Balls: What A Piece Of Work

Just a short note to record my astonishment at the hypocrisy and arrogance not just of Labour but of a particularly bad Labourist about the roots of the Coalition on that Robinson thing on telly just now. I had thought, foolishly, that Ed Balls was incapable of getting any worse. I was, of course, wrong. Hearing him whine about Labour's negotiations with the Lib Dems after the hung parliament is extraordinary.

I think some cognitive malfunction in his mind, combined with some serious weakness in his character, together mean that he simply is incapable of comprehending what it means to be honest. He just lies all the time, effortlessly, and has no awareness whatsoever that his habitually revised narrative of events is just that: lies - and, what's more, is known to be lies by everyone outside his mind who has seen the evidence - and the truth - laid out, crystal clear, before their very eyes. But it doesn't stop him - oh no! - because it's pathological. He talks, for instance, about this idea that Nick Clegg about-faced on cuts just for leverage in the negotiation process. Not so (read more about that in the Speccy online here). It was a bare-faced lie, on camera, for the film - but Balls didn't care because he doesn't understand what he did. Maybe we should pity him, he's that bad. (Nah.)

Anyway, I could go on but this is, thankfully, all cold water under Westminster bridge. The right - the only - outcome for Britain came to pass, so none of it really matters to anyone other than various breeds of historian and fading BBC journalists like Robinson any more.

Apart from Balls, that is. He wants to a party leader, but his party (no doubt with him - along with Straw and the other usual suspects - the ringleaders) are about to renege genuinely on a manifesto promise for the sake of political expediency with the AV/constituency restructuring Bill. That's genuine, pathetic, grubby opportunism and it's also why I and other people who feel, for the current incarnation of the Labour party, nothing but utter contempt, would very much like to see Balls win. It would be a great day for the nation (the death of Labour).

But remember, always, there was at least one joyous ending to those strange days of uncertainty back in May: forget Balls because his rather more lunatic mentor, Gordon Brown, was gone, gone, gone! at the end of it all. And the nation breathed a heavy, collective sigh of relief because of it.

Now that's what I call "victory". So, what the hell: good luck to the Coalition deal that fashioned that happy outcome, Tory and Lib Dem members both. Hats off to the nationalists, too (a party of which I happily and tactically voted for).

And why not?

The Final Delusion

My utter and entirely justified contempt for Gordon Brown is well-documented on this blog. But even he's managed to surpass himself in terms of delusion and sanctimonious bullshit flammery in his post-prime ministerial speech to a bunch of corrupt socialist African 'leaders' (dictators) in Kampala yesterday. 
But hey, that's just my view of the utter Brown catastrophe. Here's a bit of what he said. I think the entire speech, taken as watertight evidence of a diseased mind, conclusively demonsrates that he is, at heart, a quasi-totalitarian egoist with messianic tendencies. But, naturally, you must make-up your own mind:

All of our lives are connected: we can all impact for good or ill on the lives of people we have never met. And yet we don’t currently share a common society or effective global institutions that allow us to treat strangers as neighbours or give life to our feelings of fellowship, solidarity, compassion and care.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. I believe that it is possible for people, acting together, to build a global society, and design the institutions that would best serve its values

OK, Gord, you get on with 'building a global society'. But while you're busy designing the brave new world, the rest of us normal people will be searching for ways to harness individual compassion as a social force, lowering taxes to reward hard work and freeing the education system so that our brightest no longer have to feel disadvantageded because they aren't part of the anti-excellence Labour average.
I digress. The simple point is that Brown is a well-known, now-talkative lunatic, and Balls should just resign,

Brown vs Cameron: The Contrast

There's Dave...

Sky News' Jon Craig has posted an interesting piece on the latest Brown-sighting this evening. After Cameron's highly adroit - even deft - performance in the US, it's becoming pretty clear that, in absolute fact, Britain is far better off, both at home and abroad, now that she is finally being represented by a prime minister that isn't either a) a hopeless attention-seeker obsessed with his own image rather than concerned with the needs of a country he laughably purported to lead or the world that he generally preferred to start wars in, or b) a socially inept weirdo with terrifying delusions of grandeur and a pathological inability to recognise, much less tell, the truth.

Jon Craig writes of the latter's latest noises well-off performance:

So what did Gordon Brown do after his brief appearance in the House of Lords?
(See previous blog.)
Speak in the Commons during the third reading debate on the Finance Bill?
Er, no.
Pop down to Strangers' Bar or the terrace for a few beers with old comrades?
Er, no.
The former Prime Minister, I can reveal, had already invited new Labour MPs elected for the first time on May 6 - about 70 in all - for a chat at 4pm in his grand and spacious new office on the top floor of Portcullis House.
An audience with Gordon.
Aah. So the room was packed, then?
Er, no.
Apparently, so my informant tells me, only about 10 turned up to listen to the former PM.
I'm also told that some of the bright young things turned up hoping to ask him worthy questions about the Alternative Vote referendum and other current topics.
But they were disapppointed to hear him talk at some length - no change there, then - about how the Tories kept trashing his record in power.
Oh dear.
In denial?
That's what some Labour MPs are claiming.

Where's Wally Gordon?

I'm quite surprised to be writing this, but Cameron is actually beginning to look great. Now that could just be because he's normal compared to the two contemptible Labour has-beens this country and the world have been forced to tolerate for over a decade in unequal shares until very recently.

