Imagine the worst possible scenario: May 7, Gordon Brown and Sarah walk into Downing Street to cheers from a carefully selected crowd of Labour party agents and apparachiks. He shakes hands manically, his painted-on smile glowing like a supernova.

Against the odds, Gordon has won another five years as Prime Minister, with a parliamentary majority of 20. The predicted surge of tactical voting for the Tories failed to happen, largely because the turnout was very low: 37%. It was a battle of the core votes and client state. Only Labour could win.

Pundits claim that the three 90-minute TV Leaders’ debates were so boring they turned the nation off at the plug. The country slept through the election as a result.

The Tories are shattered. Television vox pops confirm that voters didn’t know what they were offering; it was too technical and there were no big sweeping themes to enthuse them. The gamble of relying on Brown’s unpopularity flopped spectacularly, especially as large parts of the Tory core vote simply stayed at home.

Tabloid overnight phone polls seem to confirm that if Cameron had offered a trade-only relationship with the EU at the top of his menu he would have gained enough votes to give him a 30-seat overall majority.

Naturally, Conservative Eurosceptics are furious and demand his head, which he offers without protest. George Osborne takes over as Tory leader.

Scroll forward two years: the economy is in a double-dip recession. The peak-to-trough drop in national output rises to 11 percent — a full-blown depression, dubbed by the media as Britain’s lost decade.

Brown is so unpopular a serious leadership challenge is mounted against him by senior Cabinet colleagues. At last, the old fraud is toppled and David Miliband becomes Prime Minister.

The Conservatives are 25 points ahead in the polls, while a series of by-elections reduce Labour’s majority to one. As Britain’s place in international league tables collapses into the mid-teens, while its credit rating falls to triple-B, interest rates rise inexorably.

A vote of no confidence is passed in the House precipitating another general election.

The Conservatives get in with a majority of 150. George Osborne goes to the Palace, while David Cameron becomes Chancellor, William Hague Foreign Secretary.

At a late supper of meatloaf in the Number 10 flat, Osborne says, “2010 was a good election to lose.”

Cameron’s lip curls, “For you, you mean.”

John Evans

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Syntagma Books’ next title is a republication of one of my favourite John Buchan novels, Huntingtower. I wrote about it in a recent diary entry under Gorbals Die-hards

There follows an extract from a 1922 newspaper review of the book — paper and writer unknown:

August 4th 1922
MR. BUCHAN’S LATEST ROMANCE

As a piquant novelty Mr. Buchan has hit upon the device of introducing a band of ragged Glasgow lads, [the Die-hards] formed into an unofficial body of boy scouts. In the exuberance of their youth, they march to such songs as “Class-conscious are we, and class-conscious wull be, Till our fit’s on the neck of the Boorjoyzee”, learned by one of their members at a Socialist Sunday school. But these are battle hymns, sung for the sake of their rhythm, without regard to their meaning, and the boys are unreservedly, not to say violently, on the side of law and order.

Priceless. How could you resist?

John Buchan, later Lord Tweedsmuir, was a Conservative MP and Governor-General of Canada.

Annoyment of the Week
A Gordon Brown-free zone

For your eyes only. Keep this under your hat.

Met Office official alert for November. Dated: October 30.

“November heralds the return of autumn”

I could have told them that after a quick glance at the calendar.

Or could it be a secret coded message as used to appear in The Times in Sherlock Holmes’s day: “Die Wetter ist besser im sommer”.

“Watson, I have it! The weather is better in summer. Germany will invade England between June and August.”

“But, Holmes, surely not during the Ashes series.”

David Milibug, aka Miliband, Britain’s putative Foreign Secretary, is playing a devious, but rather obvious, game of seeking the yet-to-be-created post of foreign minister of the European Union.

Frankly, I don’t give a damn whether he gets the wretched job or not. He’s welcome to it. Its only reward is to provide ego cover and material support through the long period of the Labour wilderness years to come.

After his unforgivably inaccurate attacks on the future Foreign Secretary, William Hague, this week, he will get little succour from the new Whitehall.

With little brother, Ed, a possible leader of the Labour rump after the election, and doomed to fail, he will know that the seat is being ably kept warm for him when he returns from exile.

And what of Mandy Pandy? Big Pete has always lusted after the Foreign Office, ever since his grandpapa, Herbert Morrison, held the post for all of seven months after the war. There are seven months left of this Parliament. Mandy could hardly resist.

It all sounds so cosy. The words “world” and “oyster” suggest themselves.

