The self-obsession of Tory bloggers knows few bounds. Which is why Malcolm lurks, shadowy, behind a thin alter ego. And in this game “ego” is le vrai mot.
So, here Dale is retro-publicising his “appearance” (you’re balding, Iain) on the Sky newspaper review:
Should I Have Questioned the PM’s State of Mind?
- No, it’s argumentum ad hominem.
- It’s a cliché of the Tory Right, encouraged hourly by the blatherings of those loonies and loopies even further towards the fringe than Dale usually is (why does Malcolm suddenly start to mutter Remember, remember, the Fifth of November at this moment?).
- And it’s nonsense.
Let’s stick to issues of policy. That’s if the Tories actually would recognise a “policy” rather than an “aspiration”, or one of the other weaselings that is their current mode.
However …
Churchill had his first heart attack in the White House in 1941. He was a manic-depressive (suffering from his “Black Dog”) and drank to excess. He had a major heart-attack in 1953; and was effectively incapacitated to the extent that Anthony Eden effectively ran the business until Churchill’s resignation.
Eden himself stoked himself on Benzedrine to cope with the Suez business. An operation, in 1952, for gall-stones was botched; and thereafter Eden was subject to recurrent fevers and pain. This combination caused his sleeplessness and violent mood-swings.
Macmillan, towards the end of his term, was suffering from what was believed to be prostate cancer, and being medicated throughout the final turmoil of the Profumo affair. That’s without one of the more colourful (and miserable) private lives.
Heath was uniquely fit and healthy until the last couple of years of his long life. Nobody, it seems to Malcolm, has yet plumbed the peculiarities of that personality. John Campbell wrestled with the problem for several pages of his turgid 1993 biography, and eventually pronounced Heath to be hopelessly introverted. That great authority, the present Mayor of Barnet, Brian Coleman once claimed that Heath had been warned off his “cottaging” on becoming a Privy Councillor. As with much of Coleman’s other outpourings, nobody else takes this particularly seriously.
Thatcher was (and apparently still is) an out-and-out alky. Her tipple of preference is Bell’s whisky. She allegedly (the source is her personal assistant, Cynthia Crawford), in moments of crisis, drank through the night and survived on injections of vitamin B12.
Which makes the grey, ordinary John Major the nearest thing to sanity and normality that can be found among Tory PMs of the last half-century.
And Malcolm used to think they were merely ignorant and misguided.
But Iain Dale thinks Gordon Brown is deranged, and surely, he is an honourable man.
Malcolm Redfellow's Home Service 
So, I am balding. Well thanks for that original observation.
I did not say he was deranged. I said I thought his press conference exhibited all the signs of a man on the verge of a breakdown. Did you see it? If not, you wouldn’t have a clue what I am talking about. If you did, you would.
Yes, Mr Dale, I did watch closely and with interest. I didn’t see the man on the edge of a breakdown: that is an extrapolation, a wild inference on your part. What I did see was a man with obviously rheumy eyes.
This “Gordon Brown is mad” meme was started (as far as I can tell) by the LibDems: I recall seeing it on LibDemVoice last August. The loonies and loopies out on the political equivalent of the Dagenham marshes (at least three stops beyond Barking) persist with it: Paul Staines seems to have only one other line of attack.
The thing’s had its moment.
Yet many Tories, Iain Dale included, persist with it. Why? Are there no original thoughts, no doctrinal issues, no policies, no ideology better to present?
Or is the target audience he, rough as a badger’s bum but better lubricated, whom I heard in my local pub this afternoon, sagely pronouncing that he hated “that fuckin’ mad Scots git”? Quite frankly, there are some votes any Party is better without.
I repeat, I did not say he was mad. But it clearly suits you to twist my words.
Noted. Accepted. Up to a point …
“Questioned the PM’s State of Mind”;
“he was having some sort of breakdown on live television”;
“weird hand movements”;
“odd facial exp[r]essions”;
[White] “blustered that it was completely wrong to have said that Brown was mad, which is not what I did at all.”
Yeah, we heard the dog-whistle.
When they were burning Jesuits, it was called equivocation: “Faith, here’s an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven. O, come in, equivocator.”