Gordon the Rhino
by Graham Davies

To lose two Government Ministers is careless. To lose eleven is comically catastrophic. But Gordon Brown's main presentational asset is not his academic brain...it is his thick skin.

It takes a remarkable man to be able to sit through a sequence of several speeches by senior colleagues, all of whom shared the same Micro-Message: your continued presence is destroying us.

Of course, because the Labour Party is so, well...laborious in its electoral procedures, it would take months to force him out, no matter how many MPs were against him. This means that Gordon can relish the prospect of peddling the following lines over the next few weeks:

• I am confident that the Party has full confidence in me
• The Euro-Election results were certainly not a vote of no confidence in me by the general public
  
• I am supremely confident of leading Labour to victory in the next General Election

This would be quite some Confidence Trick. But, unlike Margaret Thatcher, Brown will not end his career by quitting. His Micro-Message to the world is still Bollocks to all of you, I'm staying.