Eight days before the British election Labour Party leader Gordon Brown makes a tremendous gaffe on an open mic. The polls suggest Labour is already in third place but this may collapse their vote entirely. From the Telegraph:
Emboldened by Mr Brown's new confidence dealing with the great British public, one of his senior Downing Street staffers, Sue Nye, clearly thought he would be more than a match for Gillian Duffy, an opinionated 66-year-old widow who was vociferously voicing her views to anyone who would listen as Mr Brown visited a community payback scheme for offenders in Rochdale.
Mrs Duffy was delighted - robustly telling the Prime Minister her thoughts on a range of issues, from student tuition fee, to the deficit and, apparently to Mr Brown's disgust, immigration.
Their conversation was overheard by dozens of gleeful journalists and camera crews, again to Mr Brown's dismay.
As he climbed into his waiting Jaguar, he turned to his adviser and demanded to know who had been responsible for putting him in a situation he found so uncomfortable.
"She's just a sort of bigoted woman who says she used to be Labour," he raged.
