being completed and utterly floored by an easy-peasy, soft-ball question thrown to him by a well-intentioned child.
Skip the video to about 01:15. A group of schoolkids on some kind of BBC-sponsered news reporting work experience arrive at No 10 Downing Street to interview the Prime Minister. The excitement! The children huddle outside the famous black door, taking pictures and expressing their awe at the occasion. They're nervous - they're about to sit down with big old Gordon Brown himself, the most famous name in policitics, the most powerful man in the nation, the most scarily serious person you could ever meet...
And then they do. Brown hurries in to the conference room. He greets them: "Nice to meet you... Hello!". It's said a bit stiffly, and he seems a bit patronising as he bends over the seated children to shake their hands. But Gordon'll recover from the awkward start, won't he? As soon as things get going, he'll be spouting policy and progress, sounding all statesman-like and before long everyone will get all dreamy and completely forget how rubbish they think the government is. Right?
First question: "My favourite food is Chinese noodles. What's your favourite meal?" 'Great', you or I would be thinking in the same situation: that's bloody easy. I can just waffle on about how I like lamb biriyani, and how I learned how to make it the other week, although it's not a patch on how they make it at the Indian restuarant... etc. I can do that on autopilot, leaving my brain free to simultaneously try and stitch together some way of defending my atrocious economic record...
But Gordon isn't like you or I. He grins sheepishly, knowing he's been wrong-footed by the children asking such a cleverly non-policy orientated question.
"Traditional things, like, uhh, steak...." Good, he thinks, the right answer. Even if it's been forced out of me. I've totally covered myself by showing that I'm patriotic and not a cosmopolitan twat like Mandleson...
Hang on, though. What more can he possibly say about "steak"? In fact, what other food even goes with steak??! Keep on talking, Gordon!
"... and, err, ... and all that..." His manner now is exactly like that of a schoolkid who's failing to bluff his way through answering a question about the set text he hasn't read. His interviewers, of course, can sense this all too well (especially the boy seated to his right, who increasingly looks as if he can barely suppress a guffaw at this pathetic perfomance).
So Gordon re-winds to try and salvage the situation. "And I love, uhh, ... spaghetti ... bolognese, carbonara... and all these ... all these things. "
" So, ah... I like, I like all these, uhh, things."
Gordon thinks: Good god! This is going terribly. Start listing some stuff like a proper politician who know's his facts!
"So I like Chinese food, Indian food..." [Too foreign - back up!] "I like, uhm, English food" [I'm going to offend the Welsh here!] "uhm, British food..." [Now I sound like a mad fascist] "... I like French food... I like almost anything!" [phew!].
But the children can now sense blood.
Another kid asks "but what would be your perfect, perfect meal? You can have anything!" Wham! Patronised and boxed into a corner by these crowing kids, Gordon has nowhere to run. "Perfect?...Huh, huh huh! Perfert meal!" He squirms with nervous laughter.
"I think it would be.... ahhh .... steak."
At this point, the BBC editors seem to join in with the bloodsport by very cruelly cutting straight to a similar children's meeting with David Cameron. Here, of course, the tables are turned.
Dave's giving an efficient spiel about how politicians can't answer questions. He does a line about Jeremy Paxman. The kids all laugh. He's doing all the confident body language stuff, leaning forward and backwards at the right points, gesturing commandingly. The children sit bolt upright and smile demurely. They listen attentively. He's definitely the alpha male here. It's the way it should be: they're all inwardly cowering at his superior social skills.
The BBC doesn't cut back to what's happening at No 10, but it's obvious that, by now, Gordon's been run out of the room, puffing and sweating, chased by hoardes of evil children asking polite questions that they know he won't be able to answer.
So, yeah - there we have it. My thesis is that children are the canaries in the cage that'll alert you to the imminent death of a government. OK, maybe not the best metaphor, assuming the children weren't too badly harmed by the experience of meeting the PM. But they could certainly tell you how it really is. Gordon Brown is like the emporer who says he has the best dinners in the world. And it took a humble child to point out that he hasn't got a favourite meal.
