Imagine you are a hardened criminal who has just stolen the Crown Jewels.

Would you (a) melt down the gold and sell off the gems to handpicked buyers associated with the underworld? Or (b) declare them to Companies House as assets on your balance sheet?

The ludicrous declaration by Sir Peter Viggers of the creation of a floating island for his ducks as an aid to his Parliamentary duties, places him firmly in the Laurel and Hardy camp. He made £1600 from the act, but I’m sure he didn’t need it.

There’s a lot of that around. MPs are illustrating just how inept they would be if ever they decided to walk on the wild side of the law. The real question is, does that make them unfit for public office, or, in an endearing sort of way, does it reveal their fundamental honesty?

The Tory claims are generally more colourful than Labour’s. Douglas Hogg’s moat is a good example. You can imagine him exclaiming, “Doesn’t everyone claim for their moat on expenses?”

We’re into darker territory with the many MPs who avoided Capital Gains Tax on a house sale by “flipping” the designation of the property to that of their main residence. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, no less, did this four times in four years. He was in effect indulging in property speculation at public expense. Surely he can’t survive?

Again, to put this in perspective, many buy-to-let landlords do something similar when offloading one of their properties. The technique is to rent out your own house and move into the flat or house you want to sell. Once you’ve been there for six months it becomes your main residence for tax purposes and can be sold without paying CGT. I’m told it’s a common practice in the trade.

Surely the Revenue has cracked that one by now, you may ask? Apparently not. The law lays down the six-month rule, and it’s not illegal to move from house to house. Shady, but within the rules.

The Secretary for Communities and Local Government, that walking rictus Hazel Blears, managed this, we are told, three times in one year without, apparently, actually moving in. A bit excessive? It’s still said to be “within the law”. And the law is made by Parliament.

Clearly, Members of Parliament have to have higher standards than your average Dell Boy down the Mile End Road. There can be no excuse for endearing incompetence for the important folk who make the rules the rest of us have to abide by on pain of increasingly draconian penalties. Laurel and Hardy are for Hollywood not Westminster.

Someone has to draw the line somewhere and it can’t be Gordon Brown. He’s too implicated in the wreckage of everything he’s touched over the past 12 years.

What’s much worse than the occasional Stan and Ollie is a calculating manipulator who deliberately turns every decision and action to his own, and his cronies’, advantage.

Brown is severely damaged goods and must relinquish the reins of power before the fumigation of government begins.

Duckgate is a passing amusement. Smile, and move on. There are much more threatening characters to remove from public life.

Let’s not be diverted. Bring on that General Election now!

John Evans

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There’s a lot brewing this morning, including PMQs, an election leak, and general discussion of the state of Parliament.

Let’s start with an intriguing snippet: an apparently inadvertent leak of Gordon Brown’s election intentions by Labour Chief Whip, Nick Brown, one of the PM’s closest confidants.

The picture shows a Twitter post from N. Brown to Labour MP, Austin Mitchell. Since the new Speaker will be installed around June 22, that means an August or September election will be called in July, give or take a few weeks.

The Twitter account was subsequently taken down. Oooops!

This is, of course, a breach of protocol. A Dissolution should be a request from Prime Minister to Monarch, not blabbed about on Twitter.

Nick Brown’s head sits uneasily on his shoulders today.

Via Iain Dale’s Diary

Don’t throw out 646 babies with the bathwater
In his press conference last evening, Gordon Brown was in “Save the world” mode — again.

Having done his bit to subvert and corrupt Parliament over the past 12 years, Brown now poses as the Great Reformer on a personal mission to clean up politics. One could be excused for feeling physically sick during his performance.

Do we want this moral wreck of a man to poke about in the soul of our Constitution? I can hear the howls of rage from here in deepest Devon.

We are now to have a new Speaker foisted on us by a Labour dominated House of Commons, and promoted, I’ve no doubt, by the man who gave us Michael Martin.

I’m rapidly coming to what might be called the Widdy Option — after Ann Widdecombe — of a temporary Speaker (Widdy herself?) to see out the remainder of this Parliament.

Already, leftish commentators are writing about a totally new Constitution, where sovereignty will rest with “the people”, not Parliament. That effectively abolishes the Constitutional Monarchy, characterized by the “Queen in Parliament”.

Let’s get this straight, the public is not angry with the Queen, or even Parliament. The general anger is targeted on Gordon Brown himself and the pig of a party he leads. In the mood of the times, my profound apologies to pigs everywhere.

