By Denis Campbell

So said embattled UK PM Gordon Brown. The last person I heard say this was my Dad a few hours before emphysema claimed his life six years ago. My mother walked in while he was in a labouring sleep, stroked his head and gently said, “it’s OK, you can let go now.” He snapped his eyes wide open and replied, “I’m not going anywhere!” A few hours later he was indeed gone. 

Emphysema robs the sufferer of oxygen and kills with a slow monotony and insidiousness akin to politics. Gordon Brown announced to the media yesterday he was not going anywhere. He seemed to be the only person in the room unaware of his growing death slide. 

How many lives does this PM cat have? The drumbeat for him to resign is growing ever stronger. His latest Cabinet re-shuffle (the third in a year) includes newly minted peer Sir Alan Sugar. For those viewing from outside the UK, he is the grumpy and irascible host of the UK version of the television show The Apprentice. This would be akin to President Obama appointing Donald Trump as his Secretary of Commerce!

Mr. Brown is looking increasingly like my Dad, while not quite as desperate to hold onto this mortal coil, his vice grip on the PM Office reminds one of Charlton Heston standing before the National Rifle Association. He was their President at the time and shouted in his trademark Moses parting the Red Sea voice, “you can have my gun when you pry it from my cold dead hands!” 

My Dad smoked 2 packs a day for 50-years. Even when on an oxygen tank, he would slip the nose piece off and have a smoke. He was diagnosed for the first time almost eight years earlier and like the proverbial frog in a slowly heating vat of water learned to adapt and live with a reduced lung capacity found only atop K-2 or Everest. 

He quite literally suffocated one day at a time. He hit the Tipping Point of 90+% and basically his body starting shutting down. When my Dad made his famous utterance the hospice workers had been in the house for 10 days preparing him, my Mum and the family for what they had seen 100s of time before. End stage emphysema is cruel because other than his usual inability to breathe, he seemed normal and his last breath was both eerily quiet and irreversible.

Gordon Brown now needs a hospice team. He has fought back against enormous odds and believes he will survive this but the inevitability has not yet hit him. His hand was always difficult. He dealt with a deceitful previous boss, financial meltdown, a schoolboy opponent content to lob sarcastic snark balls across the box and got stuck with the legacy of his predecessor. He fought the good fight, indeed until three weeks ago looked like he might weather the storm and its time to let go, pass the baton and move on. 

The recent ridiculously low turnout at EU Parliament elections does not deserve to be a referendum on his effort. And unless someone inspires an electorate to vote like President Obama did, we end up with the government we deserve. 

So when we wake up next year and see that Tory 2.0 is like all other out-of-the-box release versions (not sure why Windows Vista comes to mind here), gussied up to look nice on the screen but offering little new whilst draining memory and disk space, Mr. Brown can say “I told you so” but will be long buried and gone.

Would Dad have died at 72 had he not smoked for 50 years? Would Gordon Brown have avoided this showdown had Tony Blair left a year earlier and the economy kept humming along? We’ll never know.

That’s why politics and indeed life can seem so unfair.