Some people, who should know better, like to think of themselves as actors. Take the classic case of the bald, plump bank manager who insists on playing the romantic hero in an amateur musical production.

Fred Astaire famously said, “Can’t act, can’t sing, can’t dance” — but everyone knew he could.

Gordon Brown is more like the bank manager, “Can act, can sing, can dance” — but everyone knows he can’t.

This is prompted by a risible clip shown on TV this morning of our theatrically-challenged PM leaping onto a dais to make a speech with such force I thought he might overshoot and fall off the other end.

He was, of course, sending out the message to us in his clunky way, that he is an athletic sort of guy who should not be messed with. The reality is he’s a portly, middle-aged loser who couldn’t act his way out of a ricepaper bag.

It might be rather endearing, except for the fact he’s wrecked the economy, ruined the country, and all but destroyed our Parliamentary democracy. Nothing amusing about that.

Give up the day job, Gordon. An acting career beckons.

Kate Hoey seemed to suggest this morning that the Queen should dissolve Parliament and call a quick General Election. She added, it’s only a convention that HM waits for the Prime Minister to make the first move.

Actually, the Queen has form on this. In 1974, on the advice of the Australian Governor General, John Kerr, she sacked the Labor government of Gough Whitlam, who was running up an enormous Federal budget deficit by spending on dead-end projects. Ring any bells?

It left a nasty taste in the mouths of many Australians, though, and prompted the subsequent referendum on the Monarchy, which the Queen won handsomely.

It may be that HM will remember the unpleasant aftermath of that incident and exercise extreme caution here.

However, I believe a large majority of people in Britain would welcome the cathartic opportunity to lance the multitude of boils popping up all over the body politic now.

Voters can’t be left out of this for much longer or there really could be violence on the street.

With the political class in deep trouble with the electorate, the Queen would be seen as a great redeemer if she acted crisply to transfer the reins of power back to her people in these dangerous times.

Go for it, Ma’am.

Bryan Appleyard has a thoughtful piece in today’s Sunday Times News Review about the effects of the internet, and Web 2.0 in particular, on society.

Surprisingly, for a man who writes extensively about science, he doesn’t really like it very much. By offering almost everything free, he writes, the internet is destroying real-world institutions, like newspapers, that bring together the talents of many specialists, and deliver a much better analysis of events than bloggers, twitterers and other individual efforts can.

The everything-free culture is also deflationary and may have played a part in the current dangerous round of deflation in world markets.

I’ve always been wary of “the wisdom of crowds” myself, since it’s easy to start a psychological contagion, as we saw recently during the “spend, spend, spend” trend that gripped the world prior to the crash. On the other hand, dictators are almost always brought down by popular uprisings.

It works both ways. There are beneficial contagions as well as disastrous ones, but many more of the latter.

The internet can indeed be dangerous to those susceptible to faceless faces and placeless places. On the surface, it appears to strip away many real-world threats, and often presents a sanitized version of events. Dig deeper, though, and it’s not long before you reach the land of psychotics, hate merchants, and lost souls.

The real danger of Web 2.0 is psychological. If you stick with intelligent users and websites, you may enhance your life in many ways. But stray a little to where the mass of players congregate and you could be in trouble from weird thought-forms and cultish behaviour that can take over minds, and even turn you away from friends and family. It’s the young that suffer most from this.

As with all such articles, the question left hanging in the air is: We can’t abolish the internet, so what do you suggest?

Inevitably, the answer is: Nothing.

We’re stuck with it. That’s life.

Europe is in a frightful fix, with Germany tipping off a mountain and the Club Med countries, plus Ireland, in virtual freefall.

After the bankbath, the next hurricane will be the autumn defaults of trillions worth of corporate debts which can’t be rolled over. Anyone invested with highly-leveraged private equity deals should follow the rats overboard before the owners wake up.

In many ways the worst is to come. The world financial system is utterly flakey and lacking in strength. Further crunches will only weaken it further.