Constitutional change must begin with what we want to retain, not what the Left wants to get rid of. That means the great principles that underpin the system and hold the revolutionaries at bay.

What we must chuck out is the class-based shop steward system introduced by a sizeable block of Scottish cronies around Brown, including Michael Martin. That should be dumped into landfill at a depth at which it’s unrecoverable.

Only a Conservative Government under David Cameron can do this with full public confidence.

If Nick Brown is right about the election, we may yet enjoy the glorious summer promised us by the Met Office.

PMQs
Two very entertaining encounters between the Opposition leaders and Gordon Brown were laid out before us at this morning’s Prime Minister’s Questions.

David Cameron once again shone a searching light on Brown’s inadequacies.

He spat out his first question: why did the PM say that a quick General Election would mean “chaos”?

Brown tried so hard to be slick but, as usual, stumbled oafishly. Because a Conservative Government would mean spending cuts, he gloated.

Eh? Don’t we have the highest government debt in peacetime history, one which our grandchildren will still be paying off?

Cameron left that hanging in the air by chortling: so he acknowledges the Conservatives will win the election then!

Spending cuts, mouthed Brown, cutting his own throat in the process.

I counted only four questions by Cameron, but they ended in a flurry of fury with his peroration, which left Brown in no-man’s land. “The Prime Minister calls an election chaos. I call it change. When can we have one?”

Spending cuts …

Oh dear.

Cleggie was in cracking form again too, and facing an inevitable barrage of snorting from Labour proles. After his first question, Speaker Martin — yes, the old goat is still there — called someone else.

Clegg stood his ground. “I have two questions, Mr Speaker”.

Martin fumbled. “I thought you asked two questions in your first one.”

Clegg laughed it off and continued.

The Speaker is in demob mood and may be troublesome in the weeks ahead.

Syntagma’s Verdict:
Cameron, 8
Clegg, 7
Brown, 0.9
Martin, vanishingly small.

John Evans

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In what was surely the most inept statement ever made to the House of Commons, a blundering, stuttering Speaker lost what little authority he has remaining to him.

In a speech of staggering inadequacy, Michael Martin apologized on behalf of the whole House over the cash-for-breathing affair, while putting his own involvement in the conditional tense.

He called for a meeting of party leaders “within 48 hours” to thrash out a solution to the many problems of this imploding Parliament.

As he sat down there followed a rumble of total disbelief from the many members present. The mood threatened to erupt in fury as member after member rose to challenge his authority and competence. Some called outright for his resignation.

When asked about Douglas Carswell’s Early Day Motion calling for him to step down, the bewildered Speaker needed to consult his Clerk on whether an EDM was a “substantive motion” that could be debated. It wasn’t. That was in the hands of the government, he said, to loud groans and protests from all sides of the House.

He had passed the buck to his old crony, Gordon Brown, no doubt expecting his support.

At this point Martin was overwhelmed by shouts from the floor and continuing points of order. He had lost the respect of the House but blustered on as if unaware of it. His thick hide and thicker brain failing to grasp the seriousness of his plight.

There is now real anger in Parliament and that will spill over in the days ahead. It was apparent that this hopeless man, promoted as an ally by Gordon Brown, cannot continue in this role.

If the Prime Minister makes any move to keep him in office, he will go down with him. He probably will in any case.

Brown sat moodily on the front bench and must have sensed another nail biting into his political coffin. He left immediately after the statement.

It was dire. It was death.

Cameron calls for Election now
Minutes before the Speaker’s suicide note, David Cameron addressed a press conference and called for “a General election after June the 4th”.

Couched as an imperative rather than a party political point, the declaration cited the public mood of anger and frustration and demanded an end to the triple chaos in government, the economy and political morality.

The Leader of the Opposition’s intervention will strengthen the growing coalition calling for the catharsis of a national poll.

John Evans

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This is how it ends: with a flood of sordid details about MPs’ little chitties, their bathplugs, dog food, and fridge contents.

Great democracies do not thrive on endless reminders of the necessarily pathetic incidentals of daily life, especially as lived by its high representatives and commissars.

It was once said of Rupert Brooke:

The young Apollo, golden-haired,
Standing on the brink of strife,
Magnificently unprepared
For the long littleness of life.

When that littleness takes precedence in the public mind over great matters of State, our Parliamentary system is not just in trouble, but in terminal amortization.

