There are four great offices of state in our political system. In the past each has been filled by some of the most impressive and eminent people this country has ever produced.

This week, the Labour party’s choice of incumbent for each of these posts has been revealed as beneath contempt.

We have a Prime Minister whose dark, raging, uncontrolled mentality has been filleted in public and found to be empty of content.

A corrupt Home Secretary whose natural job would be as “dinner lady” in a bog-standard comprehensive.

A lightweight Foreign Secretary who is remembered only for waving a banana around like a hyperactive gibbon.

A Chancellor of the Exchequer who is so out of his depth he is widely seen as the stooge of the Prime Minister.

When the revolution comes, we were told, the masses will rise up and occupy positions of great power in the land. Well, it’s here. The lumpen proles have taken over. As far as we know they didn’t have to shoot anyone, although they have hounded one or two to their deaths, and sent more than 300 soldiers to theirs.

Are we pleased with ourselves?

A nation gets the government it deserves. Britain has only itself to blame as it suddenly discovers that British left-wing politics has not got talent.

In a few days, the Chancellor will unveil his Budget. His assets are, an empty kitty, ballooning debt, falling tax revenues, a financial and currency collapse, and an economy heading for ruin and mass unemployment.

He’s already resorted to printing money and has failed to find buyers for all his debt. Or rather “our” debt.

The nation’s fate lies in his hands and those of the man who created most of the mess in the first place, Gordon Brown.

Do we deserve such a fate? Many of us don’t. They are: those who would rather drown in a fetid bog than vote Labour, and those of us who have been warning of this disaster for years.

But all those middle class folk who fell for “nice” Tony Blair and sturdy “son of the manse” Brown, and kept them in office for three Parliaments, have much to answer for. The wreckage of the country lies at their greedy, unthinking doors.

Natural cycles ensure that the wheel turns at last and allows others to take their place. The longer-term problem is that it will also turn again, and the same mob — with different faces — will gain power for a repeat performance.

If there is a lesson from all this it’s that the Labour party should be destroyed electorally so comprehensively at the forthcoming election, it will never recover again.

It must go the way of the old Liberal party, a rump now, dreaming of the past and not the future.

People forget. Youngsters come along with their own agendas and are easily gulled by slick con artists, and mental defectives who believe their own propaganda.

We have one consolation. It won’t be for another generation at least.

Let’s enjoy the next couple of decades unreservedly, and pray the Tories don’t mess it up and let the mob back in again.

John Evans

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On this morning’s Today Programme there was a good-natured discussion about Confucius. The Master would have been pleased.

It seems the old Sage is enjoying a comeback in his native China, where the Communist ruling elite is considering changing its name to the Confucian Party. Have they actually read his words, I’m tempted to ask?

Here’s a little flavour in the form of a quiz:

1. Which British Prime Minister does this saying suggest?

The Master said, “It is rare, indeed, for a man with cunning words and an ingratiating face to be benevolent.”

Clue: Initials, TB.

2. To which British Prime Minister could this saying be directed?

The Master said, “In guiding a State of a thousand chariots, … be trustworthy in what you say; avoid excesses in expenditure and love your fellow men; employ the labour of the common people only in the right seasons.”

Clue: Initials, GB.

And a lesson for the Labour party when in office:

The Master said, “If you insist on guiding them by edicts, keeping them in line with punishments, the common people will stay out of trouble but will have no sense of shame. On the other hand, if you guide them by virtue, keeping them in line with long-held conventions, they will, besides having a sense of shame, reform themselves.”

Now that’s a good principle for a new Conservative Government — remember the Common Law?

Finally, another ancient Chinese saying that Brussels would be wise to heed:

Create ten thousand regulations and you lose all respect for the law.

Where is the modern Confucius? We could do with him now.

John Evans

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As a person without any debts, and four bank accounts coloured black, I awoke yesterday morning to find the country’s National Debt at £2 trillion ($3tr) and more. That represents more than £60,000 ($86,000) and rising per household. It dwarfs Britain’s annual national income of £1.4 trillion, and doesn’t include other off-balance-sheet liabilities.

