Poor Gordon Brown - he has been caught on microphone, calling a 65-year-old woman he had met on a meet-and-greet, a "bigot". The media has played it up, and Brown has apologised on BBC radio (filmed doing so, head in hands), and also has called her to apologise in person - and then emailed his party to apologise too. The BBC is calling it the worst moment for the Labour party so far in the election - an election that already sees them likely to come third behind the Tories and Lib-Dems. However, this may garner sympathy. If the woman did want to restrict immigration to keep out Eastern Europeans, she is, by definition, a bit of a bigot. Brown actually does seem to care, and actually does have integrity. His fault seems to be that he called it like it is. Perhaps he was too quick to say he was sorry. Still, the BBC news is emphasising the Janus-faced nature of the comments - that Brown would speak to a Labour supporter one way in person, and then fulminate against them immediately after in private. Bad luck seems to hang over Brown like a fug. Tonight, this seems to be playing on and on, and snowballing. The most famous Duffy in the UK may now be Gillian, not Carol Ann, Duffy. This is Brown's Susan Boyle moment, in reverse.
When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se....
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Poor old Gordon! My sister said that watching him is a bit like watching a defenceless puppy get kicked. Hopefully he will harvest plenty of sympathy votes.
Best wishes from Simon