But he did look and sound great today - a real independent force. Having seen some of the clips of his performance with the latest incarnation of the US president, compared to the rather brittle-looking, slightly spiteful-sounding Barack Hussein Obama, he was, well, just great.

Hang-on, I know it's early days, but it is possible Cameron is great - as in an unusually gifted statesman and leader (at least in the making).

One day maybe it'll even become a famous quotation: "Andy Burnham [or whoever], you are no David Cameron! (You're actually a bit like Tony Blair - but not quite as bad as Gordon Thingumyjig)," says someone or other who's fairly famous in politics .

Hmm. Maybe not (yet). But he's clearly better than Blair. And way, way, way better than the unspeakable (and nearly vanished forever anyway) Brown. We might still be in the 'thank God for small mercies' stage of Cameron's premiership, but there can be no denying it: there were one or two glimpses of greatness there today.

What a contrast!

Blair To Blame For Brown

Quite aside from all his other disastrous decisions, mainly on foreign policy, it seems perfectly fair to me that Blair be blamed for not seeing while he was Prime Minister that Britain wasn't saddled with a successor he himself thought was unfit to govern. This is, according to Andrew Rawnsley in his extraordinarily excoriating assault on virtually the entire Labour administration, the thing for which Blair, ultimately, is most guilty. It's a heck of a read and should be disastrous for all Labour's leadership candidates, tainted as they are with the charge of cowardice, arch and chronic dishonesty and, simply put, self-interested misgovernance. Anyway, here's a taste of something which, if you haven't already read it, is well worth a look:

If Blair thought that Brown was unfit to be prime minister – and there's now lots of evidence that this is precisely what Blair thought – he had an obligation to his party and his country to do something about it. At the very least, he should have, as he could have, ensured that there was a contest for the succession in 2007 rather than allow Brown to be crowned without proper scrutiny. It was one of Blair's most selfish acts and a gross dereliction of duty to swan off to make his millions while leaving his party and country to cope with the consequences of a Brown premiership.

The implication from this is that by the time he had finally given in to the forces of hell unleashed by Brown in the form of Balls, Wheelan et al in 2006, Blair simply didn't give a toss about what happened next. A more damning indictment of the man as Prime Minister is simply inconceivable, even one involving his misleading the House of Commons, the country and the world over WMDs in Iraq. It's actually quite difficult accurately to describe a person like that, whose self-interest and vanity is only trumped by his greed and dishonesty. In some ways if one views it in the light of this unforgivable dereliction of duty, as Rawnsley rightly calls it, Blair ends up as an even worse national leader than Brown, difficult though that might be for some (like me) to swallow.

If you do accept Rawnsley's characterisation of Blair, it is, however, perfectly possible to argue that he was worse than Brown as a man and as a leader. The only difference between the two frauds being, therefore, that Blair was a far better con man than Brown ever could be, which meant that Blair was able to trick the country into believing him and then voting for him. By contrast, Brown was just Brown: paranoid, delusional, vicious, incompetent even in disguising his many falsehoods and, ultimately, a total electoral liability and a catastrophe for the nation.

The impact of these realisations on the Labour leadership campaign as I said should be massive. All the candidates are as discredited as each other for failing to make the decision Blair couldn't be ar*ed to make and stopping Brown once it was crystal clear he was utterly hopeless. As Rawnsley says, quite fairly and quite mildly in truth:

Andy Burnham was one of the nodding dogs who would declare to TV cameras that the cabinet had every confidence in Gordon Brown when the reverse was the case. Ed Balls ran the thuggish Brownite machine and the decade-long insurgency against Tony Blair to put his master in Number 10. Ed Miliband makes pious noises denouncing "factionalism" as if he is a saintly figure who never had anything to do with it. "The emissary from Planet Fuck" – as he was known among Blair's aides during the civil war – was at the heart of the Brown faction.It is a bit tricky for David Miliband. He was one of the senior members of the cabinet who knew Brown was taking them to defeat and failed to act before it was too late.

So they all should be screwed - and rightly so. For all his hypocrisy, Mandelson doesn't really matter because he's not a leadership candidate. So, assuming (and this is a big assumption) the MSM ends its own version of Labourist dishonesty and begins to treat the rest with the contempt they should have coming to them for their pathetic behaviour in propping up Brown, the only untainted candidate in the Labour leadership race is, hilariously, Diane Abbott!

Either way, and this is essentially Rawnsley's conclusion, Labour is truly, deservedly and royally buggered. And in the end, of course, they themselves are the ones who are to blame for it. After all, Blair only gave us Brown because he'd given up, and that's how history will judge him. But the Milibands, Burnham and Balls (and Mandelson) are the ones who propped the disastrous loser up. That was unforgivable - and the country isn't going to forgive them, ever.

Now, thankfully, their past seems finally to be catching up with them. Soon there'll be nowhere left for them to hide any more and no amount of continued lying will save their collective political bacon. If the PLP is stupid enough to elect one of them, (and it's almost certain that it is that stupid) then they should prepare to be out of power for decades, if not forever. Mind you, exactly the same thing will happen if they choose bonkers Abbott.

Catch 22 for the Labourist wreckers - and music to my ears!