Green shoots should be consumed now before the scorched earth returns.

Europe is in a bigger mess than most other regions because of huge exposures to the bust economies of Eastern Europe, and the dismal truth that EU banks have declared much less of their toxic debt load than the Americans.

It all sounds like an approaching death rattle in the throats of a preening Euro elite that boasted of its superior management and prudential skills to those pesky Anglo-Saxons.

What a pity Gordon Brown left nothing in the kitty for a rainy day. We would be sitting pretty compared with our continental friends, who would still be watching us enviously for our … er … prudential skills and superior management.

Stuart Bell has just expressed the view that House of Commons Speaker, Michael Martin, will stand down tomorrow to avoid being kicked out in a vote of MPs. What a relief, one down, one to go.

In the British system of Government, the top three personages are:

The Queen
The Prime Minister
The Speaker of the House of Commons.

In that order of precedence. Two of those three are corrupt and entirely self-serving, with no thought for what’s good for the country. You may be able to guess who they are.

With his close ally and fellow countryman gone, how long can Brown last? Surely the Queen can now prod Brown into calling a quick, refreshing General Election.

If HM points out that, since Brown usually ignores all conventions, she can too, and will not hesitate to dissolve Parliament as a matter of national emergency.

Tuesday evening’s audience at Buckingham Palace will be fascinating. Maybe Her Maj will sell tickets to raise money for a worthy cause.

A Euro-wag says there are only two well-run organizations in Europe: The ECB (European Central Bank) and Manchester United.

Man U may now have more spare cash than the ECB, especially if they sell Ronaldo.

When can we expect Jean-Claude Trichet to approach Alex Ferguson for an emergency bailout?

John Evans

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Syntagma believes an autumn General Election is more likely than not. Here we discuss the aftermath.

Conservative leader, David Cameron

When David Cameron walks into 10 Downing Street for the first time as Prime Minister, he will be shackled by debt, trussed up like an oven-ready chicken by 200,000 pages of European regulations, and faced with a Matterhorn of unrecyclable rubbish in the form of Labour’s accumulated Statute Book.

The question should not be “will he be any better?” but “will he get out alive?”

The Tory tribe will naturally circle the wagons around their leader. It will be no time for truculent dissent or throwing toys out of the pram. The Conservatives will be squeezed into grown-up mould by the absolute burden of problems laid before them.

My best guess is that Cameron — and George Osborne in the Treasury — will follow Ireland’s brave example, in today’s Budget, of hacking into public spending and raising taxes strategically. If first impressions count, it will not be an auspicious beginning.

David Cameron will have one consolation, I believe. Labour will react to defeat by crumbling like an ancient mummy lifted from a smashed sarcophagus by heavy-handed tomb robbers.

They will not present a problem for at least two Parliaments. If current indications are to be believed, they could well be led by the nightmare ticket of Labour boy James Purnell and Johnnie One-Note Cruddas.

The dilemma for the Conservatives will be how to present the probability of low growth, high taxes and unemployment reaching ahead into an uncertain future. The psychological handling of this decision will be crucial for its success.

I don’t believe the public will flinch from harsh decisions at this point, and the markets will applaud the decisiveness of meeting debt head-on. It will be the slow attrition over time that will be hard to overcome. An injection of magical proportions is called for.

Tackling the chasms of indebtedness bravely may yet avoid the calamity of a rating-agency downgrade from Triple A to AA+, as Ireland has just suffered. A cap-in-hand visit to the window of the IMF for a bailout may also be brushed aside.

Even so, a compensatory mechanism will be a political imperative at this time. And lo, a great opportunity shimmers before our future leaders if they have the vision to see and grasp it.

Former French President, and nominal author of the European Constitution, Valery Giscard d’Estaing, has already primed Brussels for a British realignment with the EU after the election. In a recent speech in this country, he suggested that the UK should negotiate a free trade Association Agreement with the bloc.

For full psychological effect with the native population, it should not include free movement of labour, regulation by Brussels diktat, or legal oversight by Strasbourg’s two courts.