Since I am a genuine citizen of the United Kingdom, I am liable for that sum, and probably more from people who can’t or won’t pay, and from more recent arrivistes who decide to desert the heavily listing vessel.

I won’t get an invoice in the post: “For gross mismangement of the economy by Gordon Brown”. That would be too candid and straightforward.

Instead, I’ll find almost every public and private bill will rise, while any receipts will fall and services diminish. Prices in the shops will also start to balloon in a year or two and will remain high for decades to come.

Thus, this debt-free individual, who earns his own living, with savings in the bank and other less liquid assets, will suffer the consequences of others’ malpractice through substantial impoverishment.

Almost everyone in the country will be on a similar path, except those with institutional parachutes to comfort, like politicians, top bankers, and the upper reaches of the Civil Service who caused the problem at source. In modern Britain the buck only stops when it nestles in the pockets of the guilty.

The principal culprit, as almost everyone now realizes despite his increasingly-pathetic attempts at shovelling it off onto others, is Gordon Brown, the man who ran the Treasury with an iron fist from 1997 to 2008 and has been British Prime Minister since then.

In France, within almost living memory, he would have faced the guillotine. In Britain, more likely disgraced and forced into a humbling exile. Even now, he can be impeached by a much-abused nation. Why is this not being discussed?

The other big number this week is 219. Not so significant, you might imagine until you add “billion” on the end. £219 billion ($311bn) is Brown’s yearly overspending in real terms, i.e. above inflation. (From Bankrupt Britain by City fund manager, Malcolm Offord.)

It’s not good economics, but multiply that figure by 10 and you get a rough approximation of the new National Debt.

The pity of it is, the money was wasted. Almost no improvements are discernible in public services over the period while most have gone downhill, the result of politburo-style management and misuse of public funds at every level, much of it from incompetence, the rest from jobs-for-the-tribe. Snouts in the trough doesn’t begin to cover it.

Once again a Labour Government will leave office having wrecked the country.

* In 1929 we had the British version of the Great Depression to look forward to.
* In the late 1940s it was by restricting markets from operating at all while Germany and Japan freed up their workforces and built the foundations for their current strength.
* In the 1970s, Britain was placed at the mercy of the IMF, followed by the Winter of Discontent.
* This time, the nation has been hollowed out, its vital wealth-creating engine crushed. A decade of its earnings simply squandered on a whimsical mountain of public services that struggle to operate on any level.

It didn’t help that this time Labour was given three Parliaments to wreak its usual havoc. How did that happen? By guile, neglecting the truth, cooking the books, making false claims about almost everything … and getting away with it thanks to friends in the media who complacently turned blind eyes to the accumulating shambles.

Will Brown be impeached, do you suppose?

Do elephants ski?

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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Times economist Anatole Kaletsky, wrote a perfectly New Labour mea culpa a couple of weeks ago. It went something like this:

“It pains me to say so but my economic forecasts for 2008 were entirely wrong. … However, it was all Hank Paulson’s fault.”

Gordon Brown’s new speechwriter, perhaps?

We are in for an exhilarating six months as the Czech Republic takes over the rotating European Union Presidency.

President Klaus is about as anti-EU as any Tory Eurosceptic. He has refused to sign the fraudulent Lisbon Treaty and been duffed up by the Euro mob as a result (see my piece here).

Now we have tidings of a truly awful sculpture (pictured above), commissioned by the wonderful Czechs for a major spot in Euroland, Brussels.

Apart from looking like a pile of rubbish — it’s supposed to be a map of the EU, with all its countries represented — the great thing about it is that Britain is missing completely. Oh the irony!

Apparently, British artist, Khalid Asadi, thought a no-show by the rowdy islanders would best represent our feelings about the whole shoddy enterprise. Would that the Turner Prize could be so relevant.

Give that man a Knighthood.

PS We’re now hearing that the “sculpture” may be a hoax, having been concocted by one man, not by 27 artists. Indeed, the British fellow, Khalid Asadi, is thought not to exist. What an excellent representation of the whole European Union project.

Give that man a Peerage.