Inside the Bunker

Iain Martin has provided, presumably from his sources inside the civil service, a fascinating and chilling insight into Brown's autocratic, paranoid and hopeless (mis)management of day-to-day Prime Ministerial business. If you haven't already read it, click through here.

It will take a lot of effort to work out just how much damage three years (or 13 years if you include his time as a diabolical, serially disloyal Chancellor) of Brown's weirdness and chaos in Downing Street has done to this nation. The litany of disasters that can be traced directly back to Brown's bunker door are emerging daily, of course, so the process could take less time than we think.

Quite frankly, I think how such a man was elevated to the level of the highest office in the land in the first place, without even the pretence of any form of democratic election, should also be a source of deep and urgent study. Why? Because it must never, ever be permitted to happen again and if that means radical alterations to the rules governing the way Prime Ministers are chosen, then so be it.

In the meantime we can be happy about a couple of things, and Martin alludes to these in his excellent piece: stable, reasonable, elected people are back in charge, cabinet government appears to have returned and the principles of ministerial and collective responsibility look like being rigorously reinstated.

We shall see, but after the cocksure, cowboy, sofa government years of Blair and the mentally disturbed, incoherent, mafiosi years of Brown, it certainly feels like accountability, professionalism and, crucially, normality have returned to Downing Street, Whitehall and, perhaps (just perhaps), even Westminster.

Well, you might disagree. But God help us all if I'm wrong!

Just remember, Brown's chief hit man, Balls, is still around, waiting in the wings, shamelessly spewing his poisonous politics of propaganda, division, dishonesty and fear. He's on This Week right now lying through his teeth about, in this case, his many crimes against Tony Blair on behalf of his boss, Brown, to whom he remains fanatically loyal. The chances of the evil Balls becoming leader even of his own party are pretty slim, I admit, (oh I do hope he wins!) but there's still that chance, however slight, and the frailties of our system, exposed by the Brown 2007 coup d'état, mean that at that point, he would be a hell of a lot closer to Number 10 than is sanely conceivable.

If Iain Martin's revelations reveal just how very, very, incredibly bad Brown was, just imagine what life would be like under Prime Minister Balls.

That would be a nightmare from which we might never wake up.

We Need Troops In Afghanistan, Not Just Timetables

Mission accomplished? Hardly

I must say, I'm afraid I found Liam Fox's explanations and justifications for the combat drawdown timetable in Afghanistan on Radio 4 this morning rather unconvincing. At one point he started to remind me of various Labour defence ministers (you can pick one) in his attempts to service the argument that the Afghan National Army will somehow be ready to take over from American and British troops in five years' time, despite mounting evidence to the contrary (not least yesterday's tragic rocket attack on British soldiers by an insurgent who had infiltrated the Afghan army) and continuing military reversals (I define losing territory you have just gained from the enemy because you don't have enough men to hold it a 'reversal', don't you?).

It's not that I don't buy what he says - in most ways, he is far more believable than his Labour predecessors, who spent most of their time lying through their teeth about helicopter numbers, among many other things - it's that things just don't add up given the time frame proposed and troop levels involved.

It's been said by a lot of commentators and experts alike that the mission, the war aims, the 'liberation not occupation' philosophy, the 'protecting us at home by fighting terror abroad' ideology, even the timetable that's been announced, are all theoretically sound apart from one, vitally important factor: for all these goals to be accomplished, our troop levels in the short term need to rise substantially; our level of engagement intensify dramatically.

Under-manning has and, it seems, always will be the British problem in Afghanistan. In order to fulfil the mission we set for ourselves, two or even three divisions of soldiers (around 30,000+ combat troops plus support) should have been committed, and now should be committed, to augment the USA's 10. "But that would cost the country a fortune!" I hear you gasp. Well, war does cost a fortune and if you are not prepared to pay it, then you should pull the hell out immediately because there is no point in staying.

It was a fortune of our treasure that Gordon Brown was not willing to spend on our behalf to protect our armed forces, so I place the blame squarely at his door for subsequent losses, both the ones caused by a lack of equipment - strength in the air - and the ones caused by insufficient strength on the ground.

I'm now wondering, though, will the Coalition government try to fight this war on the cheap as well? If they do, then we will lose.

Dr Fox had better wake up to that reality - fast. And so had David Cameron and the Coalition he purports to lead.

Brown's Cronies Still Delusional

A serious Labour politician

The sound of son of a butcher and former schoolteacher Paul "Lord" Myners on the Today programme this morning was all the reminding I needed of how utterly delusional members of the previous government remain, particularly in the area of their economic (mis)management. He seemed to be saying that what the coalition government is doing in announcing what amount to, in reality, pretty modest savings in the short term, designed merely to halt the speed of expansion of the national debt by slowing down government spending rather than slashing it, is putting some kind of Labourist-inspired 'recovery' at risk. I kid you not.

He and his ilk still seem to think that the last months of Brown, where spending was allowed to run out of control not as part of any genuine attempt to kick start the economy through some kind of novel notion (which even Keynes never proposed) that you can spend your way out of recession while servicing gigantic levels of borrowing, but as part of a calculated effort to save nothing more and nothing less than Brown's political career by bribing Labour's heartlands and key marginals, is actually defensible. It's not, epsecially because it worked, predictably, in the North East, North West and, to a slightly lesser degree, Yorkshire, hence there was no Labour wipeout even if it didn't save Brown (nothing could), but it didn't work in the marginals, hence the coalition.

