The Lighter Side

Although it took the Vicar of Downing Street some years to make public his personal relationship with the Deity, his Glorious Successor has no such inhibitions. "Maybe it's because I am the son of a minister of the church," he said today, in partial explanation of his Big Tent policy of excluding only those who disagree with him: "my father always taught me you had to reach out to people and you had to bring people in wherever you could encourage them and then persuade them to support your views." Gordon's views are that he believes in "a society built by working hard, playing by the rules, fair play". These are Labour values; and they also happen, fortuitously, to be British values. That settles that, then. Anyone indiscreet enough to work hard for the wrong priorities, to play by non-Labour rules, or to hold ideas of fairness which have the bad taste to differ from Gordon's - be warned, for your days of Britishness are numbered. For my own part, I would cheerfully admit to being a lazy, anarchic cheat if it meant I was allowed to do without an ID card; but I fear that the sin of failing to be appropriately encouraged and persuaded may make for slightly more serious consequences.

Asked whether he intends to call a general election, Gordon "insisted that the Queen would be the first to know", ahead of the electorate, ahead of the Cabinet and ahead of Saatchi and Saatchi. Immigrant family or not, the Queen works hard, plays by the rules and has made no public objection to fair play; so evidently she is British enough to cope with the privilege.

Gordon also said that the Government plans to close a tax loophole which enables private equity firms to get away with paying too little. "Whenever there is a loophole that shouldn't exist we take action," Gordon said. "Since 1997 we have closed a massive number. Sometimes it is very difficult to do so because you have lawyers and accountants who are always trying to find these loopholes." Apparently it never occurred to New Labour to pay lawyers and accountants to glance over some of the envelopes on which its 2,685 new laws were drafted, so that the loopholes could be closed in advance. Well, perhaps it did occur to Gordon; perhaps that's what he has been sulking about all these years. He used the occasion of an interview with Mariella Frostrup to put a formal end to the sulk, claiming that in his youth he had been offered "free beer on the NHS". The punchline, it appears, was, "I'm sure it's still available." The Guardian's politics editor calls this kind of thing "a lighter side to his personality".