Not so fast. Labour’s coming drubbing in the polls is likely to be savage. As Chesterton put it:

We hear men speaking for us of new laws strong and sweet,
Yet is there no man speaketh as we speak in the street.
It may be we shall rise the last as Frenchmen rose the first,
Our wrath come after Russia’s wrath and our wrath be the worst.
It may be we are meant to mark with our riot and our rest
God’s scorn for all men governing. It may be beer is best.
But we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet.

Did you know that in 1728, the Royal Bank of Scotland became the first bank in the world to offer overdraft facilities? Apparently so.

RBS was established to provide a bank with strong Hanoverian and Whig ties to England, as the rival Bank of Scotland was involved in raising funds for the Jacobite Rebellion. Bonnie Prince Charlie was missing out on the “Royal” title even before he set off for Derbyshire and his nemesis.

Two banks at war. Two banks now in the wars. History and politics are never far from large concentrations of money.

Scotland’s First Minister, Alex Salmond, worked for RBS in his early days, probably blissfully unaware that he was consorting with the “enemy”

Isn’t life grand?

For New Labour:

We each have a personal myth, a story which builds gradually from our parent’s stories, our cultural myth, and many other factors. In this story, we are the main character, other people are secondary characters. They, however, have their own stories, which are usually radically different from ours.

Society is built on resolving the clash of these personal myths. Civilizations are constructed to preserve collective and national myths. When powerful people’s inner stories meet in dissent, whole continents can dissolve into war.

Such is the power of our personal story. Most people are not in command of their story because it’s formed from a ragbag of inherited ideas, and pressures from all manner of influences. This leads us to devalue ourselves and splits us from our essential authenticity.

That is the thesis of Miguel Ruiz, a Mexican doctor and surgeon, who grew up in the tradition of the Toltecs. In his book, The Voice of Knowledge, he distils it into four principles, or agreements, as he prefers to call them. At first sight, they could be taken for a boy scout’s creed : tell the truth, don’t take things personally, don’t jump to conclusions, and do your best. But this would be to miss the point. Used as talismans of action, the Four Agreements become a powerfully transformative path to happiness and success.

1. Be impeccable with your word.
2. Don’t take anything personally.
3. Don’t make assumptions.
4. Always do your best.

Strongly recommended to all members of the outgoing Cabinet.

Watch out, the zealots are coming.

Who mediates the media? The answer is, in almost all cases, the zealots.

Zealots have a long history. You may remember them from the New Testament. Whatever the purpose, there is always zealotry in there somewhere.

Far from history being driven by “the economy, stupid”, as the Marxist zealots insist, it is in fact powered by all manner of zealousness.

Now, there is nothing wrong with some elements of zeal per se. Without enthusiasm there would be no progress, and probably no fun either. But we must distinguish between zealotry and enthusiasm. The latter is harmless, the former has an unbreakable intent.

Since the media — especially television — will not tolerate anyone who is dull or superficially uninteresting, the zealots have a head start in the race to be media performers, and even controllers of the pipes.

That brings us on to what a zealot does and why zealotry is bad for us.

The present zealotry can be summed up in a few words and phrases: “European Union”, “New Labour”, “carbon footprint”, “green”, “climate change”. Even religion has become the possession of zealots the world over.

Zealots rule. They mediate us from their positions in the media, religion, politics, education and much of current discourse.

If we refuse to follow their harsh prescriptions, they have ways of subtly ostracizing us from society, with weasel words like “right wing”, “eccentric” (once a noble estate in England), “Extremist”, “not one of us”.

In the age of an overwhelmingly powerful media, we must learn to mediate ourselves or become slaves of the new zealotry.

John Evans

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This week’s list of betrayals in the profoundly dispiriting battle to force the nations of Europe into one solid mass, makes depressing reading for anyone with a knowledge of history.

Frank McLynn’s terrific book, 1759, reminds us that it was “the year Britain became master of the world.” The Seven Years War was raging around the globe, and France was a ferocious threat to England’s very existence. It was a world war in everything but label.

In those days the British had some steel. They fought back and won decisively in India, Germany, Canada and the West Indies, gaining total mastery of the seas in the process and effective global supremacy.

It was the age of the greats: Edmund Burke, Dr Samuel Johnson, Pitt “the Elder”, Earl of Chatham, and John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, Winston’s extraordinary ancestor.

Compare and contrast: it’s 2009, exactly 250 years later: Gordon Brown and David Miliband are in charge of the country. Tony Blair is eagerly waiting in the wings for a call to be the unwanted President of Europe. Together with Peter Mandelson they have secretly conspired to make Britain unrecognizable on many fronts.

