Here is the final verdict: Duffy is a bigot!

Brown invited me to No 10 - but he won't be there


News

Isabel Oakeshott Deputy Political Editor

514 Words

02 May 2010

The Sunday Times

THE WOMAN labelled a "bigot" by Gordon Brown has told how he desperately appealed for her forgiveness in a 45-minute private meeting in her home. Gillian Duffy, the pensioner whose chance encounter with the prime minister on the campaign trail in Rochdale plunged Labour's election campaign into turmoil, says Brown invited her to visit him and his wife Sarah in No 10 in an attempt to make amends.

He went to her house after he was recorded dismissing her as "just a sort of bigoted woman" when he accidentally left a microphone on his lapel after getting into his car. His insult followed an apparently amiable public exchange with the pensioner, during which she questioned him about immigration.


Of his offer for her to visit Downing Street, she says: "I didn't like to say it, but all I could think was, 'I don't think you'll be there'."


In an interview in The Mail on Sunday published today, Duffy reveals how she refused repeated entreaties from the prime minister and his aides to pose with him on her doorstep for a photograph showing them shaking hands. She paints a picture of a premier shellshocked by the enormity of his blunder, which plunged Labour's beleaguered election campaign into total disarray on the eve of the final televised leaders' debate last week.

She tells how he asked her whether she had a family despite having discussed her grandchildren during their public exchange less than an hour earlier. Apparently rambling and confused, he also asked if she had met his wife, who was not accompanying him that day.

Duffy was a lifelong Labour voter, but says she will not vote on Thursday. In a blistering attack on the premier, she says: "I'm sorry for you, Gordon, because you have more to lose than me. I'm very sorry that this has happened but it's you who's going to lose out, not me."

Duffy says she was more hurt by being labelled a "woman" as opposed to a "lady" than being called a bigot, and attacks the difference between Brown's public and private persona exposed by their pavement conversation.

"He was smiling when he spoke to me but he was thinking that. What else is he thinking when he smiles?"

Brown's disastrous gaffe came after Labour spin doctors decided he needed to spend more time meeting "real" voters on the campaign trail. It followed Tory criticisms that the prime minister was "being moved from safe house to safe house under armed guard" to prevent potentially difficult encounters with disillusioned voters.

However, Duffy says: "If you're going to go and talk to people, you should have answers, shouldn't you? You don't just go there and shake their hands and tell them how well they're doing. All I did was ask questions. Does that make me a bigot?" Duffy: rejected Brown's pleas