Listen in: how Shakira defended Gordon Brown

Gordon Brown continued his unlikely courtship of celebrities with a transatlantic phone call to the Latin American pop singer Shakira.

Mr Brown, who recently invited the Hollywood actor George Clooney to No 10, joined Shakira in a conference call to launch a global campaign for universal education.

Shakira, whose hit song Hips Don’t Lie topped the charts in 45 countries, sprang to the Prime Minister’s defence when asked if he was rubbing shoulders with celebrities to boost his own image.

“Absolutely not,” the singer told The Times from her Washington hotel room. “He is a man with wonderful intentions. He is very pro-active, working very, very hard for this issue of education.

“Think about the fact that not all leaders in the world are focusing on this as an issue. He is one of those who is. So I applaud his work, I applaud the fact that he is brave enough to come to celebrities like me.”

Cynics might suspect yesterday’s event was the latest manifestation of a new defensive strategy in Downing Street: when in trouble, reach for the stars.

Ministers at each others’ throats? Roll out the red carpet for George Clooney.

Voters don’t know who you are? Film a clip for American Idol and share your sunny smile with tens of millions of viewers on a United States talent show.

Tax plans unravelling? Send for Shakira.

With her wild blonde mane, good looks and talents that span singing, modelling and belly-dancing, Shakira certainly reaches parts of the electorate that Mr Brown cannot.

But their collaboration pre-dates his troubles at Number 10 - he invited her to the Commons two years ago in her role as a Unicef ambassador and the Global Campaign for Education, who arranged the conference call, said Shakira and Mr Brown were taking part at their invitation.

Mr Brown himself gave a mumbled defence of his celebrity outreach work, saying: “I will work with everybody who is trying to make a reality of education for every child. Shakira is a long-standing supporter of the Global Campaign for Education and I applaud the work she is doing.”

The campaign, an alliance of children’s charities and teaching unions, seeks to put pressure on governments to meet the United Nations target that every child should have completed primary school by 2015, which means starting in school by next year.

Members of the campaign in Britain are critical of the Government’s own contribution, accusing it of failing to honour quickly enough pledges to make more money available for schooling in developing countries.

Earlier in the day, Mr Brown again abandoned a lectern to give another stage-roaming performance and speak without notes as he addressed the Scottish Trades Union Congress at Inverness.

Instinctively he is an old fashioned platform orator rather than a perambulator, preferring to bulldoze his way through a densely prepared text, heavily annotated in marker pen.

But he is showing dogged determination to master an art form inaugurated by the Tory politician Ann Widdecombe and perfected more recently by David Cameron, his arch enemy.

Some of his remarks to Scottish trade unionists were deliberately personal, as he spoke of his memories of job losses, protest marches and political campaigns stretching back into the 1970s.

He stumbled over his words several times, but emphasised each point by pressing his flattened hands outwards in a reassuring signal of forthrightness, precision and control.

Mr Brown’s allies are prickly at any suggestion of a makeover, insisting that he has often addressed meetings without notes in recent months and say this is simply because he does not have time to write a full-length speech.

Officials also insist Downing Street’s recent celebrity-fest is all a coincidence.

“These things have just come about through nothing that has been devised especially,” one told The Times. “They just happened to have come about in a short space of time.”

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