How Mrs Duffy refused to dance to anti-Brown tune played by ‘The Sun’.
I spent the other day feeling very sorry for Gillian Duffy, the Rochdale pensioner whom Gordon Brown described as "a sort of bigoted woman".
She went out for a loaf of bread, got into a chat with Gordon Brown, and spent the next few days under siege.
About 50 newspaper and broadcast journalists, photographers and camera crews spent the rest of the afternoon and evening camped outside Mrs Duffy's white PVC front door, hoping that she would come out to speak to them.But The Sun, sensing another way to attack Brown and aid Cameron were round the back door of the property waving their chequebook.
And, God bless Gillian Duffy, she refused their life changing sums of money because they wanted her to say thing which she did not believe.
There was speculation yesterday that The Sun had offered Mrs Duffy £50,000, or even £75,000 for her story. It is more probable that The Sun's offer was in the range of £25,000 to £30,000 – which must still have sounded like riches to a pensioner who has worked all her life on relatively modest wages. But Mrs Duffy turned it down. Reputedly, The Sun, which has been campaigning aggressively since last October for a Conservative victory, wanted her to attack Gordon Brown in unrestrained language and declare her support for David Cameron but, after a lifetime's allegiance to the Labour Party, she would not do it.Even after being called "a bigot" by a Prime Minister she had previously supported, this lady refused to accept money from The Sun because she did not believe in the message which they wanted her to preach.
It's not a day that she will ever forget. But she can hold her head up high that she ended up at the centre of a fuss which she could never have foreseen, but that she came out of it without being in any way corrupted.
Click here for full article.
Tags:
2 comments:
It was indeed wonderful, and a credit to the lady, that she was not tempted by the inducements of the tabloids. I bet the Sun reporter fell off his chair when she said no.
Mind you, I feel sorry (sort of) for Gordon Brown too. He is not a man at ease with the media. I think, conversely, that he probably would have found Mrs Duffy easy enough to talk to under normal circumstances (witness the fact that he was in her house for 40 minutes) - I think he is just extremely uncomfortable with microphones and smooth talking...and smiling.
Tony Blair would have handled the lady like a dream but that doesn't mean to say he is a better man, or a more honest politician.
Oh, Blair would have spun it like a dream. And I agree that Gordon is an essentially decent man, he's just not made for television.
Post a Comment