As Brown Ascends to PM, Drunken Sailors Reject Comparison

LONDON. As he prepares to leave No. 11 Downing Street and move to No. 10 when he becomes Prime Minister this summer, Gordon Brown looks back on his legacy as Chancellor of the Exchequer with a mixture of pride and regret at goals he pursued, but failed to achieve.

 

Gordon Brown:  “Favorite song?  I’d have to say ‘Taxman’ by The Beatles.”

“We got the tax code up to 8,300 pages,” Brown says a bit wistfully. “I would have liked to have broken 10,000, but I couldn’t get a prescription for steroids” through Britain’s notoriously slow National Health Service.

“If Brown would give us money for talcum powder I wouldn’t have this problem.”

The former rugby player has firmly established his legacy in another respect, however; a spender of historic proportions, raising taxes 99 times according to his Conservative Party opponents, and squandering much of that money on marginal items such as schools, hospitals and transport while basic needs such as the Prince’s polo pony stables are neglected.

Drunken sailors:  “I find the comparison odorous, or odious–whatever.”

Brown’s penchant for taxing and spending has given his opponents a vivid bucket of paint with which to color him in the run-up to parliamentary elections in 2010. “Brown spends like a drunken sailor,” says George Osborne, the shadow finance minister. That charge has drawn fire not from Labour Party members but from another unexpected source; Britain’s many drunken sailors–military, merchant and pleasure.

Pink Pot Pub, Thursday night:  “I’m Hen-e-ry the VIIIth I am!”

“I resent the comparison,” says Peter Bishop, who sailed to Argentina to re-capture the Falkland Islands when Margaret Thatcher checked her spice cabinent in 1982 and found they were missing. “I always spent responsibly, leaving enough money for a taxi ride back to my ship and a packet of crisps to settle my stomach,” he explains from his regular chair at the Pink Pot, a Tottenham Court Road pub where he joins in karaoke every Thursday night.

Larkin:  “We want the money for ourselves at home, so people can spend three pounds, ninety-nine pence on poems.”

Michael Aylward, a seaman in the British Merchant Marine on 24-hour shore leave in Liverpool, concurs. “I never conducted myself as Brown has,” he says as he shifts a heavily made-up woman he calls “Trixie” from his right knee to his left. “Reading poetry, vacationing in Cape Cod, Massachusetts like a bloody Yank,” he says with disgust. “That sort of trip would cost me a year’s salary, even if I didn’t splurge and buy The Collected Poems of Philip Larkin to read on the beach.” Brown is a poetry-lover and frequently asks Andrew Motion, the poet laureate, for recommendations on English football wagers.

Michael Aylward and “Trixie”

The British office of “Chancellor of the Exchequer” is the cabinet minister responsible for balancing the checkbooks of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. It is the equivalent of the shortstop position in American baseball, and goalie in ice hockey. “It’s not too tough until you get to Ireland,” noted former chancellor Ian Smith-Watkins. “They come up with all sorts of IOU’s they forgot to mark down in the register, and they’re always overdrawn.”

“We’d been drinking gin and tonics for several hours, and had somehow blown off course.”

Pleasure boatsmen, while just as vehement in their rejection of any similarity between their own spending habits and Brown’s, were somewhat more sympathetic. “I understand he was blinded in one eye during a rugby game while at Edinburgh Univeristy,” says Philip Masterson aboard his 50-foot yacht “Diffident”. “Sometimes when I drink too much I can’t see out of either.”

Copyright 2007, Con Chapman