What is it about greens? No, not Brussels sprouts, I mean the green politicos who berate us for almost anything we do nowadays.

Turn on the radio and there they are: near hysterical voices getting worked up about an aircraft, a car, a policy, a lightbulb. Whatever it may be, STOP! You’re destroying the planet.

The matter of light bulbs is the latest incursion into our generally pleasant existence. Hyperactive David Miliband volunteered the nation to be the first to switch from Edison’s neat little tungsten filaments to the ghastly mercury-filled, dimdowned, expensive contraptions that are now almost unavoidable and will be enforced by EU “law” soon.

The big stores have stopped selling the 100watt+ bulbs by voluntary agreement. Soon the rest will go.

Luckily, I’ve discovered a small, independent ironmongers run by little old ladies, and they’ve got stacks of the old-fashioned beauties. Thanks to them, I’ve got a crateful of bulbs stockpiled against further crackdowns by the Euro police.

Greens have long been associated with dictatorial governments, like the Nazis. They are naturally authoritarian by nature, ruling, if given the chance, by a stream of “Don’t do this, don’t do that” injunctions.

Shouldn’t we shunt them into oblivion by bringing back the “conservationists”, a much nicer class of folk?

I’ll let you into a dark secret. I’ve always wanted to own a hedge fund.

There’s something attractively racy about hedge funds and their owners. Dressed in Savile Row’s finest, with offices in Mayfair, they stroll along the Strand into the City … and heads turn. Shadowy figures shrink back into dark doorways as they pass. Another day short-selling the banks begins, sucking millions from their vaults with consummate ease — a bit like Count Dracula really.

And yet, the world’s most admired investor has a hedge fund. Warren Buffett, Sage of Omaha, who still lives in his first, modest marital home, is a hedgey. You can’t conceive of a more restrained investment policy than buying blue chips, but only if they are well-managed.

It was Buffett who put five billion into Goldman Sachs preference shares when the outfit was on its knees last year. Well managed they certainly are, despite the credit crisis. Didn’t they send Hank Paulson to the U.S. Treasury Department? What a relief that must have been. Warren B. is clearly a genius.

In Britain, being a hedge fund owner is like nipping over to Deauville to play the tables and splash out on the horses, never mind the fillies. King Edward VII was a regular sailor across the channel a century ago. Few Kings have been more popular amongst the poor and needy. Today, he would undoubtedly run a hedge fund.

So, if anyone out there has a hedge fund going cheap, I’m your man.

I should point out though that my experience of the industry doesn’t go much beyond knowing it’s not a branch of topiary.

I know it’s the weekend when I spend half an hour throwing out three-quarters of my morning newspapers before I’ve started reading them.

Out go the travel supplement, properties section, appointments, glossy magazines, CDs, motoring, sports, reviews, arts, gardening, cookery, advertising leaflets, packaging, sudoku and “Train Your Brain” booklets.

I’m left with the main paper itself — surprisingly slim these days — and the business section. I read the commentariat and skim through the news coverage, most of which I’ve consumed already on 24-hour TV news.

So, what do I get from the papers? Very little, except for a screen-free few hours of reading. My £2 ($3) Sunday Times, which yesterday weighed in at around 3lbs on the kitchen scales, provided me with nothing I couldn’t have read online at timesonline.co.uk.

They are now part of my exercise routine, however. At weekends, I walk to the Quay to buy the main titles, and stroll back along the riverbank, changing arms occasionally. It has become my weight-training workout, my upper-body, cardiovascular stressor session.

At around a fiver, that’s very good value, even if I do chuck most of them away.

John Evans

The extraordinary failure of the public sector in Britain, despite massive funding by the Labour government, needs some explanation.

The poster child for this disaster is Baby P, who died at the hands of monsters who were meant to protect him. The Social Services department charged with preventing it, failed so completely that no confidence can be placed in any similar organization anywhere in the country.

The people in charge barefacedly claimed they “followed procedure”, as if procedure were their only duty, not actual child protection. Failure of the procedure was the fault of politicians, not their own. Unhappily, that is mostly true.

