Gordon Brown, British Prime Minister, First Lord of the Treasury, Leader of the Labour Party, former Chancellor of the Exchequer, has had surprisingly few titles in his long 11 years in government. Some Minsters have managed to accrue almost one a year to embellish their CVs and Who’s Who entries.

Maybe he deserves another to plump out his list, even if it is an honorary gong going forward.

The title I have in mind has been available to him ever since the local elections in May and the loss of London to David Cameron’s Tories. It should certainly have been collected after the disastrous debacle in Labour’s safe seat of Crewe and Nantwich. Now, following yesterday’s cataclysmic implosion in the East End of Glasgow — the very soul of Labour’s heartland — we’re going to pin it on his chest whether he likes it or not.

Her Majesty’s Leader of the Opposition Designate.

Not that he will linger in his new job when his party is wiped out Canadian-meltdown style in the next General Election. You can be sure he will step down from politics the moment he concedes defeat. A son of the manse who built a reputation for pulling rabbits out of hats will find the absence of hats very hard to bear. Latterly, even the rabbits have deserted him.

For Gordon was the man who, as Chancellor, forged a glittering Cityscape of infrastructure to celebrate his achievements. The Golden Rule that borrowing should be for “investment” only, not for consumption. As a man without a moment’s experience of commerce in his entire life, his idea of investment was more, and yet more, state clutter.

His Borrowing Rule and his Financial Regulator were equally flawed. He’s had to send in his chief ghillie to slice them up for breakfast after they all dropped dead at the same time. Gordon’s smoke and mirrors have disappeared in a big puff of smoke.

Like many, I sometimes get a twinge of conscience in seeming so beastly to a one-eyed man who has pursued his partial vision with commendable vigour for so long. Then I recall that his 1970s-style economics was aimed at creating a client state that would, in theory, always vote Labour. The same was true for mass immigration.

The list of betrayals goes on. Signing away the country to a foreign power (as the EU will be after the Lisbon Treaty) against the wishes of a large majority of the British, and ratting on the promise of a referendum. Selling seats in the upper chamber of Parliament, and other honours, for party funding — he denied knowledge of this outrage but no-one believes him …

Eventually you get weary of compiling inventories of Brown’s failings, treacheries, errors of judgement and betrayals of trust. Like many obsessives, he bores by excess.

The electorate has already spoken. Will he go of his own volition? Brown’s tragedy is that he has no hinterland, nowhere else to go. To him, politics and life are one. Even the books he occasionally writes are intended to burnish his career prospects. Silly little tomes about courage, from a man who conspicuously has little of it. He has been labelled “yellow” by his opponents.

But he won’t go unless pushed and the Labour Party doesn’t cut down its leaders. It’s the long stalemate before checkmate.

Rudyard Kipling had a prescient little verse for our Leader of the Opposition Designate:

There’s a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu,
There’s a little marble cross below the town;
There’s a broken-hearted woman tends the grave of Mad Carew,
And the Yellow God forever gazes down.

Cartoon by Peter Brookes

Despite the spate of negative results in referendums on aspects of the European Union, the EU Commission and its heavyweight political supporters have not given up on their main aim: to convert the EU into a single country.

The currently proposed constitution — now called the Lisbon Treaty — would turn a grouping of nation states into a legal entity in its own right with the power to sign international treaties on behalf of member states and the right to overturn any nation’s laws. It includes an embryo army poised to requisition the forces of any EU country worth having, a flag, a “national” anthem, a passport system and the beginnings of a diplomatic corps with its own embassies around the world.

All it needs is a name.

The European Union is largely operated for, and on behalf of, Germany and France, the two original founders. What they want, they tend to get. In the treaty after next, assuming they find a way to browbeat Ireland into accepting most of the Lisbon Treaty, the question of the name of the new country of Europe is sure to figure. What might it be?

It would have to satisfy the egos of the Germans and the French and be mildly acceptable to the rest. One obvious name stands out: Frankia.

France was originally named after the Germanic tribe, the Franks, which gave us Charlemagne and other worthies of the “Holy Roman Empire”. It’s a name that would flatter both Paris and Berlin, and emphasize their status as joint controllers of the new European empire. The former French currency, naturally, was the franc.

The British would hate it, of course, and, assuming Labour governments are a thing of the past by then, would probably withdraw.

But would, say, a David Cameron government have the moral force to renegotiate Britain’s terms along the lines of an association agreement? Matthew d’Ancona has an excellent “testing the waters” piece in today’s Telegraph on what Cameron can expect on becoming PM in two years from now. One of his most important points is that serious challenges bring massive opportunities for radical change.

Cameron will certainly be faced with the kind of economic reconstruction that Margaret Thatcher tackled so fearlessly in the early 1980s. She succeeded in transforming Britain from basket case to Anglo-Saxon Tiger in less than a decade.

I’m not going to recite my own shopping list of what a new British government needs to do, as it’s way too long. But lancing the European boil is absolutely essential for British independence and for unity in the Tory party. It would also allow the country its familiar role as a freebooting trader again, free from the paralysing regulatory environment and toxic cost base spewing out in all directions from Brussels.

Frankia, in any shape or size, is no longer in Britain’s national interest. David Cameron may just become the saviour of the nation, a Winston Churchill for the 21st century.