Did Gordon tame the feral beasts?

Due to last night's trip to the theatre I missed the Newsnight interview with the Prime Minister in waiting. I'm watching it back on-line this morning and to my surprise I've been fairly impressed with his performance. He looks relaxed, seems on top of his brief and is generally answering the questions put to him, even if he is then pivoting back onto message (no shame in that). Interestingly the only question he has completely dodged was whether he found President Bush impressive or not, although that does come under the damned if you do (PLP erupts in protest) and damned if you don't ("PM Brown calls President Bush Thick") category of questions. Of course one would expect any competent politician to perform well under these circumstances given he will have had days to prepare and it wouldn't have been hard to guess what the questions where. The concern remains how will Gordon cope when something comes up and he can't retreat to cocoon of Her Majesty's Treasury and brood on it for a few months, we shall see.

As to the performance of the BBC's finest? Well I thought they over egged the pudding on Iraq. Yes we know its a disaster, but the time they spent reheating the frankly tedious argument over the semantics of exactly who has apologised for what could have been used to discuss something of real substance. How do we deal with a newly strident and authoritarian Russia, how do you defend free trade in a world that is increasingly hostile to it? Questions that might have told us more about Gordon's world view.

Oh and where was Evan Davis coming from on the will we join the Euro question? is that back on the agenda and I missed the memo? Although to be fair the quote he got out of Gordon on how he believes that monetary integration is, in principal, a good thing might turn up on a few Tory leaflets.