Brown study

If I had a kennel, it would be filled with underdogs.  I'm not sure why, but when I see power being wielded,  I find myself tugged to the side of the person on the receiving end. So while I know it's none of my business who gets elected in Britain, I can't help but feel sympathy for Gordon Brown.  In the  by-now-famous Bigotgate encounter,  Brown is cast as the hypocritical, other-blaming oaf against the defenceless, rough-but-loveable-diamond  Gillian Duffy. The media have raised their sticks and laid into him with a will - what a bully, what a fraud, what contempt for ordinary people, what erratic emotional behaviour!  Well I'm sure the cudgel-swinging critics are faultless rational beings, but I've frequently emerged from encounters, sometimes personal and sometimes professional,  muttering 'What a bastard!' or 'I can't STAND that prat!' or 'I didn't want to talk to that berk in the first place!'  - all this seconds after having smiled and maybe shaken hands with the object of my wrath.  You can't always afford to tell people to their face what you think of them - and anyway, didn't someone say if you knew what your best friends really think of you, you'd cut your throat?  What amazes me is Gordon's restraint. In similar circumstances I'm sure I'd have taken my Anglo-Saxon vocabulary for an exercise run.  So enough of the 'What a ghastly man!' huffing and puffing from the right wing.  You think old Etonians like Cameron or old Westminister boys like Clegg are asking their aides to get the number of that nice council-house person they were speaking to last, so they can call him/her up and arrange to spend an evening together?  Between the toffs who run Britain and the working-class British people a great gulf exists. It's a necessary gulf, otherwise the underdogs would start swarming about and having daily contact with the overdogs,   and all the things that make Britain Britain would be at risk.