The appalling rash of incompetence across most of Britain’s public sector, involving the police, child protection agencies, exam boards … and many other examples, highlights the need for a total reform of how Britain is governed.

Superdemocracy is an idea I had a long while ago while musing on the optimum hierarchy for any organization. It’s really a variation on meritocracy, so will be dismissed by followers of the postmodern tendency.

Imagine if you will the billions of decisions taken daily in businesses, agencies, governments, and other organizations up and down the country. Most of them will be made at nodal points where power has settled and accumulated over time, and where empires are ruthlessly defended. In other words, they will be taken well above the level of optimum efficiency — the Point of Maximum Competence.

A little thought reveals that almost all decisions are made at points where the decision-takers are not fully aware of the complexities of the task. In today’s technical society, that disjunction is growing all the time.

If each decision is depicted as a small arrow, it’s not hard to visualize most of them pointing downward, albeit by a tiny amount. Day after day, these billions of small decrements add up to a massive efficiency deficit, which can only be supported by vast quantities of public money propping up the whole edifice. They will also need statistical fallacies to claim success where failure is the norm.

Small businesses, by contrast, develop the expertise to avoid this tendency or they die, which is why they are usually the most dynamic elements in any economy.

Big businesses become more like governments as they mature, even creating social security and foreign affairs departments — look at Google and Microsoft.

But government is the principal problem. In the UK, central government operates the highly technical National Health Service, with predictably dismal, and costly, results.

Government also runs the State schools, transport and other big areas of public concern. It now appropriates getting on for 50pc of national income and employs 25pc of the workforce. Let’s call that, Decremental Drainage. The losses are huge and ongoing.

Governmental decisions are taken at the Level of Minimum Competence. In the UK, we also have the even more remote European level in Brussels — the Level of Maximum Incompetence. Why would any decisions, beyond essential cross-border issues, ever be sent to Brussels?

Conjure up a vision of decisions being taken much further down the food chain at the point where all the complexities and variations of the particular case are fully appreciated. Imagine all those billions of arrows pointing upwards by a small increment.

Jump forward a year or so and listen to that faint, distant rumbling of a tidal wave just visible on the horizon. It’s a tidal wave of MONEY. In the public sector that would translate as COMPETENCE, and hence lower public debt.

Look at any successful operation and you’ll see decision-making at the Point of Maximum Competence, or quite near to it. Examine any failing organization and you’ll discover decisions being made well above those levels by people miserably ensconced in positions of conceit and self-delusion. There is no exception to this rule. Decisions, like cream in a milk bottle, will always rise to the top.

All decisions therefore should be taken at the Point of Maximum Competence. The CEO role should comprise little more than shaking the milk bottles all day long.

Superdemocracy and representative democracy
Representative democracy, our standard political institution in the West, is vital for two reasons:

1. It spreads decision-making thinly, ensuring that power doesn’t concentrate in too few hands, and
2. It allows ordinary people to feel they are represented in the highest taxing and lawmaking councils of the land.

Point 1, of course, is easily bypassed by determined politicians with a decent majority in Parliament. Elective dictatorship is a curse of the British parliamentary system, caused mainly by “the Sovereignty of Parliament” — but that’s another story.

As Churchill may well have implied, you wouldn’t appoint a CEO of a major organization by a kind of X Factor televised beauty parade. “Democracy,” he said, “is a bad form of Government, but it’s better than any of the others.”

We have to recognize that most politicians are rank amateurs at what they do — and it shows. Seizing on a dangerously-small stock of information and experience, while being ignorant of the complexities of the case, they often make huge, irreversible blunders paid for by the rest of us.

Clearly, representative democracy is necessary. But it needs to be modified still further to limit the amount of decision-making available to the often hick-town amateur actors who rise to the top in the election process.

Using Superdemocracy as the principle of governance across a whole society would naturally rob the dilettantes of power and add a huge efficiency increment to a country’s earning power.

Simply passing power downwards — or sideways, in the case of “devolution” — is not enough. A root and branch examination of decisions, and who takes them, is vital to rebalance the system.

David Cameron, Iain Duncan Smith, and the next Conservative Government should put constitutional change on its agenda as a matter of urgency.

