OK, Brown was unlucky. But it's revealing of his mindset. Evidently voters have to be screened before they are put in front of His Highness. And that's after he was supposed to be talking with ordinary members of the public.
So the politburo mindset is on clear show.
Much more interesting, though, were Mrs Duffy's questions. No party but UKIP or the BNP has any answer to her point about East European immigrants. If it's important in Rochdale, it's also apparently important in Wolverhampton, where unemployed people were complaining that when jobs at some firms became vacant, they just bus Poles down from Chester on an agency basis.
Her question about government debt stood out. Our children will be paying it off in taxes for 20 years, she said (or was it 25?). Mrs Duffy gets the scale of the government debt problem.
This is despite the best efforts of all the main political parties. And Mrs Duffy didn't sound as if she'd just had a revelation from the IFS that morning. She wasn't asking if it was true. She knew, and it was a truth that was familiar to her.
So are the parties being less successful in keeping the lid on public understanding of the scale of the debt problem than they'd hoped?
That may turn out to be the significance of Gillian Duffy.
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