Parliament is a shambles and, as it stands, no longer deserves the role and position it holds in the nation’s life. The so-called Sovereignty of Parliament is a joke, so much of it having been given away to the European Union, devolution, and to the judges through the lamentable Human Rights Act. Much of what has been enacted in the past decade has stripped away real power from the ancestral gathering place of our rulers.

Throw in the legitimacy that has passed from the floor of the House to the Executive, which now wields the powers of medieval Monarchs within the small compass remaining to the institution, and we are left with nothing worth saving, except the memories.

Parliament is a wreck, living on past glories and the biographies of splendid figures from history. Pitt, Burke, Gladstone and Churchill would recoil no doubt from the present abject scene, were they miraculously returned to the place that shaped them.

I was about to write: “But we can’t just abolish Parliament”, then realized that the “we” in that sentence is illusory. “We” simply don’t figure in the solution. The whole of the reform process is in the hands of the fraudsters and gangsters who brought us to this stricken state.

Gordon Brown, Michael Martin, and their accomplices, will continue to filibuster for as long as the rules permit — perhaps another year or so. They must be made to understand that hanging onto their jobs, in the circumstances that exist, would be a crime against the nation.

By then, Parliament will have been holed beneath the waterline: by the Lisbon Treaty; by more circling of wagons around the “rights and privileges” of “honourable” members; by Vatican-like attitudes towards the “Sovereignty” of this busted English Bastille, destroyed not by enraged outsiders, but by its own inhabitants, in our name.

It’s not easy to overstate this. As vultures circle overhead, and vicious parties of the far left vie for grassroots support, all hope rests with the Conservatives led by David Cameron, who themselves have a vested interest in the current chaos.

Luckily, Cameron is showing some real fight and steel in his determination to destroy the fungible Brown and his frightful cronies. One wonders though if he realizes the scale of the job ahead of him?

On attaining office, he should mentally assume that our Parliamentary democracy has burnt to the ground. He must reassemble the principles that have served us well over the centuries: the Rule of Law, Common Law, national independence, the Constitutional Monarchy, a Parliamentary system that rests on honour not personal advantage, transparency of action and motive, and a general acceptance that power should be exercised at the point of maximum competence, not only in Whitehall.

It could be accomplished by a series of majestic Great Reform Acts on a scale matched only by the Victorians. If ever there was a time for big, brave solutions, it is now.

Cameron will not long survive if he retreats into small-scale technical adjustments. The country is waiting for a programme worthy of the times we live in.

He should also create a constitutional corpus of law that could be changed only by a complex process involving the agreement of a few outside bodies, whose membership is not controlled by Parliament.

It could include a strict limit on Government spending and borrowing, way below present levels, except in a major war. This should be wrapped up so tightly that a profligate socialist adminstration, like Brown’s, can never be elected again.

Full legislative powers should be returned to a refurbished Palace of Westminster, as a matter of urgency, where Commons and Lords have real teeth to control the Executive power.

Only a programme on such a scale can restore confidence and, yes, affection, to our dying system of Government.

David Cameron’s time has come. He will, I believe, have the kind of majority that will allow him to accomplish this task. He must not hold back or be content with small flicks around the edges.

The problems of Parliament go beyond the domestic affairs of its members. They encompass nothing less than the survival of the nation itself.

John Evans

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In a subdued House of Commons chamber today, MPs seemed chastened by the ongoing train wreck of their expenses row. It was a quiet session by PMQ standards.

Gordon Brown again adopted a sober demeanour and what, for him, passes as the Prime Ministerial grand manner. He was comprehensively outshone by the smart-footed and punchy lightness of David Cameron’s multipointed attack. He has hit match-winning form at last.

Ignoring BBC man Nick Robinson’s earlier advice not to get “back into the ring” of MPs’ expenses after flooring his opponents the day before, Cameron launched a fiercely penetrative assault, like an expert epee fencer skewering his challenger with neat and numerous holes.

He wanted leadership, and he wanted it now, very much aware that it was he, not Brown, delivering it in spades.

Brown had a “tin ear”, he hissed across the dispatch boxes, pinning the PM to his bench with another adroit thrust. He claimed it would take years for a committee to sort through all the receipts. Action must be this day, not next year, he demanded, echoing Churchill.

Brown mumbled something about consensus across the whole House, but it sounded so lame you could almost hear the silent groans on the benches behind him.

Will he accept that all expenses claims should be published online, in full, immediately, cried Cameron, going in for the kill.

Consensus …., whispered Brown.

Will he save money by abolishing the £10,000 “communications’ allowance” that gives MPs an unfair advantage over their challengers, spat the Tory leader, now plunging his blade into Brown’s carapace at will, like a jubilant toreador.

