How Gordon Brown brutalised journalists into silence for 10 years

When I returned to the UK in 2005, I was amazed at the way journalists (with the honourable exception of Jeff Randall) were constantly praising Gordon Brown for being an “Iron Chancellor”, a Presbyterian Scot would wouldn’t waste any taxpayers’ money and who was keeping public spending below 40% of GDP over “the economic cycle”. As far as I could see, the man was a financially-incontinent buffoon without the slightest understanding of the economy and also a blustering recidivist liar.

So, with the help of a journalist from Private Eye, I wrote a book PLUNDERING THE PUBLIC SECTOR about how Blair and Brown were wasting about £70bn of our money on their favourite management and IT systems consultants. I think we sold about 6,000 copies, which is pretty acceptable for such a “serious” book. But still, the main journalists (hello Mr Peston, hello Ms Flanders – how are you today?) seemed to me to continue with their adulation of the (IMHO) utterly useless lying fool Brown. Moreover, there didn’t seem to be a single Tory MP willing to or capable of taking on Brown and exposing him for the complete charlatan that he (IMHO) was.

That made me try again and I wrote SQUANDERED How Gordon Brown is wasting over one trillion pounds of our money. This got wonderful reviews from some more enlightened commentators (Jeff Randall, Dominic Sandbrook and a couple of others) and I believe this sold over 10,000 copies. But still the adulation of Brown and the passivity of the Tories continued – right up to the 2008 financial crash.

Now, of course, everybody says they knew all along that Brown was a total disaster for Britain. And several of those, who were (IMHO) grovelling sycophants at the time, have gone on to lucratively write their own books proving they understood what was really happening. A pity they “forgot” to tell us at the time.

I’ve always wondered why so many journalists were so silent for so many years as Brown, ably assisted by the (IMHO) equally useless Ed Balls, bankrupted Britain.

A week or so ago, I did a talk for the Economic Research Council. At the talk, I met an economist who had been an adviser to several government departments and MPs. So I asked him why nobody – no journalists or Tory MPs – ever criticised the lying spendthrift Brown. He explained that, right from Brown taking over as chancellor in 1997, whenever a journalist wrote anything even slightly questioning Brown’s competence and policies, Brown would ring up the journalist’s editor and start screaming abuse and threats while demanding the journalist got sacked. Journalists have mortgages and school fees to pay. Soon Brown’s threats were effective and the press were cowed into submission. As for the BBC – the Blair Broadcasting Corporation – they were already so biased pro-Labour that their supposed “journalists” would say and write anything, provided it showed the worthless liar Brown in a good light.

But what about the Tories? Why didn’t they expose Brown? Because so many of them were busy getting rich from the second, third and even fourth jobs or from building up their property empires using our money or from cheating on their expenses or from employing family members, friends, lovers, sex partners etc as supposed “assistants” with our money, that none of them had the time, energy, intellect or desire to rock the boat.

And all these people – politicians and journalists – have got rich at our expense while reducing the rest of us to penury and bringing Britain to the verge of bankruptcy.