Brownfall

Hattip to The Daily Referendum

Recycling The Trash

Guess who's coming back to the Home Office. Talk about recycling the trash.

Rumours are circulating that reformed Communist, reformed alcoholic, Blairite Jock, John Reid is about to join his arch enemy Gordon Brown's zombie government in what is (was?) being planned as some sort of spectacular move to shore up the cabinet a la Mandy. But Downing Street immediately sought to scotch the speculation after a meeting between Brown and Reid was leaked to BBC political toad, Nick Robinson, so the Spectator says.

Either the leak - the umpteenth act of sabotage from within Downing St. this week - has scuppered the plan completely or Brown will simply go ahead and bring this 'heavyweight' antagonist back regardless. The reality seems to be now that whichever direction Brown tries to step, he somehow finds a landmine.

There must be someone within his 'inner circle' - actually inside the bunker - constantly briefing against him and releasing confidential or embarrassing information to the press corps. It has paralysed Brown: he can no longer make any future plans because no sooner has he decided something than the media somehow get hold of it and splash it all over the internet.

All I really wonder, gleeful as I am that this puffed-up demagogue has once and for all been found out and laid low, is if he likes the taste of his own poison. Whoever's introduced it into Brown's water supply deserves a knighthood: the toxin is taking effect.

So don't worry, Gordo. The whole, horrible nightmare will be over soon, chum. Then we can all wake-up.

==Update==
According to Iain Dale, Reid actually told Brown he should quit in that meeting. Apparently, the conversation went something like this:

Brown: Will you be my Home Secretary?
Reid: No
Brown: You have to support me.
Reid: No I don't. I have to support my country and my party, and that means you have to stand down

Extraordinary. I think (I hope) this isn't a spoof by Mr Dale. He is a bigwig insider, after all. Although the story is unsourced, which is unusual for Dale, spoofs aren't really his style.

If it is kosher, then fair play to the old Scottish Labour fart, Reid. And I wonder: could we be seeing the emergence of the stalking horse. He fits the bill... .

This story could be a real runner.

Brown Trousers

JudasShaun Woodward: seated at the Gord's Left Hand in PMQs. A lot on his mind.

What a morning, then. Brown barely limps-on having been savaged by a chipmunk and a pair of foppish toff scunners, relying now on those personifications of loyalty, Peter Mandelson, Shaun Woodward and Ed Balls, as his loyal crutches - and now we hear rumours from Guido that Madame Flint is about to snear her way into political oblivion too. All we need is for Ali Darling to be strangled by his own eyebrows - they've always been at odds with the rest of him - for an almost perfect day to be complete.

But I'm not so convinced that even this cabinet vaporisation and the ebbing away of his control of the tainted resident Blairites will do for Brown. The fatal blow will be struck by the Left. And now the Guardian has unearthed a gathering of names, no less. The Spectator has it:

Allegra Stratton and David Hencke have the scoop over at The Guardian:

A group of rebel MPs have begun soliciting signatures for a round robin letter calling for Gordon Brown to step down, which they plan to hand to the prime minister after the results of the local and European elections have come in on Monday morning.

The Guardian has learned there are reports that the backbenchers think they can reach 70 or 80 signatories, with some claims that the letter could be delivered to Downing Street by the end of today.

Some backbenchers have seen the letter and are not signing it on account of a perception that the names already on the list are "too leftwing".

The pair report that all this is being done by MPs sending a message to an email address. What should worry Brown about this is that it shows that the left are mobilising against him as well. Things are moving fast now.

The real challenge has always been from that direction. Disaffected and betrayed, the Left have had enough. They will challenge - and they actually know the labyrinthine party rules. For me, though, this indicates it's not only game over for Brown, it's game over for Labour. Quite simply, through cowardice, denial and basic stupidity, they've left it too late.