Consensus, we must have cons …, pleaded a stricken Brown.

We can save the taxpayer money by reducing the number of MPs in this House, Cameron insisted. Will the Prime Minister agree?

There must be agreement from all sides …

It was a bravura performance by David Cameron, shattering the last of Brown’s defences and starkly revealing the emptiness of his thinking. Brown has little left to give, and the House sensed it.

Nick Clegg was less snippy this week, but made the useful point that MPs should not speculate in the property market at taxpayers’ expense. Whoever decreed they should?

It was Cameron’s day. The demolition of Gordon Brown’s Premiership remains on track, but it’s beginning to seem like a hollow victory against such a lacklustre opponent, clearly punch drunk, and on his way out.

Syntagma’s Verdict: Cameron 9, Clegg 6, Brown 2.

PS: Tom Bradby said on ITV News that the most damaging revelations will be published in tomorrow’s Daily Telegraph. Could that mean the Speaker’s nice little earners?

John Evans

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Is this the worst British government ever?

It depends whether you include a few autocratic Kings in the mix. The reigns of King Stephen and George IV would be impossible to simulate today, given that they both bankrupted the country, George was utterly dissolute, and Stephen invented perpetual civil war.

Although King Henry VIII created the framework for English liberties until the invention of the European Union, his reign must have been ghastly to live under, especially for people situated anywhere near a monastery.

With the advent of democracy, the governance of the nation became a little more accessible, if no less fraught on occasions. In living memory, though, it’s hard to think of an administration so cackhanded, corrupt, violent to its opponents, and so thoroughly despised by almost everyone you meet as Gordon Brown’s.

His economic arrogance and incompetence have ignominiously fly-tipped the country into approaching bankruptcy. His apparent lack of concern about the vast vault of accumulated debt — a Fort Knox stuffed full of IOUs and demands to pay where our Sovereign wealth fund should be — amounts to the greatest danger the country has faced since the second world war.

Not even Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan in tandem created such a mess.

We are told to look at pictures from the Great Depression of the 1930s and to compare them with photographs of today. It’s nothing like as bad, the Brownites cajole.

It’s a specious argument, for even pictures of the time before depression looked exactly the same. That’s how people were then. That’s how they dressed.

The relatively affluent, smartly-attired and well-nourished folk queueing up outside Northern Rock for their life savings last year does not represent a lesser event, it simply reflects the way we are now.

The loss of wealth is profound and, in Britain, will exceed the losses of the 1930s in percentage terms. It’s the relative destruction of value that counts, even if we do start from a higher base.

On sleaze, Brown’s government has long overtaken the John Major years. As Major wrote last week, Brown continually lies about what he inherited in 1997. It’s blatant, casual and, when done in the House of Commons, should lead to an apology, followed by resignation if repeated on the industrial scale of a Gordon Brown. But he is oblivious to both honesty and honour.

The latest scandal, over expenses claimed by MPs and Ministers, is part of a long line of misdemeanours and allegedly criminal acts committed by this Labour government.

The system of allowances that corrupts Members of Parliament, rather than pay them at a commensurable rate, is absolutely typical of the Brown dispensation. Part cowardice, part concealment, part fantasy, partly adolescent, part corruption, part greed, part lust for the trappings of office, it has nothing whatever to do with good government or the needs of the country.

Yes, I can safely say, this is the worst British government ever. This generation can perhaps come to a new understanding of Guy Fawkes and his motives. Getting rid of egregious evil in power is not easy — and Brown has a year to go, according to the rules.

Today, as you hear MP after MP wail, “I did nothing wrong, I didn’t break the rules”, remember that is Gordon Brown’s passport through to June 2010. He has the rules on his side.

Can he be allowed to take us all for fools for so long? His disdain for public opinion is well known.

But he may find it will overwhelm him long before his time is up.

John Evans

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Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons has become unbearably boring in recent months, and it’s Gordon Brown’s fault.

To add to his other flaws, Brown is as boring a man as you’ll find in any pub late on in the evening. He doesn’t answer questions, he drones interminably with a small stock of inept phrases and accusatory remarks that would be mocked in a debate for 12-year olds.

David Cameron has not yet found a way through his body armour to deliver a killer blow. Surprisingly, Lib-Dem leader Nick Clegg has.

After a passionate defence of the Ghurkas last week, today he attacked Brown mercilessly, as well as the Labour MPs who barracked him: “I attack him openly. You do it behind his back.” It was a telling blow, like a rugby player who not only tackles the man with the ball, but the rest of the pursuing pack too.

