![]() ![]() The show ended with Forde inviting the ex-PM to talk about his current charity work, redistributing surplus stock from Amazon and elsewhere to poor families in Fife. Where, Matt Forde, is the comedy in this? He wishes, he said, he’d had the chance to prevent austerity, to do more to eradicate child poverty – and (my reverie kicks in) to bring about a world in which Cameron, May, Johnson, Rees-Mogg et al HAD NEVER HAPPENED! It could bring a(nother) tear to your eye. As opposed to Peter Mandelson, whom Forde did ask Brown about, to amusingly terse effect.Įven as a voter who spent the New Labour years carping from the left about their caution and their compromises, the frustration I feel that Brown was unable to show this side of himself to the electorate is exquisite. Forde didn’t directly ask Brown about his vexed relationship with Tony Blair, a man whose name, remarkably, was hardly uttered in this hour-long conversation. ![]() ![]() One might have wished for a more testing examination of a man who, it could be argued, let the financial sector off the hook after the 2008 crash, opened up the NHS to private interests, cosied up to the Daily Mail – and contrived to lose an election to that political homunculus David Cameron. So did Forde, mind you: he was clearly in the presence of his political hero, and his Brown-nosed interrogation here threw only the softest of balls in the ex-PM’s direction. W here is the comedy, Matt Forde, in this? Where is the comedy in bringing on to the stage intellectual and moral colossus Gordon Brown, just as the vote for our next PM is cast between a remainder-bin Thatcher who can’t find her way out of a room, and a squillionaire who doesn’t just want to rob the poor to give to the well-off, but appears to admit it? OK, so Forde is a comedian as well as a mimic, and his Political Party show is branded as comedy – but when Brown came on stage for his hour’s chat on the Edinburgh fringe, to an ovation from this home crowd, I practically burst out crying. ![]()
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