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

THE SARKOZY SHOW

The State visit of French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his new wife, the model turned singer Carla Bruni, was the only show in town this week.

At a personal level it was a triumph for the couple, boosting Sarkozy’s battered bling bling image while his stylish, elegant bride, on her first outing abroad as France’s First Lady, looked as if she had been doing the job for years and enchanted every man who looked into her eyes.

Politically it was spun as formidable and it certainly put an end to years of froideur in Anglo-French relations.

What was certainly formidable was Sarkozy’s address to both Houses of Parliament on the opening day of pomp and ceremony.

But I felt I had heard and seen it before. Not the words, but the delivery had the same passion and sincerity he brought to his campaign to be President of France, promising so much from the depths of his heart. Since then he has done nothing to fulfil the promises of change he made to the French people.

It’s true he has only been in office for ten months and since his election has been through the emotional mill with his divorce and the whirlwind romance leading to his third marriage last month.

One French commentator has described Sarkozy is ‘shallow.’ Does this imply the man is more style than substance and while he means well with all his heart he does not follow through?

Perhaps Sarkozy’s the most revealing words in his speech at the dinner in Windsor Castle were that he could say ‘I have been here.’

As the Queen raised her glass to him amid the splendour of William the Conqueror’s 1000-year old fort with The Marseillaise playing for the umpteenth time that day, you could almost feel the huge effort he was making not to reveal the happiness in his heart with a slip of tears from his eyes.

He was living the grandest dream and its fulfilment in reality went far beyond the wildest of his dreams.

Though the French beheaded and banished royalty, a longing for monarchy still beats in heart of every French man and woman and may explain the monarchical style of their Presidency.

At the height of its imperial power, France was so much grander than Britain - we have nothing on the scale of Versailles - and is far more haunted by the splendour and grandeur of its past than we are. It found it far more difficult than Britain did to give up imperial power.

But Sarkozy spoke almost with longing when he praised the changes with have taken place in an entrepreneurial Britain which has put even the recent past behind it.

Perhaps with his private life settled, he may now set about fulfilling his promise of change to the French people. But both he and they probably first need political psychotherapy to rid themselves of the haunting, crippling, unconscious longing for the grandeur of the past so they can at last grasp change and move on.

BUSINESS AS USUAL AT HEATHROW

‘We always knew the first day would represent a unique challenge,’ said Gareth Kirkwood, British Airways Director of Operations, at the end of the chaotic day Heathrow’s Terminal 5 opened for business.

Hyped as a state of the art building which would put an end to airport aggro for BA passengers, it was blighted by cancelled flights, long delays and queues, missing luggage, lifts stopping and travellers being advised to rebook, take the bus to Gatwick to get another flight or find a hotel. There wasn’t even a free cup of tea or coffee or the offer of a refund on offer.

Day One at Terminal 5 was not unique - just business as usual at Heathrow.

Copyright © Rebecca Hamilton 2008. All Rights Reserved

NO TODAY FOR YESTERDAY'S MAN

The wrong place at the wrong time was the charitable verdict on Conservative Leader David Cameron’s visit to Rwanda as floods swamped his Oxfordshire constituency this week.

Many of his constituents felt a lot less charitable. Some said that he ignored them as he briefly got his feet wet on a stroll down a constituency street prior to his African safari and had simply exploited a photo opportunity to make him appear concerned.

Clobbered into third place in the recent by-elections in Sedgefield and Ealing Southall, his Party trailing nine points behind the Government in the latest Opinion Poll and murmuring about his leadership among his own ranks, Cameron, who likes to be called Dave, must be relieved the ten week long Parliamentary summer recess has arrived and he can head off on holiday to France with his family.

Cameron loyalists try to claim the slump in Poll ratings is simply due to a ‘Brown bounce’ in the wake of Gordon Brown becoming Prime Minister just over four weeks ago.

The truth is a lot worse for both Cameron and the Conservatives.

Elected leader 19 months ago, Cameron was at best a very inferior imitation of Tony Blair – comedians Rory Bremner and Jon Culshaw did Blair so much better.

But Blair’s days of smoke and spin, in which Cameron could just about get by, are over and gone and already seem a long time ago.

Now, as the country heads into harder times and he is up against the deeply serious politician that is Gordon Brown, Cameron not only appears a lightweight PR man but not even a very good PR man.

His Channel 5 interview on Friday, in which he talked about how he faced a crisis in his Christian when his first child was born disabled, smacked of desperation – especially coming from a man who, in defence of his privacy, has repeatedly refused to say whether or not he took drugs as a student.

And while Brown visited the flood-hit zone in Gloucestershire and looked concerned as he asked questions and repeated his thanks to the emergency workers who had saved the Walham power station from breakdown, the best Cameron could manage was a conference link with the affected areas.

Since becoming leader he has not only disowned and alienated the Party’s traditional supporters and shied away from many of the issues which concern them but he has failed to win over ground held by New Labour.

As the recent by-elections clearly showed, when disillusioned and fed up with New Labour, voters turn to the Liberal Democrats and not ‘David Cameron’s Conservatives’ as the Party was styled in Ealing Southall.

Perhaps the saddest thing for Cameron and the Conservatives is that he looks and acts like a relic from the Blair era – a yesterday’s man who has no place or relevance today.

ONLY HUMAN LIKE THE REST OF US

An air of being superior in every way to the rest of human race has surrounded the world of astronauts.

But first one drove hundreds of miles in an attempt to kidnap a love rival and now it’s emerged some astronauts have been sozzled as they soared into space.

Perhaps the pressure under which they work makes them even more fragile and prone to hit the bottle and have emotional problems than the rest of us.

Copyright © Rebecca Hamilton 2007. All Rights Reserved