When first in office at the backend of the 1990s, they opened the floodgates of third-world immigration in an attempt to paint the Tories as racist and “change the face of Britain forever”.

The UNHCR at that time said that Britain would soon be “coffee-coloured”. How did they know that? Every request they made was rapidly turned into British policy by Barbara Roche, the minister then in charge. Now we know it was at the behest of the party leadership, a deliberate, underhand policy by New Labour to change the population of England to increase the type of person who would vote for them.

Was the country ever consulted about this hyper-radical policy? It was not.

At his recent party conference Gordon Brown thundered: “Harriet Harman’s Equalities Bill will change Britain forever”. There are those words again. How often they crop up.

But there’s more. Blair, Brown, Miliband and Mandelson have plotted and schemed for years to sink the country into a European constitution against the will of its people, and without any reference to them, despite cast-iron promises to the contrary. It will “change Britain forever”, they believe. Like a sugar cube dissolved in hot coffee, there’s no possibility of ever reconstituting it. The power of self-determination, hard-won by great leaders of the past, is being lightly tossed away by nonentities.

Their policy of cultural, physical and political destruction is without precedent in peacetime. It’s a magnification of what the Nazis would have attempted had they conquered the country in the 1940s, but made worse by its Shakespearean betrayal of trust.

A group of Marxist — sorry, “progressive” — revolutionaries have been “changing Britain forever”, under the radar, for the past 12 years. Some of us knew that and protested in vain. The rest just sleepwalked into the nightmare.

Compared with the leaders of 1759, the present crew are the lowest species of bacterium. Nasty, brutish, and without a shred of decency or shame. When their story is written, they will go down as the worst traitors in British history — once the electorate has savaged them out of office.

Some Prime Ministers grow in stature over time. Margaret Thatcher is the most recent example. Others are diminished by high office: Edward Heath and John Major, to some extent, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown beyond any redemption.

David Cameron is still a blank page to many voters. He has undoubted leadership qualities and good intentions. But his task will be daunting — although it’s the enormity of the challenge that makes the long remembered leader.

In office he will need to sling the hook of the current crooked bunch and resurrect the spirit of 1759.

It won’t be easy. But it never was.

John Evans

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We can all agree on two things, I believe: Labour is going to lose the next election, and there will be a new leader of the Labour party at some point within a year.

So, who will it be? The hoary old list of candidates is beginning to look raggedly threadbare now. Alan Johnson has proved himself lacking in talent, period! David Miliband needs a very long time in the oven. Harriet Harman is the suicide-note candidate. Ed Balls should join a circus.

Ed Miliband is the gurning candidate. James Purnell lacks bite and mastery. Jon Cruddas is the heir to Foot.

But, hold your donkeys. While the rest of the field has shrunk in stature, one man has gained authority hand over clunking fist.

I refer to Alistair Darling.

He was the man who declared the economic crisis as it was: “the worst in 60 years” while Brown was trying to soft-soap the nation with lies. Darling it was who stood up to Brown during the disastrous reshuffle and established himself as Chancellor of the Exchequer until the General Election.

After a shaky start in the job — probably the worst learning curve in politics — he has now emerged as the most confident minister in the Cabinet. On Saturday afternoon he commanded the respect of economic journalists from around the world with his performance at the G20 news conference.

One thing above all singles him out: he is prepared to speak the truth and engage in the nuanced debate most of us want to hear. Imagine Gordon Brown at the same occasion: PMQs writ large, a bellowing performance of self-praise and obfuscation.

For this diarist, Darling is now the most persuasive voice in the Labour party. Don’t rule him out as its next leader.

He won’t beat David Cameron. He may be yet another Scotsman, but that hardly matters when talent and honesty are the lodestones the country needs.

You heard it here first.

Last year, the American tech blogosphere was drowning in “fatblogging”.

It was started by Jason Calacanis, the man who sold a bunch of blogs to AOL for $30million and a seat on the board. It had its own website and anyone could participate by tagging their posts “fatblogging”. I am not proud to admit that I put up a few myself.

Now the British Tory blogosphere is descending into the same swamp of oleaginous twaddle.

Iain Dale (It’s worse than I thought) — who has looked more than chubby of late on Sky News — has declared himself 18 stone and rising, and desperately in need of motivation to pare down the pounds.

Tory Radio (Iain Dale is a big fat loser!) has reciprocated, claiming even greater avoir dupoisage in what is developing into an “I bet I’m fatter than you are” battle of the sumos. When Eric Pickles declares himself, I’ll be convinced this is going somewhere.

