Brown: Just Not Good Enough

It's not so much the letter - I suspect that, given his visual disabilities, it might be a little unfair to go overboard in criticising Brown for his careless spelling and semi-literate scrawl, desperately unfortunate though these proved to be in the circumstances - but failing to bow his head at the Cenotaph yesterday? That is an entirely different matter for which he has offered no valid explanation as yet, something I personally find absolutely extraordinary - and, yes, unforgivable. If the Queen feels she must do that to honour the war dead, then so should Brown. "Forgetting," which, I suggest, will eventually emerge as the excuse this time, uttered all over the airwaves by one of Brown's substandard ministerial cronies, no doubt (just like Millepede Minor this morning over that letter - in between re-announcing a nuclear programme that will never get off the ground while Labour are still in power), is just not good enough.

But that's really the fundamental problem with Brown, isn't it? He lumbers from one crisis to another, one gaffe to another, one bit of cringe-making social ineptitude to another and still no one - in the mainstream media at least - has the guts or the sense to admit the blindingly obvious, very simple fact: he's just not good enough.

Judging by the weekend's G20 fiasco, the rest of the world seems to have understood that now. As usual, Britain is just a bit slow on the uptake.