THE SAVIOUR OF THE WORLD?

When he condemned the terrorist attack in Mumbai, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced that he was speaking for everyone in the world.

Last week he told the House of Commons he was saving the world from financial ruin.

The House roared with laughter.

Incapability Brown does not even look like a saviour of the world.

Whatever anyone felt about Tony Blair, he cut an attractive, youthful figure as he criss-crossed the planet meeting a swathe of elderly world leaders. His fresh-faced good looks and ever ready smile gave Britain a buoyant image abroad. Even today with what appears to be an eye lift and gold streaks in the remains of his hair, he is still in not too bad shape.

Brown, who looks even more miserable than Andy Murray, lets the nation down the moment he sets foot on foreign soil - even before he opens his mouth. As desperation and decay seep out his every pore, the world knows the United Kingdom is in a bad way when he limps on to the international stage, struggling to hang on to a job which is completely beyond him. When he turns up on the TV news you want to look away and pretend he’s not British, not one of us, that he doesn’t belong with us.

What is no laughing matter is Brown’s messianic belief that he is saving world, that he is the man the world (not just this country) needs at this desperate hour and he has been called to meet his destiny. Otherwise he would never have made that revealing psychological slip in Parliament last week.

The truth is that Brown is not a leader and never has been and got his present job by default because no one in the Labour Party had the guts to stand up to his reputed bullying, menacing ways. To try to keep that job he now clings to the economy he helped to wreck.

Brown has talked a lot about being the son of a Scottish Presbyterian minister and how the beliefs inculcated into him by his father have moulded what he stands for.

A harsh, thou-shalt-not, Calvinistic streak pervades Scottish Presbyterianism, which largely holds that misery and poverty are the only fit state for mankind and success and happiness are the preserve not of this world but the next. This may partly explain why beneath the Father of the Nation pose he is prone to assume, Brown seems to be revelling in the recession and the hard times hitting people.

What Brown’s father either forgot to tell him or Brown has forgotten and badly needs to remember is that the Christian Saviour of the World was a handsome, charismatic young man of great humility.

Copyright © Rebecca Hamilton 2008. All Right Reserved