There comes a moment in the fight game when an old boxer refuses to give up out of misplaced pride, but everyone present can see he’s taking too much punishment to continue. At that point the referee steps in and declares an end to the fight.

I never thought I would feel sorry for Gordon Brown, given the weight of punishment beatings he’s dished out over the years, but inexplicably I almost do.

This is not a time to gloat over his demise. For demise it is. Deservedly, he will be cast into the outest of outer darknesses, more so than that other failed Prime Minister, Edward Heath.

He’s the worst there is, has been, and maybe even ever will be. His tragic baggage is that he doesn’t yet know it — or the bit of his mind that pokes out of the top doesn’t.

Gordon Brown has presided for 12 years over the destruction of everything we prize and hope to pass on to future generations.

His personality is so unsuited to high office only the Labour party would think of offering it to him.

Today at PMQs, Nick Clegg got it right. The choice is now between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. “Labour is finished.”

People and parties have a habit of hanging on in there even when there’s no hope left. Some thread to the past convinces them they can repeat what has gone before.

At some point, though, even they stop believing and contemplate throwing in the towel. Yet, if the smallest fragment of hope remains, and no-one intervenes to put them out of their misery, the agony goes on. Known pain is better than the unknown and total oblivion.

What Gordon Brown needs now is to be fished out of the drowning waters, and a kindly fisherman administer the gaffe with the necessary force.

Hazel Blears seemed to know that today. So do the other top Labour women. When the crones pronounce you dead, you are deadly dead.

Who will fish Brown out of his homemade hell? It’s time for the Queen to step in and represent the nation’s most ardent wish to be rid of this man.

May he rest in peace, but let it be quick.

John Evans

PS: Yes, politics is back here in Syntagma. Death is too weighty a subject not to pronounce upon.

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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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Sunday morning at last, after a week of calamity for Britain’s Labour government.

Not surprisingly, the papers are flagging enormous Conservative leads in the latest independent opinion polls. The Mail on Sunday carries a 19pc advantage, while the Sunday Telegraph is close behind with 17pc. Either would do for the Tories.

George Osborne put on an impressive performance on Andrew Marr’s programme, looking and sounding more like a Chancellor than Alistair Darling will when he presents the Budget on Wednesday.

These are heady times for the Tories. Those of us who have been forecasting a crushing landslide at the next election (due before early June, 2010) have been running out of steam lately. No sweat.

I still stand by my counter-intuitive forecast last week that Gordon Brown will resign within days or weeks — and I don’t mean 50 or 60 weeks.

Peter Oborne has written a timely piece in today’s Observer, detailing the failings of New Labour governance under both Blair and Brown.

He traces them back to Maurice Cowling at Peterhouse College, Cambridge, who taught the Namierite school of history to Michael Portillo, Michael Gove and … Damian McBride.

Oborne writes of Cowling, “… his particular scholarly contribution was to take Namier’s pessimism about human nature, scepticism about political ideas, and dogmatic insistence that public events could only be explained by reference to narrow personal interest, to their ultimate conclusion.”

This led directly to a method known as “manipulative populism,” a fancy term for lying through your teeth.

Thus peripheral power passed from Chief Whip, whose precinct is Parliament, to the Prime Minister’s spin doctor, whose domain is public perception and news management.

Gordon Brown earlier rejected that dismal thesis, but has secretly embraced it like a frog to a pond.

That’s perhaps the worst aspect of Brown’s character — his complete lack of any.

We have been getting reports that the saintly Vince Cable has been getting above himself lately, adding a touch of grandeur to his air of infallability. When he starts waving to crowds like the Queen Mother, we’ll know his transformation is complete.

In today’s polls the Liberal-Democrats have received a big bounce from Labour’s implosion, putting them at 21pc. It’s fair to say that most of that is probably due to their Treasury spokesman, Mr Vincent Cable.

Is it possible the Lib-Dems could become the Official Opposition after the election? Don’t rule it out. They fight hard at election time. Hand-to-hand engagements are not unknown. If they were allowed bayonets, Paddy Ashdown would be leading the charge.

Once popularly known as “the Salads,” a more accurate rendition might be “the Saladins.”

Vince should tread carefully though. There’s a term in engineering called Cable Fatigue.

He may be getting perilously close.

It’s that time of year when wannabe artists start packing up their works for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, which is open to almost anyone.

There was a wonderful vignette of the modern art scene a few years ago when an artist sculpted a head for the show. To display it at its best, he purchased an off-the-shelf plinth on which to mount it, then sent it off to the RA.

As often with the best laid plans, the head became separated from the plinth in transit.

Imagine his surprise when, weeks later, the Academicians rejected the head, but accepted the plinth.

I’ve often wondered if many of the exhibits there comprise bits of packing material and wrapping paper.

That saintly chipmunk, known throughout the land as wee Hazel Blears, Minister for Communities and Other Odds and Sods, wonders why we Brits don’t have a TV version of the American West Wing.

Maybe we do, only in real life.

Remember when New Labour first came to power? Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson referred to each other as Jack and Bobby, after JFK and his brother. Later the name Bobby was passed on to Mandelson’s dog — dogs feature large in life at the White House.

Were these two prize chumps role playing themselves as Pres and Chief Sidekick? Don’t put it past them. Juvenilia is all part of The Project.

Come to think of it, almost every ghastly glimpse we get of life inside Number 10 has an eerie resonance with the West Wing way of doing things.

Never mind that our constitutional arrangements are vastly different from the US version, Blair and Brown made them fit somehow — with much violence.

I believe the sheer incoherence of the government machine is due to excessive WestWingitis. Tony Blair was once reported to have asked a scriptwriter on the show for advice on how to govern Britain.

Is it any wonder … ?

Prince Philip today becomes the longest-serving Royal Consort in British history. Probably the oldest too.

On Tuesday, the Queen is 83, the oldest reigning Monarch in our history.

God bless them both, and may they continue to bring sanity to our sadly-depleted and much tarnished public affairs.

John Evans

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