Forsyth: I don’t know – I didn’t see her.
Brown: Sue’s, I think. Just ridiculous!
Forsyth: What did she say?
Brown: Everything! She was just a sort of bigoted woman who said she used to be Labour. I mean, it’s just ridiculous!
In the blink of an eye, Brown’s comments were broadcast on every television and radio channel. Duffy was asked for a response. She gave one: ‘He’s an educated person, why has he come out with words like that? He’s supposed to lead this country and he’s calling an ordinary woman who’s just come up and asked questions what most people would ask him – he’s not doing anything about the national debt and it’s going to be tax, tax, tax for another 20 years to get out of this mess – and he’s calling me a bigot. I thought he was understanding – but he wasn’t, was he? The way he’s come out with the comments.’
In a cringingly desperate attempt at damage-limitation, Brown’s car immediately spun around and took the ashen-faced PM right back to Duffy’s door, where he apologised profusely and asked if he could come in to apologise some more. She allowed him to do so, although she didn’t look overjoyed at the prospect of taking tea with someone fond of insulting her on national television.
For the electorate, the incident was easily the most memorable moment of the campaign. They had never warmed to Brown, and now they had good reason to hate him. Ageing, dyed-in-the-wool Labour voters saw that he secretly treated them with contempt whenever he thought he could get away with it and many no doubt put their cross against the name of the nice, smiley young Tory leader David Cameron, who had never been unpleasant about them on Sky News. The election delivered a hung parliament – with just a few of the voters Brown personally alienated, Labour might have clung on to power by their fingertips.
* It’s hard to know what other nations think when they see the home of British PMs – the Americans have the marvellous neo-classical White House; the French have the elegantly imposing Elysée Palace. British leaders have a terraced house that suffers the occasional mouse infestation. In fact, Number 10 is actually three houses joined together – a sixteenth-century mansion, a cottage (occupied by a Mr Chicken when Walpole took possession) and the normal terraced house that is usually seen. Between them there are more than a hundred rooms – it’s just the façade that looks dull and unimposing. Downing, by the way, was a spy for Oliver Cromwell.
* Although Westminster Hall had been built as a throne room, its use was somewhat multi-functional on an ad hoc basis. The Chancery of the Exchequer used a room above the entrance hall for its meetings. The Court of the King’s Bench met at the southeast corner of the great hall; the Court of Chancery occupied the southwest; and the Court of Common Pleas, which was presided over by Lord Chief Justice Pratt, sat at the middle of the south wall. Their plots were divided up by nothing more than removable screens, and were connected by a gangway filled with stalls hawking books, clothes and anything else people wanted to buy.
** When the Dublin Post of 2 May 1811 wrongly reported Luttrell had died, he demanded a retraction, which the paper printed under the headline ‘PUBLIC DISAPPOINTMENT’.
* The Reform Act was a jolly affair, although ‘Great’ is up for debate. Only increasing the franchise from 400,000 to 650,000 men – around one in six of the adult male population – it was really just a clear-out of all the dross that had built up in the parliamentary system over the previous 500 years. Top of the list for reform were the rotten boroughs. These were constituencies that had once possibly justified having an MP, but over the centuries had become ghost towns. The most famous was Old Sarum, a muddy field in Wiltshire, which had been the original settlement that became Salisbury, but by the nineteenth century was occupied only by goats.
Those goats returned not one but two MPs to Parliament, including William Pitt the Elder. And he only got the job because his family had bought two constituencies for his elder brother, Thomas, and his brother had been ‘elected’ to both, so he gave Old Sarum to William. At least you could stand in Old Sarum – the parliamentary seat of Dunwich in Suffolk was largely underwater.
* Jix was an anti-semite, a great opponent of people enjoying themselves in nightclubs and spent a good deal of energy on banning Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness.
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