John Evans

I’ve long been an adherent of what I call, Up-To-A-Pointism.

If something works, it only works up to a point. Thereafter it yields diminishing returns, followed by negative consequences.

Government intervention is like that, as are free markets. Both have a limited bandwidth within which they operate well.

Politicians are largely unaware of this iron rule of nature. They should be. Our future rests on it. It is vital that attempts are made to determine the limits that constrain every policy decision.

The Alan Greenspan era, which finally collapsed in upon itself on August 9 2007, was the last hurrah of Reaganomics: scant regulation allied to free market economics, especially in financial markets.

It passed its point of usefulness around the turn of the century when some Asian countries were shipwrecked by massive money flows in and out of their economies. By then, the essential principles had become inflexible dogma, crowding out necessary evolution of the system.

The Left always brings settled dogma into government. Its methods are already written down by past socialist heroes, so they must be true, mustn’t they? That’s why the Left invariably fails in office.

Blair and Brown knew that in 1997. New Labour presented itself as the champion of free financial markets, just as the notion was beginning to shapeshift into corrosive insanity.

In the U.S., George W. Bush, thanks to Dick “deficits don’t matter” Cheney, was trapped by the dogma of the Right and its sorcerer’s apprentice, Alan Greenspan. A little Up-To-A-Pointism would have gone a long way at that time.

The same can be said for globalization. Up-To-A-Pointism should have been applied long ago to the idea that “the world is one and the same.” In political and economic terms, it isn’t. It never was, and it never will be.

Today, Gordon Brown’s shiny new big idea — riding on his newly-found sense of invincibility — is to summon a meeting of “world leaders” — shades of Bretton Woods — to reshape the global system in accordance with the old puritan’s post-war, iron-clad viewpoint.

So it’s back from Greenspanomics to Truman and Attlee — or Churchill and Roosevelt if you believe Gordon Brown. Remind me, what happened to the Bretton Woods agreement on global fixed exchange rates? I seem to recall it foundered irretrievably in 1971.

New dogma is replaced by the old stuff. Democracy is ditched for governance by foreign leaders, unelected by us, and unaccountable.

On a global scale, and at regional level — the EU in Britain’s case — we are ordered about by layers of oligarchy, lacking knowledge of who we are, and uninterested in our wishes and cultural preferences.

More than anything now, the world needs Up-To-A-Pointism to refresh its grasp of reality and to grapple back our basic freedoms from the hobgoblins who would rule over us.

If we’re looking for an iconic figure for the new age of austerity, it should be Edmund Burke not Leon Trotsky.

John Evans

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You’ll no doubt have heard that Gordon Brown made another “speech of a lifetime” — that’s the one designed to save his skin — at the Labour party conference yesterday.

It didn’t. One of his most senior ministers, Ruth Kelly, resigned almost immediately, apparently calling it “disgusting”.

A number of Secretaries of State were visibly disgusted too. I saw the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, grimacing and fuming on at least two occasions, while leadership contender Alan Johnson seemed as underwhelmed as it’s possible to be without falling asleep.

What is it with Brown that sucks the joie de vivre out of normally jolly fellows? It could be his utter lack of sparkle, his emptiness of content, the inability to create one line of English that resonates, uplifts and galvanises an audience.

The speech was one long litany of Soviet-style platitudes of the kind that used to come from half-dead men in raincoats and porkpie hats on the Kremlin balcony.

Of course, he doesn’t describe himself like that. He claims to be a free-marketeer and free-trader. This double-edged approach is called “triangulation” — saying one thing to one set of people, while “dog-whistling” something else to an inner clique or clientele.

To make matters worse, he peppered his turgid oration with small, pathetic giveaways to various sections of the population. A bribe here, an inducement there. I wouldn’t have been surprised had he offered free black puddings to university students, or gratis bobble hats to pensioners.

Gordon Brown seems to enjoy presiding over a Father Christmas society, with himself as Santa Claus. It’s a pity that taxpayers have to pick up the bill for his bogus charity.

