Gordon Brown ‘Nixonian’ Debate Sparked By Frost/Nixon

Film premiers are usually the arena for dull, self congratulatory speeches and some cinema theory babble.

Not so the Frost/Nixon Q&A premier last night (apart from the abominable Philip French), at Haymarket Cineworld, which turned into a wonderful 400 strong group analysis of the autistic ‘Nixonian’ qualities of PM Gordon Brown.

Martin Bright, recently resigned political editor of the beleaguered New Statesman, asked Q&A panelist John Humphrys what he thought about Brown’s relationship to the Mad Monk. After detailing a number of shared features – their bovine jowls and evasive, stonewalling answers – Humphrys concluded confidently that Brown’s strongest Nixonian qualities were his autistic lack of charm, and desperate need to be loved. 

It’s not the first time the Nixon-Brown connection has been made. Last weekend the Telegraph’s Mandrake column quoted Frost/Nixon’s screenwriter Peter Morgan attributing to Broon many of the emotional flaws of Tricky Dick: 

“They are people who are hard to like, people who have complicated emotional inner landscapes, and somehow have had trouble accessing them.”

Or is it just that they both have really fat, odd looking faces? As far as lying, crooked, megalomaniacal power freaks go, I’m not sure good old Gordon is really having a seat prepared for him in hell’s parliament next to Nixon and Pol Pot.

It’s sort of unsurprising the comparison is being made by Morgan though, given his fetish for powerful leaders with bloated, jowly mugs: he also scripted the Brown/Blair telemovie The Deal, chronicling Brown’s fatal Labour leadership deal with Tony Blair in 1994, the Oscar award winning The Queen, and The Last King of Scotland, about the enormous fat-head Idi Amin. I predict a Yeltsin biopic next.

Surprisingly, the Nixon-Brown comparison was also drawn when Brown took over from his be-hated leader, Tony Blair (even though Blair is more likely to have matched Gloomy Gus in his elaborate use of make-up), in a Robert Harris piece for the Sunday Times:

“Gordon Brown is Labour’s Richard Nixon. That is not to suggest for an instant that he is a crook — far from it — but he has Nixon’s combination of immense political talent and utter clumsiness. The buttoned-up suit, the mouth slightly agape, the physical awkwardness, the alarming smile which seems to appear from nowhere as if a button marked “smile” has been pressed in his head, the nocturnal brooding on imaginary grievances encouraged by a group of chippy cronies — Brown, like Nixon, suffers from a kind of political Asperger’s syndrome.”

So shall we soon see Broon being whisked from Number 10 in a helicopter, a smile fading from his face, his hands raised in peace signs, as he is evacuated in disgrace to exile and retirement in Blackpool?

Posted by Becky North in Other | January 23, 2009 2:14PM |