A month on from the disastrous “election that never was”, Gordon Brown finally got the “chance to reassert his faltering authority” when the Queen opened parliament on Tuesday, says the Daily Mail. MPs usually relish the occasion, a chance to hear the Prime Minister set out his plans for the year ahead. But looking around the chamber as Brown delivered his speech, despair was “writ large on many a face”, writes Andrew Gimson in The Daily Telegraph.
Announcing plans on education, health and housing reform, “for half an hour he was stupefyingly dull”. Which is hardly surprising, given that we’ve “been here before”, says the FT. Most of the legislative proposals revealed this week, such as plans to raise the minimum school leaving age to 18, were already announced in July. And even those proposals that were new were trivial. The law making it illegal to incite hatred against disabled people or those who have undergone sex changes “smacks of fiddling and micro-management”, says The Daily Telegraph, rather than “visionary inspiration”. Hardly the image Brown wanted to portray.
But that, perhaps, is not such a bad thing, says The Independent. “The public does not want stunts from the Prime Minister. It wants solid and considered government.” Still, David Cameron didn’t find it hard to locate Brown’s jugular, accusing the Prime Minister of “short-term tricks instead of long-term problem solving”. Confident, full of brio and swagger, David Cameron “looked utterly at home” at the dispatch box, says Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian, in contrast to a “defensive, bruised” Prime Minister. Yet when Brown finally did step up the pace, Parliament came alive. His plan to cut carbon emissions by 60% by 2050 was “transformatory”, he said, accusing Cameron of being “good on jokes but pretty bad on policy”. The embattled Prime Minster had finally come to life, it seemed.
But his challenge now “is to deliver”, Rick Nye, a pollster at Populus Ltd, tells Bloomberg. After hearing the speech, what voters “actually want is improvement in their everyday lives”. Whether Brown can provide that or not, only the next 18 months will tell.