"Our Chancellor and First Minister are not of a type. Brown surrounds himself with the best and brightest, confident he will always be the smartest person in the room; McConnell cannot take the risk, and so employs Andy Kerr. Brown likes to wrestle with theoretical abstractions, tossing them to and fro in that great brain of his; McConnell gives the impression he wrestles only with his weight. Where the Chancellor recruits Alan Greenspan as an adviser, the First Minister showboats with the ludicrous Donald Trump. Like Greenspan and Trump, the men are several degrees of seriousness apart. Add to that their intense personal dislike for one another, and you have an explosive mix."
or his strategic vision:
"...the problem is this: while McConnell is tactically astute, the winner of a thousand tiny victories, he is strategically inept. He has, time and again, proven himself unable to think beyond short-term interests to longer-term consequences. This is not unusual in politicians - in a way, Tony Blair suffers from the same problem - but the more self-aware will surround themselves with people who do the strategy for them. Blair has an army of them. In contrast, McConnell's inner circle has shrunk to such an extent that it is now widely held to include just two people - his media adviser, Douglas Campbell, and Rachel McEwan, a young special adviser who has worked for the Labour Party all her adult life. Neither is a strategist, or has the heft to stand up to the First Minister's crazier schemes. His cabinet colleagues were not consulted about his new anti-Westminster stance, and the more unionist among them are deeply unhappy about it."
This is deeply unfair. Just because Mr McConnell is not the brightest penny in the cash-box, he does not deserve to be treated this way. Think of all his achievements as First Minister...
No comments:
Post a Comment