Weighing in at a toned 12 stone, I confess to a wish to lose 7lbs to get back to my best fighting weight. I have to say, 18 stone is one hell of a burden to carry around.

For example, the Sunday Times, at its bulkiest, peaks at 3lbs on the kitchen scales. The difference between 12 and 18 stone represents 28 copies of the ST.

Imagine carrying 14 under each arm. Not only would you need exceptionally long arms, but also the physique of Arnold Scwazziwatsit to bear the bundle home.

I merely point this out to bring some realism to the debate.

Nigel Farage, the exotic leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), has resigned his post and will fight the Squeaker Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, for the Parliamentary seat of Buckingham in the General Election.

This is important because?

Well, it’s one in the eye for the wretched Labour MPs who thought it deft to promote this little man as a raspberry to the Tories. Not deft, not even daft, just infantile.

When the nation needs leadership, Labour’s intellectual giants, including Brown, who must have signed this off, deliver sub-Big Brother type tactics.

Won’t we be glad to see the back of them! If Farage, whose basic EU thesis I agree with, can see off this minnow, he will have earned the nation’s gratitude.

I suspect, though, it will be seen as a stunt by the good people of Buckingham. “Better the devil you know” always plays well when the stakes are high.

Google Books is an online digitization programme for absorbing all the books in the world within the Google “cloud”. Is that good or bad?

It depends where you’re coming from.

If you have an out-of-print work that earns you nothing, you may be glad of some residual income, or a slew of new readers. On the other hand, if you have a new book coming soon, as I have, you may find the juggernaut a trifle overbearing.

There’s a huge battle going on right now over internet copyright. Whatever line you draw as an “originative intellectual worker” will inevitably be breached before long. Google is using its muscle to get a grip on a very unstable situation.

Frankly, I don’t know what the outcome will be. I’m a little bit appalled that my book may be sucked into someone else’s system without my consent, yet recognize the pressures for this to happen.

It’s both about money and not about money. Writers have to earn a living, but also need to be read.

Where do we draw the line?

Like the musicians, I suspect we don’t have a clue.

Quote of the week
Here’s an extract I like from H.G. Wells’s autobiography on “originative intellectual workers”.

“Most individual creatures since life began have been ‘up against it’ all the time, have been driven continually by fear and cravings, have had to respond to the unresting antagonisms of their surroundings, and they have found a sufficient and sustaining interest in the drama of immediate events provided for them by these demands. Essentially, their living was continuous adjustment to happenings. Good hap and ill hap filled it entirely. They hungered and ate and they desired and loved; they were amused and attracted, they pursued or escaped, they were overtaken and they died.

“But with the dawn of human foresight and with the appearance of a great surplus of energy in life such as the last century or so has revealed, there has been a progressive emancipation of the attention from everyday urgencies. What was once the whole of life, has become to an increasing extent, merely the background of life. People can ask now what would have been an extraordinary question five hundred years ago. They can say, ‘Yes, you earn a living, you support a family, you love and hate, but, ‘what do you do? . . .’

“In studies and studios and laboratories, administrative bureaus and exploring expeditions, a new world is germinated and develops. … We originative intellectual workers are reconditioning human life.”

Indeed.

John Evans

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If you peep behind the curtains of your favourite daily newspaper, you’ll come across an interesting phenomenon. Many of them now have an Editor at Large.

From memory, there’s Jeff Randall at the Telegraph, Anatole Kaletsky at The Times, and even Country Life has one, its former editor, Clive Aslet.

What exactly do they do? The one distinguishing feature seems to be that they write fewer articles than hitherto. Smaller role, bigger title. Sooo 21st century.

Maybe they’re out roaming the countryside, hence “at large”. I can understand the Country Life chap doing that, but Jeff Randall? He’s roaming about the studios of Sky News — hardly “at large” is it?

It was always dangerous criminals who were “at large”, never, to my recollection, newspaper editors.

“Here is the news. Mad Frankie Grimethorpe, the multiple axe murderer, is still at large on Dartmoor. The public is urged to use great caution when approaching him.”

Is there something we should be told about our current crop of editors?

Just a week to Easter, my favourite time of year. It is positively springlike here in Devon, as if Rachel Carson never existed.

The G20 is over, Parliament is taking its hols — like birch pollen it comes earlier every year — and the Budget is three weeks away. We have a politics-free zone for almost a month.

I don’t know about you, but I’m politicked out. Would it be too much to ask the press barons to ban politics from the public prints for this brief interlude?

Maybe editors and hacks could go walkabout?

