Have a great Mayday weekend. See you on Monday.

John Evans

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Evans

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I’ve just watched David Cameron deliver another accomplished speech at the Conservatives’ Spring Conference at Cheltenham.

Gradually — a word also used by George Osborne this morning — he’s beginning to give shape to the message that will take him into the General Election.

“Thrift” loomed large, while “tax and spend” becomes the natural enemy. Sensibly, he didn’t put too much skin on the flesh and bones. Things could take many turns for the worse before election day arrives, however soon it comes.

The speech was a good mix and plays well with the mood of the times, especially after last week’s atrocious Labour Budget. It sounded pitch perfect to me, as far as it went.

I would have liked to hear something about an association agreement with the European Union, but recognize the constraints he’s under. Maybe a little dog whistle in code to us genuine Conservatives would do the trick?

Here’s my suggestion. In his next speech or TV interview Cameron could mention former French President Giscard d’Estaing by name, in any context, and we will get the message.

I’ll be listening out intently.

The following is my contribution to the debate on the standards adopted by our Members of Parliament.

As an author I sometimes despair of publishers. And yet, as a former book publisher, I know the problems publishers face. So I’m posting this little cri de coeur I found on the web.

It’s written by a publisher, obviously, who shall remain anonymous, largely because I’ve lost the reference. But it does provide some insight into the always tortuous relationship between author and publisher:

Authors really don’t like publishers. They don’t like us because we change their work, or force them to. We reject their titles. We dress their books in jackets they hate.

We take custody of their manuscripts and refuse visitation rights. We don’t let them see or comment on marketing plans. We spend very little money or time promoting their books.

Our royalty statements might as well be in Aramaic. We don’t return their voicemail or email. We don’t communicate and we don’t care.

Sure, that’s an over-generalization, but it’s too close to the truth for comfort. It should concern us that so many authors feel this way about their publishers. And it’s our fault, really, for not communicating better about exactly what we do, and why.

Why can’t our MPs demonstrate such exquisite self-knowledge?

Continuing with the ever present thorn in the public foot of MP’s expenses, something glaringly obvious (to me, at least) has been missed by many.

MPs on the left of politics spend a lot of energy denouncing “fat cats” in industry and commerce, as well as the City of London, for their huge paypackets. Consequently, they have induced a phobia about putting up their own salaries to appropriate levels.

A kind of Freemasons’ nod and winkery has been covertly put in place across party lines to use the expenses system to compensate them for what they regard as inadequate remuneration.

Such a system encourages corruption because it is fundamentally corrupt to conceal and disguise payments received — of any sort.

Thus most MPs cross the line between fair reward and brown envelope practices. The system itself is corrupt, therefore those who take part are corrupted.

As Iain Martin writes in today’s Sunday Telegraph, the answer lies in Members’ own hands — they are meant to be sovereign, after all.

How can they hold the Executive to account, when Chief Whips know everything about the jiggerypokery going on all around them? Francis Urquhart would have had a field day. “I know about that bathplug, Jacqui.”

Pay them £100k and be done with it. After all, if a 5-a-day officer at Warminster-on-Sea Parish Council gets that, why not our legislators?

Oh, I forgot. They aren’t our legislators any more, are they? Brussels has taken that prize.

Okay, promise them £150k if they pull us out of the EU. That should get things moving, don’t you think?

Down here in the South West of England we have three football teams: Exeter (the Grecians), Torquay (the Gulls), and Plymouth (the Pilgrims).

Mostly they languish towards the bottom of the Football League, which I believe has four divisions.

Usually one of them manages bottom spot in the fourth division, before disappearing, through relegation, into a bottomless pit of poverty and amateurism.

However, our local supporters are rarely downcast, taking it all in their stride as an Act of God. One cheery soul told me how he deals with the constant stench of defeat.

“Easy,” he said. “When you get your football paper at the weekend, turn it upside down before looking at the tables. My team is usually top of the whole football league.”

Is that a glimpse of Gordon Brown’s political philosophy?

Remember the “world car”?

It could be a Ford, a Range Rover, or a Chrysler, but its parts were made all over the world, from Brazil to China, before being assembled into its final incarnation, when someone would stick a badge on it proclaiming its proud provenance.

This was globalization in the raw. A ruthless, yet profitable, use of comparative advantage to drive the costs of motoring down — however carboniferous the footprint as all those parts criss-crossed the globe on smelly bits of shipping.

Then the socialist left — devoid of purpose after the collapse of the Soviet Union and China’s flight to capitalism — spotted a gap in the market. The old International Socialist movement, now describing itself as “Progressive Internationalism”, subverted the word “globalization” to describe its own activities.

Many normally astute commentators fell for this subterfuge and eagerly jumped on the global bandwagon, little knowing that it is, in reality, their worst nightmare.

