Friday, July 18, 2003

Rough play in the UK

A labour intra-party feud gets rather personal:

Supporters of the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, have launched an extraordinary attack on [Prime Minister] Tony Blair, portraying him as a "psychopath" and "psychotic".

[An article in the Brown-backing New Statesman] declares: "The question of Tony Blair's sanity can no longer be avoided."

It quotes Sidney Crown, a former consultant psychotherapist at the Royal London Hospital, as saying that Mr Blair "does not exist" and compares him with an actor. He adds that Alastair Campbell, Downing Street's director of communications and strategy, is "very much represented in Mr Blair's dark side, which is why they like each other ... the psychopathic personality is very quick to pick things up and shift and move about".

Dr Crown suggests that Mr Blair did not decide to lie about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, but had been "highly selective" over intelligence material, seeing the material that appealed to him. "With all forms of psychotics, if you ask people about the consequences of what they've done they can't tell you, because they've no ability to see the future."

Make my popcorn super-sized!