David Maddox: Meeting the great unwashed

Gordon Brown and his senior ministers will be in and around Glasgow tomorrow ahead of a full cabinet meeting.

The event is part of an attempt to take government to the people and follows events in other major cities including Birmingham. Of course, it smacks suspiciously of a copy of Alex Salmond's National Conversation initiative of taking the Scottish Government cabinet on a tour of Scotland for its summer recess meetings last year.

But one interesting aspect of tomorrow's events is the question and answer session for the public ahead of the cabinet meeting. This, of course, has not been advertised so Glaswegians or any other Scots who may wish to attend cannot just walk in off the streets.

Instead Mr Brown and his colleagues will have an invited audience. I am assured by a senior Whitehall source that the audience "will not only consist of Labour Party members" be cause it is a government event.

Apparently, what has happened is that an arms length polling company has been asked to find an audience of a suitable balance including some school children and readers of a Glasgow based tabloid and listeners of a commercial radio station have also been selected.

Nevertheless, you get the feeling that there will not be a question about dodgy e-mails and the recently departed spin doctor Mr McBride.

And it seems a long time since a Prime Minister to hear and answer on the views of random members of the public in a genuinely open forum.

The last one to do that in relatively recent memory was John Major in the general election 1992 (see picture top left) when he took his soap box out on the streets, got on it and took on all comers. I knew the Labour party activist, later Portsmouth councillor, John McIntyre, who managed to hit Major with a rotten egg in Southampton, which perhaps sums up the dangers of letting the public too close. McIntyre had to go into hiding for a while after that and was surprisingly coy about talking about his moment of national fame.

Tony Blair only liked to meet invited audiences because of the potential embarrassment caused by angry voters. Famously when he was cornered by an angry woman outside a hospital in the 2005 general election campaign, he was lost for words.

The usual reason for not allowing in the public is of course one of security and terrorism, but such concerns did not seem to bother politicians of the past.

The last Prime Minister to have a cabinet meeting in Scotland was the last Liberal to hold the post, David Lloyd-George in Inverness in 1921. He, like the other leading politicians of his day including his friend and colleague Winston Churchill, regularly addressed mass uninvited audiences despite living in uncertain times.

It should be noted that the auspices of the Inverness meeting are not necessarily good for Mr Brown. A year after his Scottish sojourn Lloyd-George's government fell in a general election, Mr Brown faces the British electorate in the next year too.