Not many turns could fill a 100-seat hall in Keighley on a hot - TopicsExpress



          

Not many turns could fill a 100-seat hall in Keighley on a hot evening in the August holiday month at £5 a ticket. And even fewer politicians. But Alan Johnson is no ordinary politico. He manages to be engaging, funny and thoughtful all at the same time. He has what my mother used to call the gift of the gab. The postie-turned-politician had a near-capacity audience in the palm of his hand for an hour, and they were still asking for more. I haven’t seen anything like it since that grouchy old barnstormer George Brown. Affable Al was in town to talk about his best-selling autobiography, This Boy, and that other not-quite-so-best-selling product, the Labour Party. The audience was fascinated by the success story of a lad orphaned at 12 and brought up by his feisty teenage sister in a west London council flat. But what they really wanted to talk about was how to get rid of the bloody Tories and put somebody like him back into Number 10. Most of all they liked his passionate denunciation of the Big Lie – the Tory whopper that it was a Labour recession. “Osborne says Labour maxed out the credit card, and don’t give the car back to the driver who took it into the ditch,” said the former Shadow Chancellor. “But in 2008/9, it wasn’t spending on schools and hospitals that caused the crash. It was the bankers.” The banks told the then Chancellor Alistair Darling that the system was on the brink of collapse, and people would soon not be able to get money out of ATMs. “How soon?” he asked. “Three hours” they replied. “That’s where the fiscal deficit comes from,” thundered Alan. “We were the only government with pockets deep enough to bail out the banks.” In an oblique criticism of Ed Miliband’s leadership, he praised Labour’s message of the cost of living crisis, but lamented that the Shadow Cabinet had failed to nail the Big Lie. “We have stopped talking about it,” he said. “I don’t agree with that.” That was greeted with loud approval – because it’s true. When Gordon Brown left office, the economy was growing. It was a Tory-dominated coalition that took us into a recession, out of which we are only now painfully climbing. I hope Labour’s two Eds take a leaf out of Alan’s book and shout this truth from the rooftops in the nine months left before polling day. Give me Alan Johnson over smart-alec Boris Johnson any day. He’s the credible face of public service. People warm to him and want to believe him. If only he had some of the killer instinct, he would have made a fine party leader. But then he wouldn’t be affable Al. His sequel to This Boy, titled Please, Mister Postman, is due out next month. All I can say is: please, Mr Postman, keep telling it like it is. Read more from Paul Routledge here
Posted on: Thu, 14 Aug 2014 20:31:22 +0000

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