Bottler's Fortress Britain

The Bottler's bizarre and sinister determination to create what he laughably calls Fortress Britain precisely encapsulates his glowering style of government. At prodigious expense, a vast and unwieldy structure will be created and imposed from above that will profoundly inconvenience millions, significantly undermine personal liberty and which, you can be sure, will not work anyway both because it will be incompetently administered and do nothing to deter terrorists in the first place. What it will do, however, and here the clunking fist reveals itself in all its obvious deviousness, is greatly increase the power of the state.

In addition, given that it is overwhelmingly the case that 99.9999% of the population of Britain are not terrorists, why treat them as though they are? Why target the plainly innocent? Why treat everybody as a potential threat? If MI5 already knows of 2,000 Islamists conspiring to commit acts of terror, then self-evidently these are the people who should be targeted rather than every granny, maiden aunt and two-year-old in the country. How will employing airport-style security checks at 250 railways stations, for example, do anything other than a) waste money; b) waste time; c) screw people around?

It strikes me that the Bottler is now so far removed from reality and so deluded that he simply doesn't understand how and why people are very rapidly going to get seriously fed up with being permanently pestered by pea-brained bureaucrats and self-important jobsworths when they are doing no more than going about their everyday, legal business. Once the information then gathered – none of which is remotely the government's business in any case – is then lost, mislaid and/or muddled, as it will be, and people start being accused of plotting crimes of which they are entirely innocent, the wrath unleashed will be startling.

In fact, I am more than ever convinced that the Bottler has gone mad. Actually mad. Barking, bonkers, certifiable. I have a strong feeling that his heavily sedated, strait-jacketed form will have to be smuggled out of Downing Street in the dead of night by men in white coats carrying very large syringes.

My betting is for this side of Christmas.

Of course, it does also raise the alarming question of who would take over in his place.