If this were to be swiftly realized by an incoming Conservative Government at the height of its power, it would fully compensate the neglected majority for their austerity, and give the nation a new sense of freedom and national solidarity.

If they have the wit, the Conservatives can balance hard times with a national pride that Labour could never emulate.

When hard coin is scarce, a boost to the spirit is the best gift a sympathetic Government can give.

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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In the aftermath of the Jeremy Clarkson affair (another one?) in which the Top Gear presenter called British Prime Minister Gordon Brown “a one-eyed Scottish idiot”, I’ve reached for a word from Old English to say more or less the same thing.

“Puddled” means “to occupy oneself in a disorganized or unproductive way” (OED). In common parlance that translates as, batty, off ‘is ‘ead, loony, daft as a brush.

Mind you, a few months ago I pioneered the Clarkson approach by quoting Rudyard Kipling: “There’s a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu …”

Well, Downing Street is north of Khatmandu.

So is Gordon puddled? He’s obviously quite clever, and has some abilities, none of them of a personable nature. His problem is that he carries a series of assumptions that most of us find totally barmy.

Each age has its set of assumed truths around which it frames its policies and actions. Future ages usually look back in horror at what their ancestors thought, while imagining their own assumptions to be the height of sense and modernity.

Their children and grandchildren will think otherwise.

Just read contemporary accounts of medieval witchcraft trials or the very detailed archives of the Cathar Inquisition, and you’ll visit another planet.

But that’s the point. Historical records are a kind of time machine allowing us to escape the pin-down effect of the assumptions of our age. Great figures in history are usually Time Lords who roam freely over the past and project themselves into the future with ideas ahead of the game.

Bad Prime Ministers and Presidents are stuck in the rut of “modern” thinking on a range of issues. They are so much of their time, they become ridiculous in less than a decade.

When the baby boomers came to power in the 1990s, something changed radically. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair brought the 1960s with them into office. It was all informality, “Call me Tony”, and that most typical cry from the era, by Danny Cohn-Bendit, “We have no policies, only demands, and when they are met, we will have more demands” — the wail of spoilt children everywhere.

In the spirit of the age (1960s), nobody must be offended, even if they are highly offensive. Under Blair and Clinton, society was divided into small segments. Some were chosen for special treatment, especially members of the tribe and those who could be counted on to vote for the new settlement. The rest were demonized.

The prevailing Marxism of that former era was enshrined in law as the Equality Agenda — no-one was allowed to stride ahead of the crowd on merit or effort. Every area of life was dumbed down, and continues to be in Britain under Gauleiter Harriet Harman.

Gordon Brown fits into the pattern. A baby boomer to his armpits, he devotes a great deal of time and thought to the Trotskyism and Soviet tractor plans of his youth, and runs the country accordingly. Moreover, his Scottish accountant’s mentality contributes heavily to his dour, pernickety personality.

A new generation of politicians is already taking over. They reflect society in general by rejecting baby-boomer thinking with contempt, especially as it has brought the entire planet to its knees in under a decade.

Brown’s espousal of “global solutions”, by which he means the shabby superstructure created after World War II: the UN, EU, World Bank and other doddery examples of the model, is completely counter-productive in an age of the internet and face to facebook communications.

Much looser arrangements, with greater freedom for individuals, where genuinely democratic units, like Nation States, will regain their purpose, are just around the corner. The wired age will not be pushed about by people like Brown, and the roaming political sherpas of another era. They will be seen for what they are, a branch of liberal-left fascism.

Global “solutions” will shatter into a mosaic of bilateral agreements that satisfy each party involved. The world will become a more interesting, diverse and complex place to live.

And that’s exactly how most of us like it.

So is Gordon Brown puddled? Remember the definition: “to occupy oneself in a disorganized or unproductive way” (OED).

Or in common parlance: batty, off ‘is ‘ead, loony, daft as a brush.

