Bully boy Brown

Gordon Brown is centre-stage once more; although, this time, not necessarily enjoying the limelight. After last week's tear-jerker with that media equivalent of a rent boy, Piers Morgan, Gordon and his advisers must have hoped they had found a potentially rich vein of ore to mine; a previously-unremarked capacity for public lachrimosity prompting a two to three point jump in the polls.
Now, some little upstart called Rawnsley has gone and spolit the whole fiction by raising the spectre of Gordon as Gorgon ( gender non-specific, in this case) once again. The image that Andrew Rawnsley paints in Sunday's Observer is of a man of such towering ego but so little real self-esteem that he can only function by beating - metaphorically of course -everyone around him into meek submission. Aides are flayed, secretaries man-handled ( sorry Harriet, I mean of course person-handled) and coffee cups thrown in hissy fits. When Gordon was a young socialist, dissidents were the flavour of the day . But they were Russian and safely ensconced in some far away Gulag. These days, any dissent inside the bunker at Number 10, provokes the same response in  our Gordon as it does in Sir Alex Ferguson. Except, in Gorgon's case any scorching is more likely to be done with a one-eyed stare than a hair-dryer.
When Gordon wants someone's opinion, he feels most comfortable  providing them with it, first.
This is not the only time that Brown has been portrayed as a bullying oaf. Similar rumours swirled around him when he was at the Treasury. Just as nicotine stubbornly clings to a smoker's jacket, the same rumours resolutely adhere to him now. Most recently, a former Blair aide spoke about his "volcanic" temper and almost childlike tantrums when events or people didn't pan out exactly as he wanted them to. Alastair Campbell is famously credited with labelling Brown, then Chancellor, as "psychologically flawed".
Now, it is an independent journalist who has characterised him as such a self-regarding bully that he has been shown a yellow card by Gus O'Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service, concerned about the effect of Brown's tantrums on his staff.
The rumours and stories of Gorgon's bullying ways are so persistent that they are hard to ignore. The sense that there is more than a grain of truth in them is given added substance by the way that labour's big guns were immediately deployed to counter the accusations.
Peter Mandelson made the obligatory trip to Andrew Marr's Sunday show, where he attempted to make light of the charges by referring to his own disagreements with Brown. He didn't deny them outright but deflected them with all the skill of a batsman turning a ball to fine leg.
It's a technique that he uses often. Instead of tackling anything head on he changes the emphasis by
1.  implying that, even if they were true, they are all part of the healthy give-and-take expected between adult politicians conducting the country's affairs, or
2. acknowledging that there might be some truth but all that does is emphasise the tough, unrelenting devotion to duty of our beloved Gordon in steering the great ship of state.
Of course, irrespective of his many faults, Peter M can run rings around any of the current crop of so-called political inquisitors and Marr is no exception.
Temporarily, at least, some of the flames had been quenched.
They were then fanned by revelations by an anti-bullying- at-work charity that people working within Number 10 had contacted the said charity for counselling, because of the intimidating atmospher in which they had to work.
It turns out that that the person running the charity could also be aTory activist. This fact has been immediately siezed upon by Mandelson and other Nu-Labour attack dogs to divert attention from the main story - that Brown is a sociopathic bully - to the political affiliation - and therefore motives - of the charity boss. 
Many of Mandelson's media groupies are already puffing this side of the story and, given Cameron's painful inability to exploit any major news break to his or his party's advantage, it will probably be the main theme by the end of this week.
However, it will not obscure the fact that Brown is a bully. This story, or another very like it, will surface again some time in the near future.
Just as leopards find it very difficult to change their spots, so bullies, by their very nature, are rarely able to develop into fully-fledged human beings. Brown is so convinced of his own rightness that anyone who disagrees or demurs must, by definition, be wrong.
It is therefore his bounden duty to put that person right.
Should this involve a little over-enthusiastic brow-beating, well no one ever made an omellette without first bashing one or two eggs, did they?