I won’t comment on the gimmicks in the speech, the one joke, or using his charming wife as cheerleader while pledging he would never expose his family for publicity purposes.

Let’s just say that this speech was the final nail in the boot that will kick him out in due course. It addressed none of the problems of the country — the UK is around a year behind the U.S in the economic cycle. The meltdown on Wall Street and the desperate fight for rescue packages are still to arrive here.

Brown has absolutely no idea what to do about any of it. He’s only interested in protecting his back from his colleagues in the Cabinet, while dismissing any responsibility for the home-grown economic mess.

It’s very hard to be upbeat when writing about Gordon Brown, so I’ll conclude this piece with an apparently true anecdote about a Prime Minister with a similar style to his — let’s pretend it’s him.

The PM is ruminating with friends about his first ever Cabinet meeting as Prime Minister.

“I couldn’t understand it at all,” he said. “They came in and I gave them their orders. Then they wanted to sit down and discuss them.”

It could be, couldn’t it? Actually it was the Duke of Wellington.

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Politicians nowadays speak to us in code. If you still believe that the vacuous utterances of your average politico are nothing but sad soundbites and sugar, think again. The brew is teeming with cipher messages for fellow conspirators.

Currently it’s the crumpled Labour Party that’s responsible for more encrypted signals than GCHQ. Even the political commentators are picking up this irritating habit.

One of the more popular of the code words now doing the rounds is cojones, which is not a type of Welshman. Both Matthew d’Ancona and Andrew Rawnsley used the new “c” word yesterday.

Cojones, pronounced CO_HON_ESS in its native Spanish, has a lot to do with the driving force behind fighting bulls. And I mean behind literally. To be delicate (as we must on a family website), think of our Education Secretary as Ed Cojones. If I also say, two Eds are better than one, you should by now have interpreted my codified intent.

Not surprisingly, the main target in the cojones wars is David Miliband, that prize chump who bounced across our screens last week, grinning like a clown with a painted-on face, on the back of a dreary article in The Guardian. And, yes, the article was seen as so encrypted you’d need an Enigma machine to work it out.

Miliband is sometimes referred to as the British Obama, the Boy David, Millimetre, and, for some reason, even Millinery Hatband. Oh, I get it!

Milly is the cryptic leader of a putative coup against our Gordon, if the signals are read aright. He even answers questions about his dreary “manifesto” in double-code: “can” instead of “will” apparently carries enormous significance with the nerdy types who watch these things.

Variations on the conditional tense are also a big giveaway as in, “I have always wanted to support Gordon”. Meaning, “I haven’t quite got there yet, and it looks a bit late for that now … but I live in hope [Wink].”

Oh, the chuminess of it all. Such ripping fun all round.

Not so for William Rees-Mogg in Sunday’s Mail. After slipping up last week with “the British Obama”, he really gave the lad a smack yesterday.

“Least of all can one sympathise with teenage rebels without a cause who think it would be nice to be the next leader of the Labour Party. They seem to understand nothing about the depth of crisis in which their party and Government find themselves. Grow up or shut up is the best advice to them.”

Such invective is rarely heard from the Somerset Levels.

Liz Jones, also in the Mail, and not normally associated with the cloak and toothpick world of politics, sweetly writes that Milly could be our very own Brad Pitt. Not William Pitt, mind you, but Brad.

There’s only one obstacle to clear. His wife must look like Angelina Jolie. The fact that Ms Jones sets this hurdle, almost certainly means she doesn’t. That must be a great relief to Mrs Milly. I imagine though that Milly himself has enough vanity to rather fancy following in the footsteps of Brangelina.

I think we’ve squeezed all the juice to be had out of Milly’s cojones for one week. However, we do notice that another bandwagon (Milibandwagon? — ah, the composites available to this man) has begun to roll in favour of the other Miliband, Ed — not cojones Ed, you understand. And I’m not suggesting Ed M. doesn’t have what it takes in the boot.

You know, scribbling about British politics can get very complicated. Come back David Cameron (currently in Cornwall), all is most definitely forgiven.

Oh, and bring Occam’s razor with you, along with that big pile of psychology books.