Or “at large” as we media folk put it.

Lord Hoffman, the retiring Law Lord, has stood up for British justice at last by roundly condemning the so-called European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

It is, he says, accruing to itself the role of Supreme Court of a fictional United States of Europe.

The court is made up of dozens of highly paid “judges” from countries like Bulgaria, Russia and Romania, which have almost no rule of law themselves. These upstart briefs consider it a good day’s work to overrule the democratically passed laws of ancient States like Britain.

Hoffman has left it a bit late in the day to make this critique. Many of us have been saying it for years.

The Sunday Telegraph is urging the Conservatives to pull Britain out of the Convention altogether and leave the interpretation of these things to British judges. So they should.

They should also repeal the Blairs’ Human Rights Act which has shredded the Common Law and made a mockery of justice in this country.

British laws for British people would be a good Tory rallying cry.

And while they’re at it, they could also scrap the European Extradition Warrant and the one-sided arrangement with America, whereby they can remove people from Britain without due process, but we can’t from the U.S.

It’s time our politicians remembered what their backbones are for, and stood up for the people of these islands.

Hard to get away from politics isn’t it?

Here’s more: Andrew Neil is retiring soon from a top slot at the BBC.

Over the years he has been a sturdy, even bullish, commentator on many aspects of politics, business and the media — he was once editor of The Sunday Times, and a joint owner (and editor) of The Scotsman.

Apart from The Daily Politics, in which he gives a commendable impression of Terry Wogan, and his Thursday night This Week show, which is on so late nobody watches it, he chairs the sombre News Channel show Straight Talk on Saturday nights.

And sombre is the word. The set is pitch black, the music funereal, the guests so old they look like waxworks. If you haven’t seen it, think Anthony Howard reminiscing on Harold Wilson and you know it by heart.

I’ve got a few ideas for a spruce up.

Change the set to white, play in with Amarillo by Tony Christie, set an upper age limit of 45 on the guests, and insist they still have an active role in politics. Bar all mention of Clement Attlee and Roy Hattersley — in fact, ban him too — and invite guests more like Michael Gove and David Miliband (with banana). Vince Cable could only appear if he does a twirl around the studio as an encore.

Maybe Andrew would have to retire early too, although his version of Amarillo on This Week is fondly remembered by many.

Iain Dale had a poll on his blog asking readers whether Britain should be a member of a future United States of Europe, or become the 51st State of the USA.

Apart from the fact that Washington has never offered an invitation to join it, while Brussels thinks it owns us already, this is not as simple a choice as it seems.

Putting aside the feasibilities of the matter, either option would obliterate British history and sovereignty and reduce the country to a subsidiary Hong Kong status.

Given only the two choices in the poll, America won hands down, 81 percent to 19.

However, if we lose sight of reality, we are truly lost. Just half a century ago Britain ran a worldwide empire bigger than any before or since. It provided the world’s language, its mercantile system, and the model of liberal democracy that dominates the planet even now.

It created the industrial revolution, and showed how a nation could live with its past and be modern, without a political revolution.

To throw in the towel because of the travails of the moment would be going against the grain of the national character.

Three words sum up the cause of Britain’s fall from grace: the Labour party.

Every time this bunch of political pygmies gets into power, the United Kingdom drops down the league of world nations. The Conservatives usually manage to haul it up a few notches, but never completely.

There is a progressive backlog of slippage which increases with every Labour occupancy of Whitehall.

If they win the next election, we may have to settle for membership of the Russian Federation, with Vladamir Putin settled in Buckingham Palace.

David Cameron, your time has come.

The timing of the General Election is on the minds of many pundits in the aftermath of the G20 summit and in the light of an upcoming penny-pinching Budget.

Peter Oborne has pulled back from his tentative suggestion that June, 2009 is a strong possibility, and I agree with him.

With so many elections being held, for local councils and the European “parliament”, the turnout will probably be small. The electorate seems sure to give Labour a trouncing in the locals, so it’s hard to see a different verdict in a Westminster poll.

Brown has few options save playing for a hung Parliament and a deal with the Lib Dems. Risking another winter of growing unemployment and worsening public finances, would be suicidal.

Syntagma’s finely-tuned antenna is screaming “autumn, autumn!” It has to be, hasn’t it? I simply can’t see beyond October. Whatever the position is then, it will just get worse next year.

Brown has to hope for a golden, hot summer, and a mellow public mood.

He will lose, without doubt. There is a shabbiness beyond redemption about his administration that can’t be denied or swept under the carpet.

John Evans

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