ROLLING POST

[7.30pm GMT 11 May] David Cameron is the new Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He is the Queen’s 12th Prime Minister of her Reign, the youngest since Lord Liverpool in 1812.

[7pm GMT 11 May] David Cameron is heading towards Buckingham Palace to kiss hands with the Queen on appointment as Britain’s new Prime Minister.

[6.43pm GMT 11 May] Gordon Brown has left the Palace and is no longer Prime Minister. Britain as of now has no PM. The Queen herself holds that power until, in 15 minutes, David Cameron is expected to arrive and relieve his Monarch of that burden.

[6.20pm GMT 11 May] Gordon Brown announced he has resigned both as Prime Minister and leader of the Labour Party. He is currently on the way to Buckingham Palace to tender his resignation to the Queen. David Cameron is expected to go to the Palace soon. Nick Clegg is expected to be Deputy Prime Minister in the new Government.

[5pm GMT 11 May] The Queen is in Buckingham Palace as a deal is very close between the Conservatives and Lib Dems. Her Private Secretary is reported to be in the Cabinet Office. Brown is expected to resign tonight to take up a career of writing and charity.

[4.17pm GMT 11 May] The BBC’s Nick Robinson is reporting that fixed, four-year Parliaments part of deal with Lib Dems.

[4pm GMT 11 May] Gordon Brown will resign his seat and leave politics altogether.

[3.45pm GMT 11 May] Sky reporting that staff assembling in 10 Downing Street to say goodbye to the Browns.

[3.35 GMT 11 May] Meeting of the Privy Council in Buckingham Palace in 25 minutes. Although a routine one, it could become involved with the fast-moving events.

[3.15 GMT 11 May] The Evening Standard is reporting that Gordon Brown is about to resign. He will go to the Palace this evening or tomorrow morning. The Queen will then send for David Cameron.

[3pm GMT 11 May] There are reports on the BBC that Gordon Brown’s baggage is being loaded into cars as I write. Now denied.

It also looks as if the Conservatives will form a pact with the Lib Dems later today — “The only deal in town” (Lib Dems).

Could David Cameron go to the Palace this evening? We await the Queen’s helicopter from Windsor imminently.

John Evans

The result of the General Election is inconclusive overall, but with a substantial Conservative lead over all other parties.

Weakness is the message, indecision and a reluctance to tackle deep-seated problems, the cause.

Unless something is done to repair the damage in quick time, the markets will apply their chilling verdict next week. That is not vengeance on the part of the markets, but a simple reaction to the hopelessness of self-serving politicians who have deceived us for more than a decade.

As with Northern Rock and other failed financial institutions, if governments borrow from international investors, they are subject to the rules laid down by market fundamentals.

But the underlying story is one of opportunities missed. I have been scribbling here until my arms ached that the offer of a trade-only referendum on our membership of the European Union would have given Cameron the edge in a tight election.

Yesterday, the Daily Mail concluded that the Tories lost 10 seats to pointless UKIP votes.

Polling gurus Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher writing in the Sunday Times agree: “If just half those who voted UKIP [United Kingdom Independence Party] in the 19 seats that the Tories most narrowly missed had voted for Cameron instead, he would have had a majority of two.”

It follows that a referendum offer would have opened the way to a comfortable majority for the Conservatives. David Cameron and his inner sanctum must be held responsible for that.

Of course, Cameron is now effectively Prime Minister of England, representing 85% of the UK population. Whatever the merits of the various theories on electoral reform, if England can’t get the Government it wants, something is seriously wrong with the system.

There is nothing sacrosanct about an arrangement which denies a major nation like England its own administration and imposes alien government on two fronts.

Clearly, the union with Scotland should now be examined in this light. Instead of waiting for the spendaholic Scots to separate from England and the rest of the UK, the English should ditch the northerners first.

These are huge issues to grasp at a time when the debt markets are eyeing up the country for a sovereign downgrade. But great Prime Ministers are made in the heat of battle.

