Wasted Potential

Gordon Brown's talents are wasted. Here we have a man with undoubted potential. A man who has a singular but great skill. A skill and ability that he has so terribly failed to exploit. At a press conference today he exhorted the young people before him to make the most of their lives. And yet Gordon Brown has failed to do that single act for himself.

Somewhere, on an industrial estate, perhaps in a quiet corner of northern England, or maybe even in his own beloved Scotland, there is a goods warehouse, and down at the back of that warehouse is a little office, and in that little office is a small, but functional computer (no internet connection). This computer handles the stock control for the warehouse. It makes sure everything that comes in and goes out of the warehouse is recorded. Right now, this neglected but functionally perfect little machine needs someone to enter important information.

Someone, with the essential backroom skills ideally suited to a mundane job in a micro-society of one. It requires no interpersonal skills, marginal real intelligence but a rudimentary and single-minded application. This person needs little or no understanding of what is going on around him. Someone who, cannot be distracted by, or susceptible to changing events around him. Someone perhaps who is so embedded in his own little world he cannot really understand or analyse anything beyond him and his beloved computer. Somebody who just hunches over that computer for eight hours a day obsessively and diligently recording the comings and goings of this little world. Someone so lacking the tiniest iota of imagination that most of the time he is simply unaware of anyone or anything around him. Gordon Brown is that man.

The fact that he has been cruelly thrust into running one of the major world economies is a terrible waste of his potential. Daily he is required to understand and deal with major events in a fast-moving and politically turbulent world and daily he shows us how ill-equipped he is, on almost every level, to carry out this task. A great and possibly tragic loss to a small warehouse somewhere in the north of England (or possibly Scotland).