British Leader Demonstrates World's Saddest Facepalm

With little more than a week remaining in The Race to Run Knifecrime Island, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, whose Labour party is running a disappointing third in the polls, has somehow managed to make things worse after being caught on a live microphone referring to an elderly voter who had asked him a question about immigration as a “bigoted woman,” which, whatever its degree of truth or falsity, is not something you want to have out there, particularly in a country where the papers alternate reports of knife-wielding yobs in hoodies robbing pensioners with stories about illegal immigrants who only take time off from stealing British jobs to rape British women. Making matters even more fatal for Brown, an interview in which he “apologized profusely” for the remarks offered perhaps the worst optics of the campaign thus far. Watch the (sadly unembeddable) video and check out his body language as he listens to the playback; this is pretty clearly a beaten man. There’s something almost tragic about it. But also funny.

Britons carve little X’s onto their election ballots May 6th.