I believe Cameron must bid his new best friends, the LibDems, farewell. They will represent a veto on all policy decisions with the EU at a time of eurozone disintegration. Conservatives must also deal with the matter of Scotland instead of consenting to be held to ransom by the crafty Alex Salmond.

David Cameron can rule via a minority Government, ultimately blaming the others for any problems, and going to the country in the autumn to ask for a new mandate.

The alternative “rainbow alliance” between Gordon Brown, Nick Clegg and various “nationalist” parties, plus the greens, contrary to perceptions, would be manna from heaven to the Tories, if not the country. It would fail in months and lead to a big majority for the Tories in a new election. This really could be a good election to lose.

Only 16,000 votes separated the Conservatives from an overall majority in Parliament. It should be easy to make that up in a second round of voting while Labour tears itself apart over the leadership, and the LibDems are seen to be losers.

That’s the way forward for both the Conservatives and, more importantly, the country.

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We can see clearly now that the UK is totally out of touch with what is going on in Brussels. New developments today point to a widening gap between EU policy and British aspirations. These will become critical when a Conservative Government takes power within three months.

It’s only a month since the European Constitution, known colloquially as the Lisbon Treaty, came into force across Europe.

Despite the assurances and soothing voices from all sides, it is now starting to bite, with the Commission demanding a full-scale “economic government” for Europe.

Using the problems of Greece as an excuse, the federalists are in full pursuit of their quarry. The apparent backing down of Germany yesterday makes the outcome more likely, even inevitable in the short term.

Jose-Manuel Barroso, the Commission president, said that “Brussels has treaty powers allowing it to take the reins of economic management.
This is a time for boldness. I believe that our economic and social situation demands a radical shift from the status quo. And the new Lisbon Treaty allows this.”

Brown’s “red lines” are melting like icicles in the Athens sun.

Tomorrow, Thursday, Gordon Brown goes to Brussels for an EU summit which will be dominated by the Club Med crisis and the immediate future of Greece. Once again, a British Prime Minister will be up against the full force of European hegemonic zeal. Given Brown’s character and inability to face up to those stronger than himself, the outlook is not good.

Both Douglas Carswell (Conservative) and Gisela Stuart (Labour) today demanded assurances from Brown at PMQs that Britain would not get involved in eurozone matters, nor extend taxpayers money to Greece.

Brown’s reply was meticulously prepared, pointing to the new IMF facility which he knows Brussels is determined not to access. A typical EU stitchup is on the cards.

Surely now the Conservatives must make their case clear. They need to step back from this wretched powerplay.

John Evans

Breaking News: The Lisbon Treaty is set to become law within weeks after the Czech Republic’s eurosceptic president, Vaclav Klaus, conceded his attempt to challenge it was futile.

It was once considered normal to ask for a two-thirds vote in favour to bring about major constitutional change.

The European Union has succeeded in stamping out any votes at all on itself. Where that has not been possible, as in Ireland, it has demanded just a simple majority. These now rare plebiscites have been accompanied by all kinds of foul play and the bribery of reluctant electorates.

Apart from numerous treaties of accession over the years, the main instruments binding countries into the sticky web of euro politics have been:

Acts of Accession 1972: Brought UK into Common Market (PM: Edward Heath).
Single European Act: Introduced the Single Market and European Political Cooperation (PM: Margaret Thatcher).
Treaty on European Union, Maastricht: 1997. (PM: John Major).
Treaty of Amsterdam: Introduced the High Representative, transferred powers to EC and integrated the Schengen Agreement. (PM: Tony Blair).
Treaty of Nice: prepared the EU to cope with enlargement. (PM: Tony Blair).
Lisbon (EU Constitution) Treaty (Not yet in force). (PM: Gordon Brown).

Even a cursory glance at public opinion at the times of implementation of these treaties demonstrates that all of them would have been lost to British referenda. Many other countries would also have voted against, most significantly perhaps, Germany when required to give up the Deutsche Mark by the Maastricht Treaty.

The political class has been widely divergent from the general public view on almost all matters European, especially in Britain. Realizing this, Brussels has adopted dishonesty, even treachery, as its preferred method of attack.

