Westminster blog

I was surprised to see Bob Marshall-Andrews quoted in The Independent telling Simon Carr:

“He’s had it. He’s finished. The Prime Minister is complete blown chaff….All my colleagues think so too. For the first time in my life I’ve seen them united. They are united in despair.”

So I just called Bob to ask him if this was accurate. It was. And the MP for Medway had much more to say:

1] “He made a deplorable fool of himself on YouTube but then made it worse by trying to get out of it by trying to make a fool of the House of Commons. That’s what people are so angry about.”

2] “He’s gone, he’s gone. I don’t think there is any doubt about that at all. That is to say he’s a spent political force, he won’t be gone as prime minister, he will remain, but his authority has gone.”

3] “General election prospects are looking dire. I have been a member of the party for 36 years, I have sometimes fallen out over policies from time to time, but I have always supported Brown*. I supported his candidacy, I voted for him, almost alone in the Campaign Group in doing so. My colleagues found it odd but I thought he was a good man and a good Parliamentarian. All of that has gone.”

4] “There should be a general election this year, maybe even this summer. It is inevitable that we will be defeated, we need to get on with the painful and inevitable process of readjustment and reinforcement, we can’t do that in government.

5] (on the Gurkhas). “He has not got a reverse gear, he hasn’t got any gears at all, so he can’t calibrate things properly. On the Gurkhas it was all yes or no, and then announcing feeble compromises at the last minute in a way which was frankly insulting.”

6] “Governments always come to an end, the one thing you could say about John Major was that at last he came to an end with his dignity intact and a great deal of affection in the country when he went down. You can’t say the same, I’m afraid, of Gordon. But the party must attempt to salvage things…….We don’t want to be decimated.”

* In fact BM-A was a major critic of the 42 days anti-terror detention bill last summer