James Forsyth James Forsyth

Brown goes shopping for votes

There’s an interview with Gordon Brown today in the Mirror about his relationship with his mother. As you might expect given the subject, it is hardly an interrogation. Indeed, it manages to make Piers Morgan’s questions to him resemble the final part of the Frost Nixon interview. But what caught my eye was this note at the end, “This article appears in Tesco magazine, published by Cedar Communications Ltd. The magazine is available in store from March 1.”

Tesco magazine isn’t small beer. Its circulation is more than five and a half million and data shows that more women read it than any other magazine. To Brown, the attraction of this kind of interview is that it is a no lose situation for him. The questions are soft-ball, so there’s no chance of him coming a cropper and he gets to show off his human side. Indeed, both this and the Piers Morgan interview seem to be designed to try and stop people from hating Brown. Presumably, the idea being that if some of the poison can be drawn from Brown’s relationship with the public, people will be less inclined to turn out to vote against him. When you’re trying to climb out of the hole Brown is in, every little helps.

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