Even if (when) they oust Brown, Postman Al will not be able to save the party from descending into factional disarray, with an emboldened left wing holding a paralysed leadership hostage to fortune up to the next election. If they think their performance in tomorrow's polls will be bad, then they're in for one awesome shock come the (now imminent) General Election. And they only have themselves to blame for that.

Tough.

CHAOS!

Tom Watson, Brown's chief political henchman, has stood down from his post according to Sky. The report, on this day of total chaos for the government, offers no reason for his shock decision which means there must be speculation he was fired.

So it seems Guido might be right after all: there is an agent provocateur at the heart of Brown's government and, after a spate of embarrassing leaks and briefings against Brown, Watson would appear to have failed his master for the last time.

As government collapses go, this one is spectacular.

Jacqui Jumps

Preferring not to wait until she's pushed, Smith has jumped from the Home Office cabinet post she so richly didn't deserve. Presumably she's decided to spend more time with her bath plugs and to tackle the thorny problem of weaning her husband off his porn habit.

What are the implications of this surprise resignation ahead of the Euro and local elections on Thursday? Well, the Spectator called it yesterday, with James Forsyth prophesying:

Whenever word gets out that a reshuffle is underway, the rumour mill goes into overdrive—no speculation it too outrageous or too thinly sourced to make the rounds. So there’s a danger that Ministers could think, wrongly, that they’re going to be dropped or demoted and decide to get their retaliation in first.

I'm not sure this is quite an example of that - she was an epically useless Home Sec and wanted to quit anyway - but given that Number 10 appears to have totally lost control of not only the news agenda (Queen's snub over D-Day, for instance) but also their own economic policy on the car industry (LDV re-enters administration), it is true to say that it is the first sign of that 'chaos' to which Forsyth referred.

The fact, for instance, that they have another dead man walking in Alistair Darling coming out on Sky this afternoon to try to explain why Smith had gone speaks volumes about how limited Brown's scope for change in any reshuffle now is. Better than half his cabinet, including his Chancellor, are tainted by the expenses scandal, with Geoff Hoon the latest double claimer forced to pay back the cash he nicked. He is also one of the Labour ministers who benefited so richly from the 2004 rule change on flipping that Brown denied all knowledge of in a bizarre exchange during an interview with Adam Boulton yesterday.

As Fraser Nelson says this afternoon, what Smith's departure really does emphasise is Brown's helplessness. He goes on:

This gives her a bit of dignity, and will frustrate Gordon Brown who would have liked to announce this himself. The reshuffle is one of the few weapons left in his arsenal - with Labour's poll rating now below room temperature, he is about to lead the party into what will doubtless be its worst-ever defeat. And he'll look more helpless now; given he can't control his own reshuffles in a timely way.

As it all begins finally to unravel only one question really remains: can Brown hang-on as leader? Now that he has lost what was, apparently, his only 'unique selling point', (however mythical) - his control over his party - I still maintain he will be knifed in the back, shown the door, quietly asked to leave: whatever the method of his removal, he will be removed. Why? Because there are strong signs that it is finally dawning on the Labour donkeys that there is one, consistent, unifying feature of this vortex of national tribulation and political chaos they (we!) are having to suffer - and he lives in Number 10.

Not for much longer.

Darling Down Balls-Up

Meet the new Chancellor

I know it's been up for a while, but it's so fantastically naff that I had to do something on it. The Sunday Times says Gordon Brown wants Ed Balls to replace Alistair Darling. In a scoop sourced to a "top-level leak from Downing Street" [update: Guido thinks it's Mandelson. The farce is complete!] it's revealed that this is some sort of desperate strategy by Brown to reinvigorate his dead government.

...the prime minister wants to make the appointment the centrepiece of a sweeping reshuffle on Friday, after the local and European polls.

With Balls, the schools secretary, one of the most divisive figures in government, the move would be a huge risk, which could trigger a ferocious backlash within the Labour party that could spiral into a leadership challenge.

