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The former PM’s one-off onstage chat with standup Matt Forde belied his dour image. If only he’d shown more of this side of himself to the electorate

Where is the comedy, Matt Forde, in this? Where is the comedy in bringing on to the stage intellectual and moral colossus Gordon Brown, just as the vote for our next PM is cast between a remainder-bin Thatcher who can’t find her way out of a room, and a squillionaire who doesn’t just want to rob the poor to give to the well-off, but appears to admit it? OK, so Forde is a comedian as well as a mimic, and his Political Party show is branded as comedy – but when Brown came on stage for his hour’s chat on the Edinburgh fringe, to an ovation from this home crowd, I practically burst out crying.

So did Forde, mind you: he was clearly in the presence of his political hero, and his Brown-nosed interrogation here threw only the softest of balls in the ex-PM’s direction. One might have wished for a more testing examination of a man who, it could be argued, let the financial sector off the hook after the 2008 crash, opened up the NHS to private interests, cosied up to the Daily Mail – and contrived to lose an election to that political homunculus David Cameron. Forde didn’t even ask Brown about his vexed relationship with Tony Blair, a man whose name, remarkably, was not once uttered in this hour-long conversation. As opposed to Peter Mandelson, whom Forde did ask Brown about, to amusingly terse effect.

The Political Party with Matt Forde is at the Gilded Balloon, Edinburgh, on 15 and 22 August

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