The Last Ditch by Tom Paine

Flint Departs With Sexist Blast At Brown (from The Herald ).

I laughed when a colleague told me yesterday that, whatever one's political views, one must feel a little sympathy for the hapless Gordon Brown. She even thought he might get some "pity votes" at an election, so pathetic a figure does he now present. I could not imagine such emotion troubling me. Then I read this story.

Of course, it could not happen to a more appropriate man. Brown has been at the heart of Labour strategy for a long time. Encouraging a sense of victimhood among women, gays and ethnic/religious minorities has long been the core of that strategy. Self-defined victim groups have replaced the working classes as Labour's main political clients.

Everyone trying to do business under such conditions, knows full well that sacking, demoting or even failing to advance the career of a member of these favoured elites is highly dangerous. No matter how incompetent one of them they may be, s/he will always play the victim card. Many a straight white male will have been selected for redundancy during the current economic unpleasantness merely because he has no such card to play. He cannot blackmail his company with the implied threat of dragging them to a victimhood tribunal on charges of thought crime.

Flint is a person of slight consequence, with no serious contribution to make. She may be (having recently posed for a distinctly un-Ministerial photo-shoot for the Observer Magazine) one of the most complete hypocrites ever to play the "victim" joker.  But her attack on Brown for "sexism" has achieved what I thought impossible. Just before I roared with laughter, I experienced a momentary twinge of sympathy for an appalling man hoist on his own ideological petard.