Teenagers rip into the PM’s manifesto on knife crime

Even Gordon Brown's crackdown on knife crime has started to unravel. He sounded lame at the press conference in Downing Street as he suffered the indignity of having to stand there while the reporter from BBC Newsbeat read out text messages from young listeners saying he didn't have a clue.

Scorn was poured all over Jacqui Smith's idea of sending young thugs picked up with knives into hospitals to meet victims. One Newsbeat listener texted to say that if he was in a hospital bed confronted by an attacker, he'd want to stab him. Another listener said it would make the wards more like a 'freak show' for criminals.

Doctors were also dismayed at the prospect of escorting criminals around their wards. Instead of it becoming a popular measure, Brown was almost washing his hands of the policy as he stood patiently at his lectern hearing the idea shredded by teenagers.

Brown could not match the populist David Cameron by offering to lock up every child found with a knife in the street. Brown knows he hasn't got the prison places to do it.

The lack of popular support for the initiatives on knife-crime to be published tomorrow by the Home Secretary raises a wider question around Downing Street: what can Gordon do that doesn't fall apart in his hands? Everything he touches seems to turn to dust at the moment, to the concern of his genuine friends.

There are even reports from the PM's plane to Japan that a young civil servant touted by Brown as his next speech-writer desperately doesn't want the job and kept pretending to be asleep when the great man marched down the aisle towards him.

A group of London MPs who were called to the Cabinet room to meet Brown last week were mystified when - having told them that he wanted to tell them about his plans for dealing with knife crime - he came up with the idea of 'midnight football'. He told them that youths in his own Scottish constituency enjoyed late night football, and it could be expanded in London.

"We asked him whether kids in his constituency really played football at midnight. He said they actually played between 8-10pm. It was really pretty odd," said one MP who was there.

The PM is now seen to be suffering from the John Major syndrome - that under Major everything became Minor. In the end, Major became famous for the Cones Hotline initiative, and Edwina Curry. That would be a sad end for the big man who once lorded it over Tony Blair.

THE MOLE: PM UNDER SIEGE

FIRST POSTED JULY 14, 2008