Syntagma has been one of the few voices to proclaim this dirty trick from the rooftops.

Listen very carefully, I will say this only once: Globalization has ceased to be a technical term of economics and is now a pernicious political doctrine of the old left hiding under a thin veil of modernity.

Anyone using the word “global” more that once a year should be sacked immediately from high office.

Finally, on the new 50p tax rate for anyone earning more than £150k a year:

Both David Cameron and George Osborne said today they will put it on a list of taxes to repeal, but priority will be given to National Insurance increases for people earning just £20k and more.

Fair enough, but given the rate of attrition 50p will cause (see Nigel Lawson’s piece in today’s Sunday Telegraph), perhaps they could turn the list upside-down when deciding which tax to drop first.

Some of the best people do this, I’m told.

PS: I shall be listening out for a Cameroon mention of the secret codeword: Giscard d’Estaing, over the coming week. PMQs would do very nicely.

John Evans

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Remember when England last won the Ashes (that’s cricket, by the way)? It was just four years ago on home territory, accompanied by much celebration across the land.

Typically, when England played the rematch in Australia the following year, they were whitewashed 5-0. Groan!

This summer it will happen again. Shall we win, or will the usual Australian dominance emerge? Certainly, the team is not playing well right now.

Here’s what I wrote in the aftermath of that great sporting victory on October 20, 2005:

Phoenixes rise from the ashes we are told. So do nations.

This Jack Tar has jumped ship. He will not be content with the dark, satanic mills of postmodern egalitarianism again. They have been warned.

Indeed they had. But they’re still with us, four long years on. “About to go” is not enough. We want them out now.

Preferably before the Ashes battle begins.

John Evans

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In the end it played the fool with us all, and didn’t frighten the horses. That is all that can be said of Alistair Darling’s second and, let us pray, final Budget.

If the horses remain calm, we should not. Yesterday’s exercise was designed to do one thing: to conceal a massive timebomb set to detonate when the Tories have been in power for a year or two.

In a way it was a game two halves. The first was Prime Minister’s Questions in which Gordon Brown asserted again that the ongoing slump is not a conventional one, preceded by inflation, but a much more serious occurrence caused by a catastrophic drop in financial blood pressure.

However, Alistair Darling’s Budget calculations premised a normal recession in which the economy powers back to higher than trend growth within a year or two as companies rebuild their inventories and buy new machine tools. GDP will, the Chancellor asserted, grow by a sprightly 3.5pc in 2011 before gently easing back to trend. Cue gasps and catcalls from many MPs.

Slumps caused by financial collapse always take much longer to throw off, as did the Great Depression of the 1930s. This one will have a similar trajectory.

The faultline demonstrated here is not built on human error, but on Brownian calculation of advantage. Brown should have bitten his tongue at PMQs and the disparity of logic would not have been so glaringly obvious. His vanity got the better of him.

The IMF were quick to rubbish the Budget predictions of growth. Evan Davis on this morning’s Today programme practically accused the Chancellor of using a false growth figure to conceal a massive fiscal tightening from 2011 onwards. By then, the Conservatives will be in power and Labour will be screaming “Tory cuts!” from the Opposition benches.

There’s not much love lost in politics, but some personnel would be jailed for that under less liberal regimes. One incident caught my eye. As Darling read out the numbers for public borrowing for this year and next, £175 billion, and £173bn — the highest in history and more than all years added together since 1694 — Gordon Brown was laughing.

Was it because he had made history at last? Or maybe because he believes he has scuppered the next Conservative period in office, setting depth charges to explode year after year.

Whatever the reason, it revealed Mr Hyde in full swing and convinces many of us that Dr Jekyll was a figment of our imagination.

As if aware of the skullduggery that had just been played out, David Cameron put up a spirited and angry response to the Budget speech. It was the performance of the day and contrasted markedly with Darling’s leaden oratory — if it can be called that.

Many of us waited for the scorn to be poured all over the new 50p tax rate for high-end earners, the very people who create our wealth and divert their surplus funds into investments. It didn’t come.

One can imagine the delight of low-tax regimes (so-called havens) at the lip-smacking prospect of all those City types heading their way after this Budget-for-Bennites.

This was another Brownian trap for the Tories. How he must be chortling with glee, like Billy Bunter on receipt of his long-awaited postal order and the prospect of a big bag of cream buns.

Thankfully, David Cameron and George Osborne live in the real world.

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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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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George Osborne’s past claim that Gordon Brown is autistic has been crawled over again in recent days, most recently by Stephen Glover in today’s Daily Mail.

Autism is generally regarded as a spectrum of disfunctionality. A bundle of related problems might be a better description. It also crosses over with other complaints.