While Cameron played safe and called for an election, Clegg mixed it with anger, the only weapon that penetrates the Brown defence.

At the end, I could hardly remember what the exchange was about, but Brown’s clunky incompetence and Clegg’s new found aggression stay in the mind.

David Cameron needs to develop a cutting edge of scorn. It’s not good enough to shout, “He’s not up to the job!” Most of us know that. We need to see him flinch and flounder as he does when Clegg lets rip.

Result: Clegg 8, Cameron 6, Brown 2.

John Evans

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Charles Clarke is right, Ed Balls should be sacked. But for different reasons than the former Home and Education Secretary had in mind.

An educational desert?

Only totalitarian regimes control every aspect of education down to the smallest details of the curriculum. The most successful governments are content with the slimmest of oversight roles.

After the war, when British State education was a lot better than it is now, government interference was minimal. I read somewhere that the Ministry of Education was housed in a small lean-to building attached to one end of Waterloo Station. Within its tiny portals were housed a handful of civil servants and a Minister. That nano crew managed the teaching of more than nine-tenths of children in the United Kingdom.

Compare that frugal regime with the overflowingly voluptuous, wasteful and ineffectual operation we have now under Ed Balls, Secretary of State for Children and Anything Else We Can Blow Your Money On.

So, yes, Charles, let’s send Balls to the knacker’s yard, but let’s also dispatch a scout to find a suitable lean-to at Waterloo Station.

Preferably one not overrun by dossers, winos and crackheads, of course.

Mark Almond in The Times:

“Turkey needs the EU less and less. Since it has a customs union with the EU many Turkish companies have anyhow got what they want from EU membership — access to markets — while millions of Turkish farmers know that the Common Agricultural Policy will never featherbed them as it once protected French farmers.”

Why can’t our political class see that too?

So pigs are not that calamitous after all. The latest version of the ‘flu virus — grotesquely labelled Swine Flu — is now being downgraded by the puffed-up World Health Organization.

After a week of global mayhem caused by its theatrical raising of the “threat level” to a starry 5 — the flu world’s equivalent of 10 on the Richter Scale — we can all breathe safely again in public. Even while our fellow citizens are sneezing their way through the hay fever season.

Gordon Brown rode the publicity horse, naturally. “We have enough antiviral drugs for half the population and we’re reordering millions more face masks and doses of Tamiflu.” Phew, SuperGordo’s on the job. We’re all saved from the pig disease.

It was good then to see cheery old Postman Pat (Alan Johnson), on the Andrew Marr show yesterday, exclaim, “It’s only flu, for heaven’s sake.”

Now there’s a Health Secretary to die for.

He’s not Prime Ministerial material, alas, but it’s satisfying that some politicians of the old British school remain in place, especially among the aliens of NuLabour.

Keep the bon mots coming, Alan.

Continuing with our rehabilitation of pigs after a bad week for our little pink friends, new research suggests that the best cure for a hangover is a bacon sandwich. I’m not making this up.

Researchers at the University of Newcastle, home of the legendary Newky Broon beer, have made this important discovery.

Elin Roberts of the university’s Centre for Life reveals all, “Food doesn’t soak up the alcohol but it does increase your metabolism helping you deal with the after-effects of over indulgence. So food will often help you feel better.

Bread is high in carbohydrates and bacon is full of protein, which breaks down into amino acids. Bingeing on alcohol depletes neurotransmitters too, but bacon contains a high level of aminos which tops these up, giving you a clearer head.”

So a visit to a greasy spoon after a night on the razzle is just what the doctor may now order. A bacon sarnie, washed down with a pint of ebony tea in a cracked mug, is at the cutting edge of medical science.

Who says elegant dining is a thing of the past?

Have you ever wondered why some politicians consider themselves Prime Ministerial material when virtually the entire country does not?

Take the case of the two music hall acts of British politics:

Harriet Harman (stage name: Mad Hattie Harperson), Deputy Leader of the Labour Party and presiding genius behind the retro (circa 1917 Russia) Equalities Bill.

And Boris Johnson (stage name: Buffoon Boris) the colourful Mayor of London.

Hattie, who apparently believes six impossible things before breakfast, is, in reality, a hardline, hatchet-faced, militant feminist whose every instinct is to drive out and destroy any sign of excellence, or spark of talent, the nation may harbour. Her own yawning lack of exceptionality is an indication of how she would like us all to be.

