The media monitoring team at CCHQ have noticed a few changes in the official transcript of Gordon Brown’s election announcement.
Not sure how much we can read into the fact that “middle class” was dropped. But certainly a sign that the young Tory pointy heads are on the ball. Here is the Tory briefing:
SPEECH PUBLISHED – TEXT ALTERED BY SPIN DOCTORS – Labour HQ published a heavily doctored version of Brown’s speech outside No10, deleting a third of his text and adding new sections:
- Brown forgot to say the headline phrase “the future is ours to win”. His final lines were “It’s a future fair for all, now all of us let’s go to it” but these altered by Labour to “the future is ours to win, now let’s get to it”
- Brown claimed he was from a “middle class” family, but this disappears from the official version
- Brown referred to “our police, our schools and our hospitals” which Labour HQ altered to “your hospitals, your schools, your policing”
- Brown said that that if they got “the big decisions right….jobs, prosperity and better standards of living will result” but according to Labour HQ he actually meant “prosperity, jobs and better schools and hospitals will result”.
- “Small businesses are starting to grow, but a double dip recession would hit thousands of them” becomes “Businesses are growing in confidence again and the party who would pull the rug from under the recovery could tip us back into recession”;
- “Politics has been scarred by recent events” becomes “Faith in our democracy has been rightly shaken by recent events”; a “still new century” becomes a “young century”.
Jim Pickard
Kiran Stacey