For Britain, the beginning of it all was the Acts of Accession in 1972, rammed through Parliament by Edward Heath as part of his miserable three-and-a-bit years in Number 10, which also included a three-day week and a crippling miners’ strike.

Heath promised he would only go ahead with membership of the then Common Market if a substantial majority supported it. In the event, his whips had to frogmarch aged and infirm Tory MPs through the voting lobby, even when they were against entry — I believe affidavits exist confirming the rumour. His fraudulent eight-vote victory was hardly a “substantial majority”. There’s little doubt the application would have been lost in a popular referendum.

When Britain was finally granted one three years later by Harold Wilson, the wily old fox set his swivel-eyed Cabinet colleagues free to oppose it. Thus the “no” campaign was led by the likes of Tony Benn and many from the hard left. Wilson got the vote he wanted.

The Single European Act, opened the way for the so-called single market of 1992. I’m convinced a British referendum would have scuppered it. Tellingly Margaret Thatcher complained afterwards that she had been duped by the French president of the Commission, Jacques Delors. The headline in The Sun newspaper said it all: “Up Yours, Delors!”

The people were against it. We still got it.

And so it rolls on. Maastricht squeaked through Parliament with tiny majorities after heroic whipping operations. The people, though, would have flattened it. Only John Major’s negotiated opt-outs from the single currency and the social chapter saved the day for the europhiles.

Note that Labour has since signed the social chapter, and Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson would have liked to take the country into the euro currency, with obvious deadly results.

The moral is that even opt-outs are no protection from the advent of a Labour government, as Brussels knows only too well. If you sign up to a treaty, you’ll get most of it in the end.

The open wounds from the current Treaty of Lisbon are still raw. Britain was promised a referendum, but Blair conspired with Germany’s Angela Merkel, France’s Nicolas Sarkozy, Peter Mandelson and others to rat on the pledge. By the by, Blair would become Europe’s first president and that looks a likely appointment before the end of the year.

Again, a vote in Britain would have crushed this treaty for good.

The ongoing tragedy of this tale is that had Heath been square with the people and offered them a vote in 1972, even with a simple majority, the UK would never have entered what is now the EU in the first place. As time went on and Europe became more integrated, it would never have been possible to persuade the public to enter the so-called community.

The European saga is one of the most scandalous betrayals in all history. Because the power has been “salami-sliced” over 37 years, many people are only just waking up to the enormity of it.

Our only hopes now are that, 1) economic conditions get massively worse and the EU disintegrates as it deserves to do, or 2) David Cameron’s Conservatives win the General Election in May and set about restoring full powers to Parliament and the people of Britain, who are maritime Atlanteans, and have never been Europeans.

John Evans

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Labour MP, Gisela Stuart’s prescient warning of a “democratic deficit” inherent in the Lisbon Treaty is a rare moment of clarity from a mainstream politician on the almost taboo subject of the European Union.

The treaty, she said, would leave EU leaders accountable to no one, and with the ablility to grab yet more power from nations without consultation. It contains a “ratchet clause” that permits the closing down of national vetoes by diktat.

There will be “no more treaties, no more referendums anywhere” on future transfers of power from the nation states to Brussels. Gordon Brown’s hollow promise that there would be no more treaties for at least 10 years was, as ever, subtly misleading.

She went on, “My basic test of democracy is: can I get rid of them? By casting a vote, you can change the people who are in control of you. Lisbon does not give you, as a citizen, the means to control the executive or the politicians who decide on your behalf, and that’s the hurdle it falls on. The nature of democracy is really at stake.”

I’ve long argued that what’s being built in Europe is a new platform for Fascism. Continentals don’t have the same reflexes against it as the British do; their Napoleonic systems are already deeply autocratic in nature. This is very attractive to people like Blair, Brown and Mandelson, but hated by the English as a whole.

The steely bureaucrats of Brussels are terrified of Britain having a referendumed veto on this final nail in the coffin of democratic pluralism across Europe, which is why they have been making promises to Blair on the newly-created Presidency of the Council. Next year, Tony Blair could wield more power over us than new Prime Minister, David Cameron.