This morning she denied she would challenge Gordon Brown for the leadership, after campaigning openly and behind closed doors for months. Lack of courage, plus a dearth of any sort of ability for the job, rules her out in any case. Self-knowledge, Ms Harriet!

As for Boris, he’s certainly upped his performance lately and downed his buffoonery. He remains a highly educated and intelligent member of the political elite. Recently, he seemed to be challenging David Cameron for the job of Prime Minister before Cameron had even entered Downing Street.

Did he suppose that the Conservatives — up to 20 points ahead in the polls — were going to ditch one old Etonian for another just a year before an election is due? Sometimes high intelligence is as big a handicap as the lack of it. Boris should ask Hattie about that.

Charles Moore, writing in this week’s Spectator, suggests the difference between them is that Cameron was an Oppidian at Eton, while Boris a mere Colleger.

Eton a hotbed of class distinction? Harriet really does have a job on her hands.

According to Ben Brogan’s new blog over at the Telegraph, William Hague is making waves behind the scenes.

The Conservative’s Shadow Foreign Secretary is preparing the ground for a quick referendum on the European Union Constitution aka the Lisbon Treaty:

William Hague, we know, presented Sir Peter Ricketts at the Foreign Office with a series of clear requests that left little doubt about what’s in store. The head of the diplomatic service was asked to prepare a Bill for a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty that must be ready for publication within days of the Tories taking over.

Now that’s the best news I’ve heard all week.

John Evans

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In normal circumstances, it’s distressing to watch someone’s grip on reality drain slowly away, often through crippling illness or just old age.

However, watching power slip from the hungry hands of a destructive politician, whose overwhelming sense of entitlement has alienated many in his own party, is an epicurean experience to be savoured with pleasure.

As the Americans put it, Gordon Brown has lost his mojo.

Quite what he was up to yesterday in opposing the settlement in Britain of a few thousand Ghurka soldiers, who have consistently risked all for this country, is not accountable to reason. The country is rock solid behind the little Nepalese men, not to mention fragrant Joanna Lumley.

Unsurprisingly, the government lost the vote in Parliament to an Opposition motion supported by Nick Clegg and David Cameron. Quite a humiliation you might think, but also unnecessary.

Brown’s weird performance on the awkward MP’s expenses row deserves better psychoanalysis that I can give. First, he set up an inquiry under a respected chairman to produce a solution. Then, without warning he came up with his own ideas, reported not to Parliament, but on YouTube.

If you’ve ever worked in the casting department of a film production company you will have seen many such clips lying around on the cutting room floor. Gordon looked as if someone was tickling him from behind, as suddenly a great girlish grin would suffuse his face at moments unrelated to the words he was intoning.

“Don’t call us, we’ll call you,” is the classic response, quickly followed by, “Where do they get them from?”

At a subdued Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday, Brown was in soft consolidation mode, pretending to be nice to everyone. He looked fragile, as if he couldn’t take another boll***ing from anyone. Only Cleggy broke the torpor of the moment by calling him “shameless”. Sometimes the Lib-Dem leader’s tetchiness sounds like an old scold having a go for the sake of it. This time he hit his target right on the bullseye. My score: Cameron 6, Clegg 5.9, Brown 3.

There was an interesting aftermath to PMQs. As Brown got up and made his weary way from the Commons, the Speaker called, “Statement on Afghanistan, the Prime Minister.” Brown was forced to make a rueful re-entry from behind the Speaker’s Chair. Embarrassment doesn’t begin to cover it. How can you forget a statement on a major war?

He is behaving like a shuffling old man, totally out of touch with events and public opinion. His whips seem to have given up, leaving a shambles in their wake.

I’m beginning to believe, in all seriousness, that this man is no longer capable of running the country. He is clearly sick and depressed and needs a long time to recover. Gordon Brown is a broken man.

When two major foreign leaders criticize him in public, and the American President “disses” him openly, you wonder how long the men in grey suits in his party will put up with it.

There must also be a procedure whereby he can be forced into a medical and psychiatric examination for the sake of the rest of us. I imagine the Cabinet Secretary could instigate proceedings.

But is Gus O’Donnell the man for the task? Like most top Civil Servants he seems to be very thick with the current incumbents.

Frank Field has just said that Labour MPs have no idea what will be in the manifesto on which they will fight the next election. The mood among backbenchers is either desperation or resignation.

If they decide that they’re doomed, they may turn on their leader just for the hell of it. Someone should.

John Evans

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