The point is, let us hear no more from the likes of Myners pretending that there was no political calculation involved with the reckless spending levels following the crash, or, indeed, that Labour had nothing to do with causing that crash with its disastrous system of banking regulation or deliberate stoking-up of cheap credit into a gargantuan property bubble. Even without the credit crunch (which did start in America) there would have been a crash in Britain inevitably, and a pretty big one at that.

Additionally, Myners completed his flight from reality by claiming that the latest G20 meeting was pointless and lacked the substance of the London summit in 2009, presumably because Cameron was there making the case for deficit reduction in the UK, rather than arrogantly lecturing the rest of the world about how to manage their own economies. I suppose Myners was so dismissive about the event because there was no really big chunk of money to boast about at the end. I think it was a mere one trillion dollars at the London event wasn't it? Well, of 'promised' money that is, of course, although hardly any of it ever materialised and hardly any of that which did had any effect on the forces of nature driving the economic cycle anyway. But socialists don't understand that, see? Sometimes the right thing to do strategically is nothing. Well, it matters not for the likes of Myners or Brown or, come to think of it, Alistair "Apologise To Me!" Darling any more. All they can do from now on is nothing. That, at least, should mean that they can do no more damage, thank God.

One last thing I thought worth mentioning: at the end of that programme we also had the annoying, schoolboy voice of Nick Robinson putting the sneering BBC spin on the Cameron G20 performance by referring to a picture of him with his head in his hands as the utterly outclassed, out-thought and luckless England team went 4-1 down to the dreaded Germans and musing, rather lamely I thought, as to whether this "new leader on the world stage" (he's not that new) would end up "hapless" and ignored by the others. I wondered to myself at that point, seeing as it was apparently the day to make sweepingly dismissive statements, whether the performance of this England team, rather than somehow reflecting a "hapless" David Cameron, at least in mind of the Robinson talking head, had far more symbolic force as representing the end of the era of expensive under-performers who nevertheless walk away with a fortune despite having been kicked out of the tournament. That's not England, thought I, that's New Labour! Funny how the two eras, the "Golden Generation" and the gilt-edged years of plenty under New Labour, seem to parallel one another. But, of course, the reality check in the Merchant of Venice (Act 2, Scene 7) says it all:
All that glitters is not gold/Often have you heard that told/Many a man has his soul sold...

Less money (unless deserved), more passion (motivation) and more graft (productivity): that's what we need not only from England's footballers, but from the British population generally. Less bling and more sting; more passion - and less fashion. The superficiality of England's performance almost perfectly parallels the intellectual and moral vacuum at the heart of New Labour. Over-rated and all mouth, costing a fortune, but when the going gets tough they crumble and the results become disastrous. In England's case, Germany showed them up for what they really are, in New Labour's, it was the crash. The only difference is, of course, that England were beaten by superior opponents, which is fair enough, but Myners is trying to defend Gordon Brown, the team captain who made all the wrong moves, chose all the wrong tactics and managed to defeat himself, taking the country with him. And that was after the credit crunch began. That was merely his Germany in the economic tournament. The moment Brown was really tested, the whole economic kingdom of debt that he created crumbled, and so did New Labour.

Myners and others who choose their own narrative on this lamentable passage in British history according to their political orientation are naturally welcome to do so. It might even be a coherent, even persuasive, story for the gullible, but it will never make it right.

As for the BBC, well, I assume there will come a time when the Conservative party finally has its bellyful of the licence fee-funded, left wing dominated organisation's constant breaching of its charter and either disinfects it once and for all or breaks it up into little pieces, some commercial (the ones that are already, that is!) and some taxpayer-funded, with no licence fee. Then the left will have to go away and infect some other institution, if there are any remaining in the United Kingdom, which I doubt.

PS: Actually, Myners' performance on this morning's show was all the more bizarre when you consider that speech he made torpedoing current Labour politicians' arguments against Tory plans. As Wiki says of the speech:

On 8 June 2010, Myners made headlines with a speech he made in the Lords. He said, "We clearly need a policy of fiscal caution. It was right to support the economy during the global recession but there now needs to be fiscal adjustment, as evidenced by the last Government in the Fiscal Responsibility Act. There is nothing progressive about a Government who consistently spend more than they can raise in taxation, and certainly nothing progressive that endows generations to come with the liabilities incurred by the current generation."

Well, my feeling is now that he made that speech certainly not for the benefit of the Tories but to influence the Labour leadership race, possibly in favour of Ed Balls. Conclusive proof, if you'll forgive the straw man, that Labour is only talking to itself. Long may that continue.

Flash Gordon II

Guido has the lowdown on the latest sighting of the Brown Pimpernel. Apparently, like Flash Harry from the St Trinians films, he's taken to wearing a trilby hat low over his eyes and a long coat that makes him look like he's gliding along without any sign of leg movement, slithering from Important Rich Luminary to Important Rich Luminary, touting for a bit of trade. "Inconspicuous" is the watchword.

After some excitement this morning that Gordon Brown might actually be in town to represent his constituents the truth unravels. While he may have put a fleeting five minutes in the chamber, (making the number of days he as been in two out of a possible forty-nine,) King of the Lobby Gary Gibbon has; what he was really down here for. A meeting with a Kennedy, a chat with Sir Tim Berners-Lee about his future employability and a natter with his old cabinet allies.

