Gordon Brown described himself as a "penitent sinner" today after personally apologising to a widow from Rochdale whom he had branded a bigot on the campaign trail.
The Prime Minister spent a full three-quarters of an hour at Gillian Duffy's terraced home to apologise for unguarded comments caught on a radio microphone that he had forgotten to remove.
Mr Brown was accosted by the 66-year-old after stopping to talk to the voters in the suburbs of Rochdale and was attacked on subjects including welfare payments, student tuition fees and the national debt.
But it was Mrs Duffy's complaint about immigration from Eastern Europe which prompted Mr Brown to criticise her as he got back into his car and blamed a staff member for not preventing the meeting. "She's just a bigoted woman," he told aides in his official car, unaware that his microphone was still live.During the original encounter, Mrs Duffy told the Prime Minister that she was a lifelong Labour supporter. "My family have voted Labour all their lives - my father even sung Red Flag, but now I am ashamed of saying I'm Labour," she said.
But she had still intended to back Labour on May 6, until she was told what Mr Brown had said and declared that she would now not bother using her postal vote.
“He’s an educated person, why has he come out with words like that?" she said.
“He’s supposed to lead this country and he’s calling an ordinary woman who’s just come up and asked questions what most people would ask him - he’s not doing anything about the national debt and it’s going to be tax, tax, tax for another 20 years to get out of this mess - and he’s calling me a bigot?"
Mr Brown's discomfort was evident when he was played a tape of his remarks during an interview on BBC Radio 2. He claimed that he had spoken in frustration, upset by the fact that he had not been able to give her a clear answer on her question about immigration.
The Radio 2 interview was also broadcast live on television, and a haggard and humiliated-looking Prime Minister can be seen holding his head in his hands as he listens to the extracts.
"Of course I apologise if I've said anything offensive, and I would never want to put myself in a position where I would say anything like that," he said.
In a bid to make amends, Mr Brown first telephoned Mrs Duffy to apologise, then made an unscheduled return trip to Rochdale to say sorry in person. A large group of minders and journalists milled outside as the Prime Minister remained inside for some 45 minutes, the curtains closed.
When he eventually came back out, Mr Brown explained that he had been able to talk to Mrs Duffy. "I'm mortified by what happened. I've given her my sincere apologies," he said. "I misunderstood what she said and she's accepted my apologies.
"If you like, I am a penitent sinner."
It was a surreal end to a bizarre episode which marked the first major gaffe of the campaign and could prove immensely damaging to Mr Brown as he tries to lift his party out of the third place in the polls.
It was not clear as Mr Brown left whether he had persuaded Mrs Duffy to vote Labour after all - Rochdale is currently held by the Liberal Democrats with a small majority - but Labour campaign aides were clearly worried that the incident could feed into negative impressions of the Prime Minister as a bully.
Mrs Duffy herself is not planning to make any more comment, a Labour press officer said as he tried to clear reporters from her drive.
The timing of the incident could hardly have been much worse for Labour. The three party leaders are due to hold their final televised campaign debate tomorrow night, a week before polling day, and Mr Brown will have been hoping finally to impose his authority as the subject turned to the economy.
Lord Mandelson, Labour's election supremo, tried to stem the political damage, giving a series of media interviews as he arrived to give a crucial speech on the economy to the Institute of Directors at the Royal Albert Hall, making him late for his address to business leaders.
He told Sky News that Mr Brown was not just a “man of political conviction but a man with a deep sense of moral purpose as well”, and that this was why “it would upset him so greatly that, in the heat of the moment, he has in a sense betrayed those views... and given a completely different impression”.
The Business Secretary added: “I’m sorry but these things happen occasionally when you say things you don’t mean.”
Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, said that robust exchanges were normal on the campaign trail but that questions should always be treated with respect.
"I certainly think that saying something that is clearly fairly insulting to the lady in question is not right, it's not right at all."
Sky News defended broadcasting the unscheduled remarks. “Today at a walkabout in Rochdale, Sky News gave Gordon Brown a radio microphone at the request of Labour Party officials. Immediately after his exchange with Gillian Duffy, Mr Brown left in his car before the Sky News microphone could be removed and switched off," the broadcaster said in a statement.
"Audio from the microphone was widely available as part of the pool arrangements between broadcasters covering the election campaign.”
Source:The Times
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