The Sunday Times understands that Lord Mandelson, the business secretary, has warned Brown of the potential dangers, but is ready to support the move as part of a final attempt to revive the government’s fortunes.

It's difficult to know which part of this to laugh at first: one of the "most divisive figures in government" ousting a man who could well turn into Brown's Geoffrey Howe; Lord Mandelson giving his qualified blessing while warning of the "potential dangers" - something he knows all about; the "dangerous backlash" from supine Labour backbenchers frightened by the prospect of imminent unemployment and losing all those delicious perks. Whichever bit of this hairbrained (and now leaked) scheme unravels first, what's certain is that this is going to be a real blockbuster summer of political bloodshed.

But it gets worse (better, I mean):

Brown’s authority has become so weakened that some ministers are openly defying Downing Street. Insiders claim the most audacious are dodging his calls – deliberately “going to ground” when he tries to phone them.

It's amateur night at Whitehall, folks. Low farce in a paralysed regime. This is your 'government' remember. And people still wonder why we so desperately need a General Election. Well, maybe this part will finally convince them:

According to the well-placed insider, Brown has been working on the scheme to make Balls chancellor since the expenses debacle engulfed Westminster, taking a handful of his closest aides into his confidence.

Brown knows the appointment would be highly controversial and is ruminating over the possible consequences.

"Munch, munch...er...munch." The consequences will be the political equivalent of multi-megaton nuclear devastation for you, Gord - happily.

While few question Balls’s economic competence, many backbenchers remain deeply distrustful of the prime minister’s closest henchman.

Yesterday one senior Blairite figure warned of devastating consequences for the prime minister if he pressed ahead. “If Gordon wants to bring the whole house of cards tumbling down, this is the way to do it. The reaction will be apoplectic,” he said.

See?

A Downing Street spokesman said: “We do not comment on reshuffles.”

That's OK, spokesman geezer, you don't have to. We've got everything we need.

As the Brown slowmotion trainwreck enters its final phase (taking out the station and exploding in flames), one can't help but be curious about how poor old Darling, Brown's loyal retainer for so many years, feels about all this. Howe will he react, I wonder ;)

Boy oh boy, though, watching Brown tear Labour to pieces and probably destroy it for generations as a serious political force over the next few months will be absolutely captivating. If it's allowed to happen, that is.

[Insert Your Caption in the Comments Below]

Sadly, even Labour knows now that Darling or Balls, Harmon or Smith, Blears or any other of their incompetent, sleazy ministers you care to pick are not really the main problem (serious problems though they all are): it's Brown. And they're going to get rid of him - within weeks.

Shame. We won't get to see the show. I'll just have to settle for seeing Brown ousted, then. What a pity.

Cashing-In

The Telegraph has launched a fresh attack on yet another Tory MP in the ongoing expenses saga. Right, well, let's just get the details out of the way: Bill Cash, best known for his strong anti-federalist stance on the EU, claimed 15 large for his daughter's flat in London "even though he owned another home near Westminster" in 2005. He named her flat as his second home, although on the 10 o'clock news tonight he explained that not only was this within the rules at the time, he wasn't actually living in the 'other home' in London at the time. He also agreed to repay the money.

OK. He's a trougher who's used taxpayer's hard-earned to take care of his offspring and as such is obviously the epitome of all that is evil in this world of ours. But I'm going to go slightly off message here and pose a couple of questions. First, why has the Telegraph's ongoing coverage of this story focused its biggest headlines on Tory MPs? Are we to believe that Labour, with Blears and Morley and Chaytor and Malik and so on and so on ad infinitum, are somehow immune to the most damning of front page splashes apparently fine for Tories who haven't actually, technically broken any rules? Why are Labour MPs, quite a few of whom have stretched the rules in some cases beyond breaking point in making huge capital gains over the past eight years by doing-up their 'second' homes at taxpayers expense, then flipping it and doing the same thing to what was their main home, and then flipping back and selling the - bear with me - first second home, (now a second home again), at a huge profit (take a breath) not being subjected to the same kind of forensic scrutiny and opprobrium as the Tories? The house-flipping is a scam and Geoff Hoon, to name but one, has made millions out of it. Why isn't he being hounded out of office like Kirkbride or, one assumes in due course, Bill Cash. The question is: does the Sleazygraph have an anti-Tory agenda? Well, who knows. The evidence kind of suggests it might, even if it's only a 'mild' one.