So it seems the great Brownian contempt for his own constituents, the public purse that provides his unearned salary and his abject lack of contrition for - or even interest in - his role in the debt disaster now confronting Britain thanks to him will just go on and on and on. Until someone in government has the guts to put a stop to it, preferably with legislation on the conduct of sitting MPs.

People should be a lot more angry about this than the painful budget Brown has brought down on our heads thanks to that sponging loser's economic incompetence and political desperation.

As much as it was a Coalition budget, this was Brown's budget. The Tories were right: let no one forget that. Oh, and if we are expected to make sacrifices for the sake of the future security of the nation's finances, then might I suggest that everyone should be forced to pull his or her weight. We're all in this together, after all.

Flash Gordon, that ex-wrecker and now dodgy shirker, would be a top target for me for the chop. Why should I be paying for him not to do his job? Cameron can lead by example, but he can also make them - preferably of the predecessor who is so frightened of facing the music to the extent that he is effectively now on the run.

It's time Brown's past caught up with him.

Vandal Brown Deserves An ASBO

Hitler Brown

This article, buried away in the Sunday Telegraph, had me chuckling quietly into my cornflakes this morning - at first. Apparently, mysterious and severe damage to an antique table in Downing Street was caused by Gordon Brown ferociously scribbling on documents containing stuff he didn't like and either scraping so hard he punctured the paper or missing it altogether and just scrawling illegibly on the wood. Years of this abuse have left the table so badly scratched that it will be too expensive to repair in this post-Crash Gordon age of austerity. Here's a bit of the entertaining piece.

The damage to the table is so severe that cleaning staff have been unable to remove the marks despite frantic polishing. "The marks to the table were noticed by people using the room on the very first day of the new Government. People were curious about what had caused the damage," says Mandrake's man in No 10. "We learnt it was the room that was regularly used by Gordon Brown. It became apparent that the marks were caused by his manic scratchings. He was clearly writing very angrily with his pen and the marks came through the paper on to the table. Some are two or three inches long and very deep."

Now I know this all smacks of a bit of Downing Street propaganda, but it just sounds so totally plausible that I think it must be true, and, if true, then it's not a smear. With that in mind, personally I think this, combined with Brown's many other acts of weirdness, falls comfortably into the category of "anti-social behaviour", complete with expensive damage to public property and a high nuisance value for the recently arrived, new tenants of the building. Since such "low level" criminal activity can't be punished any more in post-Labour Britain, realistically justice will have to be seen to be done with the only instrument of public retribution left: Ken Clarke must serve Brown with an ASBO.

Better still, let's just send the vandalising old fraud the bill, or take it out of the MP's salary he's still drawing but not earning these days. I'm serious about that last option. About £160 Billion should cover it. Well, some of it.

AWOL Brown Should Be Kicked Out Of Parliament

Mandrake (Tim Walker) in today's Sunday Telegraph reveals that one of Gordon Brown's last acts as Prime Minister was to secretly cut the future incumbant's salary by £250,000 over five years.

Gordon Brown's failure to turn up for the State Opening of Parliament may well have been because he couldn't look David Cameron in the face. Mandrake hears that one of Brown's final acts in the Downing Street bunker was quietly to organise a pay cut for his successor which he must have known would leave him out of pocket to the tune of hundreds of thousands of pounds.

On Brown's orders, the Prime Minister's remuneration package was cut from £194,000 to £150,000, but this was done with such stealth that no formal announcement was ever made.

Now, some might say that that was done for sound economic reasons since the country faces economic collapse due the parlous state of the public finances - thanks, er, to Brown. That conclusion would be completely naive. Even Walker's conclusion, jovial as it is, and quoting a 'Whitehall source' is wide of the mark in my humble opinion.

"This was pure Gordon," harrumphs my man in Whitehall. "Quite prepared to make the big sacrifices – so long as it wasn't him who actually had to make them."

Not so. While his pocket-lining, self-serving instincts were certainly part of the motivation for his actions, Brown did this out of pure malice for his successor. That's why he did it secretly. As a result, Cameron will earn little more than he did as leader of the opposition, and could well earn less in terms of salary alone given that he has also handed himself and the cabinet an example-setting 5% pay cut, unaware that Brown had already sabotaged that good faith gesture.

As far as I'm concerned, Brown is a seriously twisted individual who finished the way he started in office, by sticking two fingers up ostensibly at the hated Tories, but really at the entire population of the country he pretty much single-handedly ruined. He must be held to account, and, if fraud or corruption are ever uncovered, brought to book for his crimes against the people of Britain.

In the meantime, let's focus on something else. It's not just that he couldn't face David Cameron at the Queen's Speech, or that he hasn't turned up in parliament once on behalf of his constituency since he was booted out of Number 10, or that he has continued to draw an MP's salary while, in effect, going AWOL (I hear he's been in up in Kirkaldy but effectively incommunicado since his ousting)...these things are bad enough. It's not any of that, however, but something far simpler. Clearly, there is a strong case for him to be suspended from parliament pending a review of his activities, or lack thereof, since regaining that safest of safe seats, (and whether his supporters in that safest of safe seat like it or not)]. If necessary, legislation should be introduced to this end. It should be applied not just to Brown but to any MPs suspected of not discharging their duties of office adequately.

