Bigotgate has helped Gordon Brown
It was crass. It was cringing. And it seemed a sure-fire vote loser when the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called Gillian Duffy "a bigoted woman" just after meeting the once staunch Labour party supporter last week.
Forgetting he was still wearing his radio lapel microphone was a silly but easy enough mistake to make. But the decision by his team to let their man - the British leader, no less - be filmed shortly afterwards in a badly lit BBC Radio 2 studio wearing some clunky "cans" (headphones) while sitting down behind a bank of studio microphones and then to have his private outburst played back to him was cretinous.
His advisors screwed up badly - again - and, in fact, continued to do so that day. It made the British leader look and feel foolish and it was excruciatingly undignified as he squirmed with his head in his hands when it was not hung in abject shame. I felt sorry for him and, I suspect, so did many others, despite his gaff.
It was said that this was the final nail in the electoral coffin for Mr Brown who had been told before the General Election that he was probably going to lose anyway. But then something startling happened.
No doubt, with nothing to lose, Gordon Brown started being himself for the last week of the campaign, without too many unnatural rictus grins for the cameras. He became passionate. He became natural. In short, he started acting as if he didn't care what people thought of him or care for what his mixed bag of advisors were telling him. It was as if he found some hidden confidence which made him decide to forego the often false theatre of electioneering and behave like a normal human being who cared.
He spoke with more confidence and belief. And it was the most appealing our Prime Minister has been throughout the course of this General Election campaign. It was reminiscent of when, against advice, the former Tory Prime Minister John Major got on his soap box in the equally desperate 1992 General Election and communciated with the electorate the old fashioned way by being himself. It worked and they won.
Even if he doesn't win tomorrow after today's poll and even if he's left it too late to make what would be an impressive comeback to retain power, Gordon Brown will at least have gone out fighting. He will have looked and, let's hope, have felt a more confident and compelling man and a force to be reckoned with.