Bring on the terrible twins

Scotland on Sunday reports that, according to a Downing Street spokesman, the great comic double act, Blair and Brown, will move into action after the results from France and the Netherlands come in, to sell the Constitution to the people of Britain.

Remembering the effect Chirac’s involvement in France and certain Dutch politicians’ in Holland has had on the campaign, we on the no side should be greeting this news with joy.

This is especially true as either the spokesman or the Westminster correspondent of the newspaper has seriously misread the election results:

“TONY Blair and Gordon Brown will reprise the 'double act' that helped steer Labour to a third election victory in a desperate attempt to turn public opinion around and win support for the much-derided European constitution.”

Helped to steer? Given the size of the majority in the last parliament and the imbalance in the make-up of the constitutencies, there could have been no other result but a Labour victory. In fact, let us recall, the media was uniformly predicting a much larger one than the electorate delivered.

As it has been noted already, had the Conservative Party been a little more forthcoming on some issues, particularly Europe, the majority would have even been smaller.

The great comic duo has steered Labour to a point where it lost many thousands of votes and has come back into power on 26 per cent of it. Hardly something to be proud of but, not content with “dying” once on a Saturday night in the provinces, the comic duo wants to repeat its performance.