I rest my case, M’lud, and ask for the Court’s indulgence for my client, Jeremy Clarkson.

John Evans

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I groaned audibly when David Cameron challenged Gordon Brown in Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) today.

Cameron fell plop into an elephant trap when he complained about Brown’s dishonest phrase, “British jobs for British workers”. Brown simply retorted, “Who is not in favour of British jobs for British workers?”

Elementary, my dear Cameron. In fact, Nick Robinson warned this might happen on The Daily Politics a few minutes before.

The challenging of that simple slogan placed the Opposition Leader in Peter Mandelson’s lap, just as John Major was once depicted as a ventriloquist’s dummy perched on the knees of an enormous Helmut Kohl. Oh, dear!

No doubt Brown was cynically lying when he said it, but the point is a valid one, especially in dangerous times like these. Cameron should have given the impression he is on the workers’ side, if for no other reason than it was the skilled workers who supported the Tories under Margaret Thatcher.

So, is Cameron endorsing EU law and court judgements that effectively allow discrimination against qualified British workers in their own backyard? Shouldn’t he be creating merry hell against this outrage?

Apparently not.

I was determined to keep a little distance from Simon Heffer’s piece in today’s Telegraph, but Cameron’s performance took down the barriers.

Syntagma will punish the Tory Leader by voting UKIP in the European elections in June.

We will, of course, vote Conservative in the General Election, but with the fervent prayer (if it’s not illegal now) that he changes his tune when in Number 10.

Dear oh dear.

John Evans

Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, is an affable cove, argumentative in a jolly sort of way, but with a hidden seriousness often overlooked.

He is frequently right in his assertions, occasionally he goes badly wrong.

He’s at it again, arguing for an old-fashioned version of free trade in the face of a worldwide downturn and a rush to shore up national economies and infrastructures long neglected by obsessions with global solutions.

Bring back the status quo ante, cries Boris, in the teeth of a gale of rage against the tattered remnants of the ancien regime.

His article in this morning’s Daily Telegraph promotes the classical case for free trade: specialization (a result of what’s called “comparative advantage”) and an acceptance of a dependency on others for a wide range of the necessities of life.

The UK, for example, has specialized in financial services in the City of London and elsewhere, while allowing a massive dependency on the rest of the world for manufactured goods and agriculture.

Hold on, wasn’t Britain once the “workshop of the world”? Didn’t we produce some of the greatest agricultural produce on the face of the earth? Weren’t these skills central in pulling us through two world wars in the 20th century?

Explain then why they were sacrificed to the make-believe world of finance, which absorbed many our best graduates, turning them into barrow-boy traders, or designers of financial gambling instruments that inflated the entire planet with unpayable debt?

Is that what Boris means by free trade?

And here’s another conundrum: why have British politicians, especially Brown and Blair, deceived the public into signing away national control over critical aspects of life and commerce to the most unresponsive and cack-handed organization ever conceived in the world’s long history? I refer, of course, to the elephantine European Union.

Is that free trade, Boris? If it is, there’s a large majority in this country that would prefer not to have anything to do with it.

The fact is, free trade, like all freedoms, has to be designed around the grain of human nature, not the mental machinations of policy wonks. It starts with the individual, not a bureaucratic oligarchy.

Does anyone believe the crackpot system we have had across the world, and in Europe, for the past decade has covered itself in glory? Most of it was built up during the “hunkering down together” period after World War II, when legislators were terrified of further wars.

Ninety percent of that system has proved itself redundant and ready to be scrapped. “Free trade” has become synonymous with maintaining this failed superstructure.

The next British Government, which may at some stage include Boris Johnson, should heed public rage at the restrictions of the hated European settlement. A loose trade association is all Britain will require in the century ahead.

And what about democracy, Mr Mayor? How is it that each treaty we sign, each organization we join, hands power on a plate to international bureaucrats at the expense of the very people in whose name this sacrifice is made? The rootless sherpas of world politics and trade have no knowledge of local needs or cultural preferences. Peter Mandelson is a perfect example.