Well, I know it won't happen - which is a pity - but, in the end, something must be done about Brown. He deserves some kind of punishment for his vicious spite and, ultimately, his cowardice both in and now out of office.

If nothing else, though, we should expect and demand better from our backbench MPs.

The Change We Need

While the cuckoo Brown parasitically remains in the Number 10 nest, and the country's real Prime Minister, David Cameron, gallantly waits and, with refreshing integrity, allows the defeated demagogue a window of opportunity through which he can choose to leave with some semblance of dignity intact, on the near horizon the storm clouds gather.

The country, and the economy, cannot wait on Gordon Brown's - and Labour's - wake-up call. He and they are now so divorced from reality that, so the left press seems to be reflecting, they imagine there is some way they can remain in power without a democratic mandate by doing some sort of deal with the Lib Dems. They are deluded if they think that will work, even if Cameron rejects the Yellow party's demands. They are even more deluded if they think, as the equally unelected Mandelson does, that a change of leader will sweeten the pill. It won't. If Labour wants to commit final suicide, that would be one of methods.

But this is all equally devastating for the hard core Tory right. They can't enter into a deal with anyone, on principle. They think Cameron has failed, so he must be punished. No, Heffer-types, you irrational, Thatcher-fetishists, Cameron triumphed. Not by quite enough, but he triumphed.

So I'm one of those people who believes that, yes, with hindsight, Cameron might have stuck to the tax-cutting guns a bit more. But I also believe that what was more important is exactly what Cameron has delivered: weaning the country off the lies, spin, bribes and decadence of New Labour, a horrible cocktail of expensive deceit to which it had become addicted. He's achieved that, so he's done what we needed and what he promised.

So now I will bow to his judgment on the final strategy for removing the cuckoo incumbent, including, if necessary, a deal with the Liberal Democrats and, if necessary, a well-equipped army detachment to get the job done on our behalf at gunpoint. It might yet come to that with a lunatic like Brown.

But that deal with the Lib Dems. What, precisely, is worrying about it? If you are an honest Tory, then the answer is "nothing", including a voting reform referendum (as Iain Dale explains) and cabinet posts for the likes of Cable. If you think the Conservative Party belongs, somehow, to you, then you are hyper-identifying (like Heffer) and need to move out and along. Join the Heffer Party for all I care. Just don't pretend you're a Tory, or that you're a grown-up.

As Michael Portillo says (he who seems to be a bit of a last-minute convert to Cameron, amazingly):

If the result is that the party gains power, the internal argument is over before it starts.

True Conservatives need to get real if they want Brown gone once and for all time. Otherwise, that Scottish criminal will exploit the self-indulgence of the leading, Tory party, ignore the fact that he has just devastated his own party in Westminster, and continue to "lead" - squat - by some miracle (also known as "constitutional loophole"), from/in Number 10. Cameron understands the change we need, and he's about to deliver it (he's going to eject Brown once and for all, one way or another. First principles!)

In other words, priority one is to kill this Brown zombie. And what Cameron is doing now with Clegg will achieve that core, common aim. Criticise this, and you are either a world-class numbskull (like Heffer) or a political fetishist who thrives on discord.

Only, while you're deciding, do remember your country. Cameron seems to have.

But if you can't do that, then next time just vote Kipper and be done with it. Only don't expect anyone to take you seriously - being the over-starched, self-important Hefferite that you clearly are - ever again.

Brown Implodes Mandelson's Campaign

Been reading a few hand-wringing blogposts around and about reinforcing the idea that after that truly appalling rant at the weird, "Citizen UK" rally, Brown had somehow found his voice at the eleventh hour. Of course, it's in the nature of the media that these things become self-reinforcing narratives leading, usually at breakneck speed, to some sort of settled view or consensus, however totally detached from the truth - or reality - it might be. In fact, you could argue that the general election battle is a battle not just for a vote, but to influence that mercurial, flowing media narrative and try to alter, if you like, the course of the discourse - so to speak.

So in one sense - this sense - one could say that Brown sort of succeeded. He has shifted the narrative slightly - maybe - with the BBC on this morning's Today programme being willing accomplices, typically, or even the initiators of this latest little change of tack. But we know that the whole narrative, whichever way it is leaning, is generally nonsense anyway; that the reality is rather different, regardless of whether it influences people's minds or not.

The reality is that Brown, with his back against the wall and his campaign leaders pulling in three different directions, telling their own voters to vote for other parties (David Blackburn was pretty amusing on this in the morning), has decided unsurprisingly to get all atavistic on our butts; to go back to the old irrational, deceitful, Tory-hating, prehistoric Balls-Brown fake dividing line that Mandelson and Darling worked so hard to move away from and onto less toxic, less risky ground. They tried to decontaminate brand Brown. It seems they failed.

But they at least could see the bigger picture that concerns the whole future of Labour. I figure they calculated that if they allowed Brown to lie about phantom Tory cuts/ equally phantom Labour spending, won the election and then proceeded to cut everything in sight having been ordered to by the IMF, they would lose the next election (which would probably come soon afterwards anyway) by a country mile, be truly obliterated this time by a livid electorate, and secure 25 years of Tory government into the bargain without David Cameron even having to break sweat.