But it remains a bit of a mystery to me, especially when you compare their other revelation inside Friday's paper about Nigel Griffiths, the Labour MP and another member of Brown's untouchable inner circle (you remember, he's the married Edinburgh trougher who was snapped shagging some other woman in his office on Remembrance Sunday and then lied about it). This guy is a real scumbag and, you'd be forgiven for thinking, a walking front page - yet he only bags second or even third spot. Curious.

The second possibility is that Cameron, unlike Brown, is now quite comfortable seeing the old guard fall before the next election and thus isn't making much of a fuss about what might or might not be press bias. Bill Cash would be no great loss for Dave. Winterton wasn't, or Steed or Hogg or Fraser and so on and so forth. But I'm not so sure about this after the Kirkbride case, where the rabid left of the 'Respect' party played a strong part in unseating her. Cameron didn't lift a finger to support her, which could mean that actually he has no control over the course events are taking. In which case, he and the Tories are now at the mercy of the press - and, frankly, the far left.

There's another problem for Cameron, too. The reason Labour are stalling on deselection and the disciplining of its most corrupt Members of Parliament is because of the respective selection systems. Tory MPs are much more vulnerable to deselection than Labour not because they deserve it any more than Labour MPs - they clearly do not - but because the Labour system for deselection/selection is far more corrupt (as we saw with the Georgia Gould fiasco recently) than the Tory system. Labour really thinks they can get away with it - and here's a thought: maybe they can! So the only place left for us to go and where these thieves might, just might, be held accountable for their criminality is the General Election. I just pray people won't get fooled into actually rewarding them by stupidly punishing the Tories. There's an even bigger picture than the expenses scandal, and that's the disaster that is Labour-in-office. They have to be kicked-out at all costs, not least because they deserve to be.

So Bill Cash, old chap, you'd better watch your back mate. And do not expect your daughter to be standing again as a Conservative candidate any time soon. Your boss has opted for an attrition strategy - probably because he had no choice. The Tory casualties will be very heavy before the General Election as a consequence.

But we have to make bloody sure Labour's are much worse after it.

US Economists: UK Budget Wrong

US financial newsblog, Intermex Power, has published a powerful article this evening by Brian S. Wesbury, chief economist, and Robert Stein senior economist at First Trust Advisors in Wheaton, Ill, who write a weekly column for Forbes. They have described the tax hikes combined with the huge levels of borrowing in the UK budget as a perilous error on the part of the government which will certainly not head off the potential credit downgrade.

...we need only look at the U.K., where the threat of a downgrade comes despite the large tax increases already built into their budget. It offers an example we shouldn't follow.

They warn the US government that to follow Brown's plans to borrow and print more money to finance ballooning levels of public debt would cripple the US economy by hammering the value of the dollar. The Standard and Poor's recent decision to 'review' the UK's AAA credit rating was not only intended to force the government to wake-up to the risks they're taking with unsustainable debt but to warn the US and the world that debt was a major danger. As the authors put it, the review of the UK's AAA status was...

...a shot heard 'round the world [and] happening despite [Gordon Brown's] planned tax hikes, because [the UK's] debt burden was to rise to 100% of gross domestic product.