The most dangerous pressure cooker for politicians of all stripes is a build up of anger and frustration by large numbers of people who believe their voices are not being heard. That’s how revolutions start. We should have long outgrown that primitive tendency.

Free trade is easily done if you have something worth selling and the other chap has something worth buying. The big bloc approach masks the necessity to develop products and services that are useful to others.

There is also a vital requirement to have a balanced economy that is not brought down by the collapse of a single sector. Cuba’s reliance on one crop, sugar, is a classic example. Britain’s lop-sided specialism in financial services and house swapping will be viewed in the same light in future.

David Cameron will be at his strongest when he first comes into power. He should use that power to ease the UK out of the EU and into an Associate position on its perimeter. He will not be forgiven if he fudges that essential step.

John Evans

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Protectionism is not for us, says Gordon Brown in exclusive Davos yesterday. So too does Peter (Lord) Mandelson, who has his own vested interest.

Brown should realize that if a leader refuses to protect his own nation, he is by default giving comfort to the rest of the world.

The Prime Minister can only say that because he’s never been elected by the whole nation — nor even by the Labour party. He has no sense of obligation to a body of people to whom he owes his job. Worse, he probably despises the electorate, believing they will never elect him to the highest office in the land. He’s right on that one.

Stodgy bureaucrat and international socialist that he is, he views the entire world as his field of gold, the backdrop to his fame on a global stage. Britain is a minor matter in the calculation.

Nothing else explains his fixation on global structures at the expense of national ones, which are there just to be destroyed. His refusal to staunch the mad scamble of immigration that occurred on his watch for a decade, is a scar on the Labour party that it will not live down for a generation.

Even when Brown had the chance of a derogation on Eastern European migration, he brushed it aside. It would damage his reputation as a world statesman, and besides who cares about the workers whose jobs would be undercut? Not the master theorist with no experience of the real world.

This disconnect between Brown’s actual policies and the support his own countryfolk have cried out for, is not to be found in the lame rhetoric, “British jobs for British workers”, but runs through his actions like veins in a blue cheese.

We have a Prime Minister who doesn’t actually care much for the British and their concerns at all. Trappings of power and the airy-fairy “world coming together as one”, are the driving forces behind everything he does.

This leaves the electorate with a very serious subcrisis to add to the emerging economic and financial woes: a government that governs for anyone but them.

Prime Ministers are appointed to office on the basis that they command a majority in the House of Commons. In the case of Brown, he came to power in mid-Parliament — another fine mess left by Tony Blair — so lacks the nation’s backing for his Soviet-style political philosophy.

Until fairly recently (1997 to be precise) you could count on a PM having strong patriotic instincts that would put Britain first. It is the essence of the job, after all. Until next summer that assurance is missing. We are governed by someone who puts the rest of the world before our own interests.

Brown’s principal sidekick Peter Mandelson — a man attracted to power like a mosquito to blood — is so caught up in the European “project” that he can’t be relied upon to make any decision in the UK’s best interest. Less globalization than continentalization. But it comes to the same end.

It’s hard to imagine a more dangerous situation for the country. A Prime Minister and deputy acting for overseas “friends” rather than for our much depleted country.

Brown’s late countryman, novelist and historian John Buchan would have had blunt words to describe both of them, none ideologically-correct in Labour’s terms. Suffice it say that Richard Hannay and Sandy Arbuthnot would be on their trail like unforgiving tigers.

It’s time to put the country first. Globalization has failed spectacularly, especially in the Ponzi-scheme financial sector. It came up with idiot’s gold that blew away with the first whiff of cordite, leaving millions with lifelong indebtedness or facing default and bankruptcy.

Britain will not break out of this home-grown disaster until its principal authors are persuaded, or forced, to leave the scene. The party that demonizes others for a living should in turn be demonized by those who come after … in the long-term national interest.

Then what? Ralph Waldo Emerson had a simple solution to most economic woes:

“If a man write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbour, tho’ he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.”