So, the upshot is that, despite the direction in which the media narrative is currently veering, apparently and irrelevantly, the fact is that Brown has got it disastrously wrong. He's not only reverted to type (who could have doubted that he wouldn't - that's all he is, after all), but he's actually going to lose the election on the back of it too, so we can skip the brief period of the total turmoil of a Labour government winning on a lie and collapsing within months as the economy tears itself apart and move straight onto the Tories.

All in all, the couple of more rational members of the former Labour cabinet must be tearing their collective hair out (that doesn't include Liam Byrne, naturally) gnashing their teeth and generally wailing a lot. Thanks to Gordon Brown, the whole, elegantly triangulated (and exquisitely dishonest rather than brutally deceitful) Mandelsonian election campaign strategy has now totally imploded and will suck the party down with it.

As I've said before, they only have themselves to blame. They could have removed Brown a long time ago. Hell, they never should have taken the piss out of the electorate by giving the auld wrecker a coronation in the first place. But that's all history now, and so is Labour. The one silver lining is that if there is any justice left in this world, or, indeed, sense left in this country, then even if Labour aren't kicked into third place and kicked into touch for a generation - even if they manage by some miracle to keep Cameron down to a minority government - Brown will be gone.

Even I, ever the optimist who still firmly believes in the clear Tory triumph - if by some horrible, perverted twist of fate I'm wrong, even I would happily settle just for the end of Brown if I can't have anything else. That outcome would be by no means satisfying, or even satisfactory, but it'd be one hell of a relief.

The Best Downfall

The best Downfall mash was this one. Why? Because it perfectly captured the massive Labour wobble about Brown in 2008, when they could have got rid of him. It also reminds us why the Guardian has switched sides today, and regrets reversing the position it took at the time: that Brown should have gone.

Mind you, it's bloody funny too. Be warned, however, that there are tons of swear words, and I usually try to stay away from that kind of language. I bloody do.

Paxman-Brown

Just watched the interview that I had hoped would be the clincher that finally ended the Brown nightmare once and for all.

Initially, I was encouraged by Paxman's enthusiasm in pursuing Brown on his lies about, well, just about everything, and his terrible record everywhere. Then, after Brown did his usual trick of attacking the interviewer for not asking him the right questions, I really thought Paxman would lose it and go for the jugular. You know, a Howard moment, which he could have done with a question like "You say you take responsibility for the things you think you are responsible for. Name them." Something like that, or better (he was in a massively target rich environment about ten minutes in). But he didn't - and I was pretty unimpressed.

Then, once the whole, sorry spectacle of wriggling, delusion, desperate, hate-filled divisiveness and contemptuous revisionism was over, I realised what Paxman had really done. In fact he hadn't suddenly decided half way through, for some perverse personal, politically motivated reason, to go easy on Brown. He'd done precisely what everyone else has done when it comes to this useless, troubled man, including the editors of the Guardian (laughably).

He'd just given up.

And that was more damning than a hundred Howard moments, and it sealed Brown's fate in just the way I had hoped - finally and permanently - but not quite in the way I'd imagined.

So - and I never thought I'd be saying this - well done Paxman. You've finally done your compatriots a genuine service.

Brown Hates Everyone

Nasty piece of work

I'm not a huge fan of the Mail, and certainly not its columnists, generally speaking. But in amongst all the pointless posturing and frequent pandering to their own puerile interpretation of middle England values, you do occasionally get a bit of a gem...

Watching Brown's lunatic performance on Wednesday was painful, and, frankly, baffling. What kind of a man is this unasked for Prime Minister, wondered millions of people? Well, I reckon Richard Littlejohn might have found the answer. The bloke's a borderline sociopath, according to this old bruiser of a feature writer, at least in terms of his public life. Littlejohn says:

Here are some commonly accepted traits of sociopathic behaviour. Stop me when you’ve heard enough.
Glibness and superficial charm; manipulative and cunning.

Check.

Grandiose sense of self and entitlement.

Check.

Pathological lying; absence of remorse, shame or guilt; callousness and lack of empathy.

Check.

Refusal to accept blame; tendency to blame others even for acts they obviously committed.

Check.

Authoritarian; secretive; paranoid; narcissism; grandiosity; an over-inflated belief in their own powers and abilities.

Check.

Prone to rage and abuse; outraged by insignificant matters.

Check.

Instead of friends, they have only victims and accomplices who tend to end up as victims.

Check.

The end always justifies the means; nothing must stand in their way.

Check, check.

Our survey said... Anyone we know?

Tell me which of the above does not apply to Gordon Brown. Well, I can't. Can you?

Personally, I think 'sociopath' is far too grand a term for Brown. I think he's just a narcissistic martinet with deep seated insecurities. But, hey, what do I know? Make up your own mind.

The only thing that still amazes me is that people are still planning on voting for this loser. They must be as delusional as he plainly is. It's alarming that they're loose in the country!

Ah well, only six more days to go, give or take a few hours. And then we'll be rid of, wait for it, the worst prime minister and government ever to have been inflicted on this country.

Bell On Bigotgate

Been too busy for Bigotgate today, more's the pity. But I've had a chance to skim through all the papers now and have been struck by one thing in particular: the schizoid coverage of Brown's epic fubar by the Guardian. Its snob-Left middle class are smelling their own farts (a la South Park's 'smug alert') like crazy over some touchy feely rentapole called Millionovus Poppinova or something's, mortally wounded by the OAP's comments about Eastern Europeans 'flocking' into Britain act. Well, I don't know about you, but I'd call a million or so permanent new members of the community, all from the same origin, a pretty hefty 'flock', wouldn't you?

