Brown on Brown
The chancellor is off to Ellesmere Port today - news that will make workers at Vauxhall's car plant there nervous.
They expect 1,000 job cuts to be announced at General Motors' last UK car factory. They remember that Mr Brown visited the MG Rover factory when it closed last year to offer aid packages to the staff.
The good folk of Cheshire may not yet have got round to reading the Washington Post. They should. It contains an intriguing interview with the chancellor. In it he was asked: "If you become prime minister, what will be the main difference between you and Blair?"
He replied: "It's not so much that the method will be so different as the challenges. Many manufacturing jobs were lost in America and Europe last year. People are worried about what's going to happen to their jobs. There's a lot of offshoring and outsourcing taking place. There's a lot more mobility of labour and of people. Unless we explain what's happening, people will resort to protectionism and xenophobia."
Does he intend only to "explain" or to do something different?
For New Labour kremlinologists there is more….
Asked "So when people say you represent a return to 'Old Labour,' are they wrong?", he replies: "Totally wrong. And the economy that I admire most is the American economy. There's obviously an interest in my opponents saying that I'm not what I am, but I've worked to create New Labour with Tony Blair, and I've said that what we need to do is broaden the New Labour coalition over the next few years."
"What do you think of the war in Iraq?"
"I was a supporter of the war in Iraq."
I'm 
