Max Raymond

All it took was about a minute’s worth of recorded audio to send the media crazy and create a pivotal moment in this election.

If you don’t know, and God forbid you didn’t in the first place, Gordon Brown met a 66-year-old in Rochdale who talked frankly about her worries on immigration. He then finished his visit and muttered into his microphone, which hadn’t been turned off, that the woman was ‘bigoted’.

This sent Twitter into absolute overdrive. A spoof account had been created within an hour of the story breaking and pretty much everyone on my feed was talking about it in some way. The professional news sources went equally  mad. The fact that the top five BBC News videos were all to do with ‘Bigotgate’ told its own story.

The fact that this got so much coverage is probably testament to how gaffe-free – in the sense of absolutely major screw ups – this election had been until now. None of the main people involved in the main parties had made a massive mistake that risked the amount of votes that a certain candidate gets. With only a week to go until the public go to the polls, not to forget a day before the final televised debate, this couldn’t have come at a worse time for the current PM.

The main consensus though that I seem to gather from this is that it might well be the final nail in the coffin for Brown’s hopes of an outright victory. Just watching that footage today of Brown talking to the people of Rochdale made me feel uneasy due to how awkward he looked.

Either way, expect the Daily Mail to have a field day tomorrow and then ask yourself whether they’d give an event like this the same coverage if you replaced the words ‘Gordon Brown’ with ‘David Cameron’.