This is 'grow up, do' territory, but, relentlessly, this stupid person instead drones on and on and on with this fake victimhood horse manure, possibly designed to deflect us from criticising the true villain of this piece: el Gordo. If not - if it is somehow genuine - then in terms of spectacularly missing the point it's hard to trump. The point? The point is that Brown simply lowered not just his, but his entire political party's mask for a moment and revealed in all its stark reality how very, very much the middle class snob-Left (the Toynbee and Harmans of this world, to name but two out of hundreds either in politics or in journalism or both) fear, despise and resent their own core vote. You see this not so much in the article, which is just bluster and drivel, but in the comments below it, which are generally disgusting. If you really can stand it, you can see what I mean here.

On the other hand, though, you have Steve Bell. Artist, a committed Tory basher with plenty of previous and a dyed in the wool lefty, but at least he's got a sense of humour. He hates hypocrisy even more than he loathes David Cameron:

Ah well, home time. But, oh joy unconfined, another debate to look forward to tonight. I do hope Dave and Nicky tease little Gordy about all this.

Mercilessly.

Bigotgate: The Musical

Many things have been said. Many things have yet to be said, but will be said.

But only Guido captures the summary with a beautiful number from another fallen King:



Farewell, Gordon. Peace be with you.

The end.

Gaffe Of The Century

Courtesy of Guy News:

One million Labour supporters have just realised that Gordon Brown is a total asshole, and that they, Brown's 'bigots', mean precisely nothing to him beyond their role as irrelevant voting fodder.

It's the gaffe of this young century. And you know what? I reckon it was a set-up by anti-Brown insiders. That might not do Brown's legendary paranoia much good, but it's wrecked his campaign.

==Update==

And here's Mrs Duffy's reaction. As far as I'm concerned, she comes across as an extremely nice lady. But not to Brown, oh no.

And now he's in her front room pleading for his political career. I'm sure she'll forgive him - she seems to be the forgiving, gentle type, (besides, Brown's goons and minders will no-doubt have checked beforehand).

But I'm absolutely certain the rest of the country will not be quite so receptive to his fake contrition act. We've seen it all before.

Find Foot, Take Aim, FIRE!

See what happens if you're at work and you leave the blogs alone for a couple of hours? You miss something really big.

In this case, the sight of Calamity Gord "loose", as Sir Humphrey might say "in the building" (or, rather, the country) and the subsequent trail of devastation ending in a rail crash that follows soon after.

It's not so much Brown's rudeness and two-faced 'pretending to care' high/heavy handedness with, in this case, an everyday voter just like you or me (well, not like me actually. She is - or maybe come to think of it 'was' - a Labour voter until Brown branded her a 'bigot' behind her back), it's the rock-solid inevitability that if Brown is involved, no matter what it is, wherever it is, something is going to go horribly, horribly wrong.

But this time, Brown has really done it. It's his and his party's whole future that he's finally, permanently sabotaged. Poetic justice that is good for at least one, vital thing: this country's future.

The other parties will be wondering why they've bothered to expend so much time and money on elaborate campaigns and manifestos when all they had to do was sit back and watch the auld wrecker single-handedly alienate nine tenths of the voting public, two thirds of his own party and comprehensively depth charge any hope he might have entertained of becoming a legitimate prime minister. Oh, hang on, I remember why they bothered (especially the Tories) - not because they feel any particular entitlement to power, as with the Labourist Brownite inner circle, but because they genuinely care about righting Brown-Labour's wrongs.

One thing this latest Brown cockup is bad for, though, and extremely irritatingly, is that Brown and his ilk are, as Iain Dale has said, pushing ordinary white working class Labour supporters straight into the arms of the nationalist socialists, the BNP: one final piece of Brownian sabotage for which he should never be forgiven, even in retirement - or death.

It's that serious; he's been that bad.

Winning The Argument

It should not be seen as much of a coincidence that on the day Greek debt is downgraded to junk, a poll comes out that lends weight to the view that the Tories are winning the key argument in this general election campaign, the economic argument.

The only game in town is Europe at the moment, with Portugal and, somewhere further down the road, Spain, next on the list for the dreaded rating drop. Whatever the virtues of wonderful and exciting policies such as Michael Gove's brilliant education plan, which has already caused a Damascene conversion of former Fabian research chairman and now editor of the Jewish Chronicle (Martin Bright take note), Stephen Pollard, the vindication of the Tories in at least promising to focus urgently on Britain's own Brown/Labour-caused debt crisis is surely now unchallengeable. Brown and Labour can go on denying the seriousness of the crisis all they want, but that will not make it go away.

And that's clearly why people increasingly are now seeing that they must therefore make Labour go away on May 6th. The stakes have never been higher - for everyone. One thing's for sure, a hung parliament or, heaven forbid, five more years of Brown - though one could and most likely would lead to the other - and we would be the ones in the unfortunate Greeks' shoes next: 16+% government borrowing interest rates, a shattered credit rating and staring down both barrels of a titanic debt default and a bombed out economy.

But the message is finally getting through: Brown or Clegg mean economic crisis and meltdown. And only the Tories offer any hope of averting both.