That worthy objective can’t be achieved by government. All it can do is ensure that education is tip-top, support meritocracy and real social mobility, and give up trying to micromanage national life.

Gosh, I think I’m making a case for a Conservative Government.

It would be a new dawn, would it not?

John Evans

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The tyranny of the European Union marches on. Two stories graphically illustrate this state of affairs.

Not only are the “no” votes on the constitution, by France and the Netherlands, brushed aside by the ruling elite, but the Irish, who also voted “no”, are being made to vote again next year.

Britain has been denied a vote at all by its own Brezhnevian Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and by his predecessor, the egregious Tony Blair.

Tyranny grows when a majority of people simply refuse to believe it’s happening. Well, it is.

Here’s an example, reported by Christopher Booker, of the extraordinary treatment of brave President Klaus (pictured) of the Czech Republic in his own country. Read and be warned:

Czech leader in shock after EU assault.

John Evans

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I have been re-reading the works of Goethe. Not required reading these days, and almost certainly ignored in the UK’s State school system, where ticking boxes is the main curricular activity.

Goethe was the great psychologist, always looking beyond the outer shell of life to source-material of which most people are unaware — material that opens us up to archetypal situations which appear as recurring patterns in human history.

Take Goethe’s most famous work, Faust, in which the eponymous university professor makes a pact with the devil in the person of Mephistopheles. Faust sells his soul in exchange for receiving everything he’s ever desired, including the incorruptible Gretchen. Mephistopheles craftily defers his own gratification by putting off the day when he will collect Faust’s soul.

Reading the famous play again, I’m reminded of Gordon Brown’s new-found soulmate Peter Mandelson, recently rehabilitated to the Brownian universe by the PM’s aching desperation to win a general election.

Brown’s stodgy performance in power cries out for a mastermind to guide him to at least one electoral victory on his own terms. With Tony Blair out of the way, Brown has foundered badly.

The pact with Mandelson, to drive power and its trappings to his putative master, gained new intensity this week with news of the Machiavellian scheme to deliver Britain into the euro currency, whether its people agreed or not. British voters have always been cruelly deceived on EU matters anyway, and were sold out on the constitution by Brown and Blair, who both ratted on a promise of a referendum.

Dumping Britain into the failing Eurozone was probably part of the pact the new Business Secretary extorted from Brown as his fee for helping win the next election. Mandelson is now Deputy Prime Minister in all but name.

Which brings me to the School of Leonid Brezhnev.

Brezhnev was made Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet after helping to sack the former incumbent. He became the first man in Soviet Union history to hold both the leadership of the party and of the State.

Apart from his clunking Politburo totalitarianism, he is best known for the Brezhnev Doctrine, which asserted the right of Soviet intervention in cases where “the essential common interests of other socialist countries are threatened by one of their number.” Or indeed no-one in particular.

In his eleven years of high office, first as Chancellor of the Exchequer for a decade, and now Prime Minister, Brown has reserved the right to interfere in all aspects of national life, and to micromanage the thoughts, activities and behaviour of every individual in the land.

The Brown Doctrine dispenses a pin-down band of control around everyone, enforced by law. It is acutely sensed by anyone outside the tribe that rules us. Those who are not paid off by State benefits, or non-jobs as “outreach workers” in the public sector, are still dazed by the extent of the country’s descent into elective dictatorship.

Nicknamed “the big, clunking fist” by his predecessor Tony Blair, Brown lives up to it, despite constantly asserting his “moral compass”.

Britain is ruled by the Brezhnevian Brown Doctrine, supplemented now by a Mephistophelian vision of unlimited Continental power, driven by Lord Mandelson’s moth-like attraction to control in all its forms.

Goethe has the angel chorus in Faust sing the following verse:

Woe! Woe!
Thou hast destroyed
The beautiful world,
By a mighty fist …

That should be Gordon Brown’s epitaph. Let it be required soon.

John Evans

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