Appalling Misjudged Harman Gaffe...

[Chil1234]

You know you've won the argument when your opponent is stooping to cheap personal insults. Calling Danny Alexander a 'ginger rodent' was jaw-droppingly childish and I'm glad she had the good grace to apologise. Silly woman.

pmsl laughing smallwhitecat. what with that and the ed milliband 'ambassador from planet fuck' comment by alaistair campbell my internal picture of british politcal life is becoming increasingly entertaining

I don't think Harriet Harman should be allowed to get away with stupid comments just because she is a woman and has been given a hard time for some of the things she's said about wimmin in the past. I don't think she's very good and I criticise her on those grounds.

sox the driving offence that got all the publicity was the one where she was initially charged under legislation she had, herself, introduced (driving whilst on a mobile phone). The others were speeding tickets.

Ed Balls was done for driving while on a mobile phone as well - with his kids in the back! Still, they do very very very important bullying work.

Ed Miliband was the only one from the Brown camp (Number 11 Downing Street) who would speak to the people in the Blair camp (Number 10). All the others in No. 11 used to tell the No. 10 lot to fuck off. So Ed Miliband was the sole go-between.

and his campbell penned moniker was 'ambassador from planet fuck.' which i LOVE.

that and the pope leaked memo restore my faith that there are human beings in whitehall.

No, Soph, I think it was "emissary from Planet Fuck" - which is even better.

even better.

i do love him. he is odious. and somehow fabulous. i'd say a bit like thatcher except i really just hate her, and definitely don't fancy her.

Yes, and he is an MP too. So does he really need all this public sympathy?

No, he doesn't need public sympathy - he can clearly stand up for himself against bullies. He is actually setting a very good example to our red-haired children - he made a quick and witty response without any of the self-pitying whingeing that Harman herself would have indulged in.

In some ways the ginger comment was one of the nicer things she could have said about the hideous creature that is Danny Alexander.

So you are still defending what she said?

LadyBlaBlah I'm a member of the Labour Party and even I think that Harmen said was disgraceful. We need to focus on fighting the cuts and making personal insults like this will not help us as it shows us to be desperate.

There was no need for the ginger part, however I think the actual insult was at the 'rodent' level, not the ginger level.

No I am not defending what she said and the fact she was using insults at all, however it is interesting that politicians insult each other personally all the time, yet she is being disproportionately being criticised and a status of 'uproar' has been created.

I am cynical and when that happens I think there are ulterior motives. And there probably are.

[hwink] Conspiracies abound...[hwink]

Hugh Muir in today's Guardian:

'A rare blunder by Labour's deputy leader Harriet Harman, who, having garnered a few laughs by branding Danny Alexander the "ginger rodent", was forced to call him and offer a grovelling apology. No word on what Ed Miliband thought of it all, or how it fits in with his wish to have a more mature tone to our politics. And no word on how the ill-judged joke went down at home. For as Harriet sits at the breakfast table she can see a member of her own family who, a close friend tells us, is "the most ginger person I know". Poor Harriet. She may well have been forced to apologise more than once.'

Despises her own kids, eh? Or just hasn't noticed him/her?

More quotes from the Guardian:

Mr Alexander later wrote on Twitter: "Red squirrel deserves to survive, unlike Labour."

Scottish Liberal Democrat election chairman, George Lyon, said: "There are no depths to which the Labour Party will not stoop.

"They aren't fit to be in opposition, let alone in government."