Silly, malleable Blair would be putty in the hands of the backroom power brokers of Brussels. At some stage he would be replaced by the longed-for “strong man” and … here we go again.

How did we sleepwalk into this?

Fascist Frankia is but a few steps away from completion. The 20th century is about to repeat itself.

Wake up, Britain. It’s not too late to get out.

Last week I wrote about the replacement of the postwar baby-boomer generation in our politics.

We have been passing through a period when the spoilt brats of the 1950s and 60s have held political power. Dr Spock’s experimental kidscape proved to be just as destructive as he himself later apologetically admitted it would be.

But consider what’s over the horizon. China has had a one-child per couple policy for decades. Most families made sure it was a boy … and boy, was he mollycoddled.

The young masters of China will be even more frustrated because there’ll be no wives for them. They will soon begin the climb to political power in a newly-resurgent superstate. With its massive reserves of cash and foreign assets, especially dollar-denominated, it will hold immense power over the rest of us.

Imagine such a powerhouse controlled by the spoilt brat generation.

No, let’s not go there.

Nick Clegg topped the Andrew Marr show this morning looking and sounding like a spoilt-brat school kid playing at being a politician. His adolescent attempts at damaging David Cameron with scornful invective misfired completely because it was so plainly not true.

After Gisela Stuart’s grown-up perceptiveness on the Lisbon Treaty, Clegg just seemed gullible and infantile. His boyish enthusiasm for all things euro was shallow and ill considered in the circumstances.

If this man is the next Leader of the Opposition, David Cameron is not going to face much flak from the other side of the House of Commons.

Clegg should be reminded of what happened when Sampson had a haircut.

Paraphernalia is everywhere. In various forms it blights our lives and gums up the works across the board. It’s hard to escape from the growing lakes and mountains of paraphernalia.

Consider weddings — where the word originated. Nowadays they can take a whole day to get through. All that’s really needed is for a couple, in everyday clothes, to walk into a church or registery office. The presiding officer then asks them if they really, really want to marry. If the answer is yes, they are pronounced man and wife and asked to sign a chitty. Next, please! The rest is paraphernalia.

Autobiographies are full of paraphernalia. Chapters on grandparents, parents, siblings, cousins and other family members, litter the pages with unwanted dross. By the time readers get to the real story, they’ve lost the will to live … and 25 quid.

I’ve been mulling this over because I’m considering writing a sort of autobiography without paraphernalia: A Life in Episodes. Sample episode: How I was betrayed by a fish and became a paid writer and photo-journalist at 12. It’s unmissable, I promise you.

Could we not get to grips with this paraphernalia overload in society rather than waste our time counting carbon footprints? We should recognize that they are paraphernalia too.

Automatic stabilizers are the pride of leftwing politicians and that strange group of economists known as Neo-Keynesians.

They kick in when the country goes into recession, automatically increasing spending as the economy splutters. They comprise various benefits paid to the unemployed as they are laid off in growing numbers.

Surely this must be a good thing? To listen to Labour ministers, you’d think so. The problem is, they have no ceiling once they start, and our system pays them out of borrowing, not investments. Borrowing has to be paid back out of taxes, which further depresses the economy.

An economy can easily spiral out of control under limitless “automatic stabilizers” and loss of tax revenue. The United Kingdom is a classic example of that right now.

Never has there been more need for a “social fund” to mop up the automatic stabilizing leakage in the national finances. Surely, there’s now an unstoppable impetus for putting the whole welfare budget on a sounder footing for the future?

Dan Brown’s latest novel, The Lost Symbol is now in the bookshops and, by all accounts, shooting off the shelves at supersonic velocities.

I bought a copy yesterday, despite a self-imposed ordinance not to buy any more books until I had finished writing my own: The Eternal Quest for Immortality — Is it staring you in the face?.

W.H. Smith is offering the £18.99 hardback at £5.99 if you buy 15 quid’s worth of stationery. How can anyone resist an offer like that? I just hope my own much more serious tome doesn’t face similar head-chopping discounts.

Does the author get a royalty on the stationery too? We should be told.

John Evans

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