Reading about Brown’s reactions, both to last week’s nasty email shenanigans in Downing Street, and earlier behavioural quirks, leads me in a different, if no less serious, direction.

Gordon Brown can’t bear to be challenged by anyone, especially by a colleague who may possibly usurp his position. Any heads peering over the parapet allegedly set off the kind of vicious reputational attack he employed Damian McBride to execute on his behalf.

Those are symptoms of paranoia.

Another tendency, illustrated by claims in the press that he resembles that well-known fictional Scottish gentleman known by the twin names of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, reveals something else.

Some comments report Brown as a kindly, erudite personality, always willing to help, and a good friend. Others insist he’s a deranged madman, hurling laptops and mobile phones around the room, and at people who cross him. Presumably this is at taxpayers’ expense?

This suggests a schizoid character who appears to be two people rolled into one.

A psychological clinician — which I’m not — might well diagnose a case of paranoid schizophrenia. Since Brown obviously manages to function reasonably well most of the time, an additional tag of “borderline” might be added.

But borderline or not, such serious disfunctionality in a Prime Minister should not go without comment or public medical reassurance.

Brown’s manic handling of the economy over 12 years, from Prudence to obsessive spending on anything that took his fancy, suggests another aspect of a split personality: bipolar disorder. It may also explain why the country is in such a mess.

Shouldn’t something be done? Pronto?

John Evans

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I started writing a blog around four years ago. It was actually this very site, Syntagma, when it was a participant in the American tech blogosphere, probably the most developed and literate part of the blog scene.

Later, I moved away from a precise blog format and began concentrating on finance worldwide, then British politics.

In the early days, the tech blogosphere was dominated by techmeme.com, an aggregator site that pushes posts up the ladder of a river of news depending on the number and importance of the links coming into them.

Techmeme monitored 1000 sites then, including Syntagma, so we often appeared in the list.

Occasionally a massive squabble broke out involving A-list tech bloggers, like Robert Scoble, Jason Calacanis, Dave Winer and others. I quickly learnt that this was deliberate “link baiting”, a process that drags in links, and traffic, from everyone trying to jump on the bandwagon. The idea was to get Google-juice, which pushed up your PageRank and thus earned you more search traffic.

These blogs could not charge for their often high-quality material, so they depended on Google’s Adsense “pay-per-click” advertising system, and some affiliate programs, to finance the work. It explains the rather shrill tone of the blogosphere, compared with the stately progress of broadsheet newspapers.

As I’ve only joined the British political website scene in the past year or so, I’m aware of how small it is compared to the US tech and political blogospheres.

The left is waywardly adrift in the bracing, freedom-loving air of the blog frontier. The likes of Derek Draper perceive it as an opportunity to smear, close down, and generally harry anyone who disagrees with them. They are totally out of kilter with both the potential and the netiquette of the medium.

John Prescott’s humour, and ability to laugh at himself, stands him out as a possible survivor. A few others on the left “get it”, but not many.

Some blogs are read because they are snarky and rude, but the material reflects the readership. The best are cool, informative and as accurate as it’s possible to be writing from a small office or bedroom outside Westminster. Some bloggers have journalistic or other writing backgrounds — they tend to be the best.

Is small beautiful? It’s different, and if done with a deft touch, makes a good contribution to politics in Britain.

I’m not one of those people who thinks blogs will destroy national newspapers — they are all online in any case. Nor do I think the nationals are so superior they will easily swat away the gadflies of small-time blogs.

I have enough tree-rings in the trunk to view the predicted loss of national newspapers with dismay. I couldn’t imagine waking up without the morning papers. Besides, reading everything online is bad for the eyesight. I’ve known a few bloggers who have developed serious eye problems.

Blogs are getting better all the time. Some academic, business and technical blogs provide sober, accurate material of a quality and relevance not found elsewhere. Like choosing your daily paper, it’s a matter of personal selection.

My guess is that as news migrates online, it will become terser and briefer, mobile oriented. Twitter is a sign of the times. Commentary, op-eds and personal opinions are ideal for high-quality blogs, which need to establish an audience through relevance and readability. Most of them will also need to make money, which is not easy.

The question at the top of this piece is: Will bloggers bring down Gordon Brown? Guido’s emails were sent to Sunday papers where they made a much bigger splash than on his blog.

They triggered an almost unprecedented tide of disgust from commentators on the left. Senior Labour people are also weighing in.

Brown must feel beleaguered in his Downing Street bunker. One can imagine even Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell silently going to ground as Brown has done on many occasions in the past.

The weight of all this approbrium will surely convince him of two things: one, he can’t win the next election and, two, waiting around for it to happen is not worth the strain to himself and his family.

If he does go, the history books will record that Paul Staines, the blogger at Guido Fawkes website, set the ball rolling. It will be a major scalp for blogging and online writers in the field.

John Evans

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