Sharpe's Opinion
Friday, 3rd Apr, 2009
Iain Dale has said everything I thought about the G20 conference and its outcome…
I do think the whole thing has been a bit of a PR triumph for Gordon Brown. But I do wonder when people actually analyse what was agreed, they may find it doesn’t quite live up to the billing. A bit like all these initiatives which Gordon Brown announced in the autumn, but which haven’t yet saved a single job or rescued anyone from a repossession. It’s all in the small print. Expect the weekend papers to unravel it.
Tom Harris disagreed, naturally, although his assertion that it is “hard to imagine that if [Posts criticising the G20] were written this time last week and scheduled for publication today, they would have read any different”, could just as easily be applied to his own post, so I guess we’re all even.
Basically, everybody is falling into the lines that have been pre-prepared for them. No media entity, let alone world leader, was about to paint this conference as a failure. No die-hard anti-Brownite was going to simply turn around and start clapping and cheering and hailing the saviour of the world.
In fact, it all rather brings to mind the lyrics to Supertramp’s If Everyone Was Listening (YouTube Video)…
The actors and jesters are here
The stage is in darkness and clear
We’re raising the curtain and no-one’s quite certain
Whose play it is…
Comments
Snap election coming up.
Very swish new comment box – although the text/box alignment isn’t quite right..!
Oh please let there be an election! I’ve been after a snap election for months now. An election would be brilliant.
Thing is, I mean that quite sincerely. Even if Brown won, at least we could then accept that he is governing by the will of the people.
There won’t be one, though. There isn’t a iPhone in a blender’s chance. Brown wouldn’t go into an election when he was 10 points ahead in the opinion polls, there’s no way he’d go into one now when he’s 10 points behind and still has a year to try and recover in.
Glad you like the new comments form – took me way longer to design than I’m willing to admit. Have fixed the alignment problem now, cheers for calling my attention to it 
>> Even if Brown won, at least we could
>> then accept that he is governing by the
>> will of the people.
Seconded!
>> Have fixed the alignment problem now
Sadly not … the text for my email and website overlap the box, as does the comment text! (IE7)
(in Firefox, only the email and website text overlaps..)
Actually, patently, that was a different problem… Well spotted, there was no way I was going to notice that. It’s also fixed now (but was an ugly hack 
)
If you’re using Internet Explorer 7, the way my site displays is the least of your problems. I hear IE8 is better, at least… At least you’re not one of the IE6 hold outs (Eurgh…) Incidentally, nobody bothered to mention to me that my navigation links were all messed up in IE…
I heard an interesting comment last night that suggested that to the ordinary joe public it won’t mean an awful lot.
I likened this to: If it were a budget and 2p were taken off a pint, joe public can appreciate the frop etc and has a benchmark to say “oh that’s good” and recognises worth in it.
I fear there’s nothing so tangible in the immediate aftermath of the G20 and so will go largely un-appreciated.
Oh well.
Fabulous Photo Gifts
April 3, 2009 at 11:04 am