So much for Brown's great lie, then: his la-la land 'global consensus'. The warning is clear: the government's policies are not only wrong, they are dangerously wrong. As Peter Hoskin of the Spectator noted earlier today

... Professor John Taylor's article for the FT today extrapolates from Standard and Poor's recent assessment of the UK's creditworthiness [and] delivers a warning about the rising national debt in America. This passage jumped out at me: that we are now in totally uncharted territory thanks to the government's mishandling of the economy year after year.

"While there is debate about whether a large deficit today provides economic stimulus, there is no economic theory or evidence that shows that deficits in five or 10 years will help to get us out of this recession. Such thinking is irresponsible. If you believe deficits are good in bad times, then the responsible policy is to try to balance the budget in good times. The CBO projects that the economy will be back to delivering on its potential growth by 2014. A responsible budget would lay out proposals for balancing the budget by then rather than aim for trillion-dollar deficits."

Taylor's point also applies over here. By the Treasury's own (optimistic?) forecasts, we'll still be running a budget deficit of 5.5 percent of GDP in 2014. Going off their current plans, that deficit would be similiar under the Tories. So unless the next government undertakes bolder fiscal consolidation than is currently being mooted, we may again be lamenting a failure to "fix the roof while the sun was shining.

The message for Brown and Darling, coming now from experts all over the world, can't be any more clear: you must cut spending or cause an even deeper crisis for the UK economy. Of course, they will not - but not for economic reasons, for political ones. Launching the essential raft of cuts in public spending would mean they would be unable to attack supposed 'Tory cuts' and thus in their uncomplicated minds lose their 'unique selling point'. As this appears to be the main (only?) plank of their political strategy it would also mean their having to work-out (very quickly) exactly what, if anything, this government is now for. I can provide the answer for them right now: this government is [good] for precisely nothing.

What voters simply must finally realise from all this is that the cynical - and severely flawed - political calculation behind the tax-borrow-and-spend 'policy', and behind triggering an insane debt explosion, is the only motive for Brown's reckless actions. It's the sheer desperation of a man (deservedly) threatened with the end of his political career and willing to devastate the UK economy in a last-ditched and deluded attempt somehow to 'save' himself. He's attempting to trick the electorate into backing him by generating a fake recovery for early 2010 which itself will result in the dreaded 'double dip' recession and then years of stagflation.

This country is currently at the mercy of a very dangerous man. The press better wake up to this fact and help people with a campaign to have him removed - immediately. It's the only option left.

Labour Tax Dodgers Let Off Hook

Just been watching Sky News in disbelief. Downing Street has come out and defended tax dodging ministers, even after the Inland Revenue itself in an unprecedented statement said:

"It’s a general principle of tax law that accountancy fees incurred in connection with the completion of a personal tax return are not deductible. This is because the costs of complying with the law are not an allowable expense against tax. This rule applies across the board."

Instead we get the now-familiar whitewash tactics of Labour: a meeting of party 'officials' (laughably named the 'star chamber') followed by a statement saying something along the lines of "Well, shucks folks, the system is just plain stoopid. But our good 'ol boys - heck, they did nothing wrong - they're the real victims in all this. Would they do anything to hurt you? Now would they? So calm down, shut-up, go home and get ready to vote us in for a Fourth Term. When we decide to let you, that is."

Grrr. The lefty goons seem to think paying an unqualified accountant, and husband of one of your colleagues, taxpayers money to do your personal accounts is just fine and tickedy-boo. But you see, Labour, no it isn't. It's illegal whatever your stupid little green book (that you wrote) says. We have to comply - and so do you!

Compare this with Cameron's ongoing purge of Tory party corruption and you see how utterly feeble this is. Mind you, I suppose it is naive of us to expect the totally corrupt Labour party to investigate their own members and produce any other results. Unbelievable. They are that bad.

Wipe them out in the elections next month, folks. Bring them down. But just remember, that will not be achieved by voting for fringe parties like UKIP.

However distasteful the idea of voting Tory might seem to you just now, it's the only way to give the Labour troughers, fraudsters and total incompetents exactly what they deserve: a bloody good kicking.