I know ...

... that I am no more than an occasional blogger, an obvious amateur, a once-in-a-while, have-a-go-blogger.

I don't think, however, that this changes what, for me, is the key point.

And this is that we are being governed by a man who is not just demonstrably demented but properly mad: self-evidently crazed, obviously certifiable, a lunatic from first to last. Loopy from the moment he wakes up to the instant he lumbers to bed.

It begs an obvious question.

Why can't this properly preposterous maniac be locked up?

It hardly sounds too much to ask.

Thugs and brutes

Watching the Great McNutter on PMQs today, I was more than ever struck by the fact that he is, properly, a thug.

He revels in whipping up his gang, strutting at their head, sneering at anyone in his way. Provided he is certain he can win, there is no playground confrontation he won't force his way into, no cheap blow he won't land, no insult he can resist hurling out.

His, first and last, is a world made real only by nastiness. How can I crush my opponents? How can I reinforce myself as the biggest bully? Who can I humiliate next?

Moral compass, anyone? An end to boom and bust? Recession, even?

Meanwhile, British political life, in thrall to McManiac's galloping sense of inadequacy and desperate need to impose himself, is reduced to a grotesque parody of schoolyard gangsterism.

Despair is the only rational response.

Has British politics ...

... ever been practised by anyone more obviously nasty than Gordon Brown?

Don't bother to send your answers on a postcard.

I am seriously thinking of starting my own one-man killer squad.

I still have a a potato gun – somewhere. Phwang! Take that, you mouldering twat. Want more, eh? Phawng again! Ha! Ha!

Die slowly Scottish lump of rotten porridge. Whang that up your haggis!

If only.

Sigh.

It defies every rational expectation that so obvious a maniac should ever have been allowed out in public at all. And now he wants us to believe he is Churchill reborn.

Cripes. Again, what have we done to deserve this?

Bad and getting badder

Well now, your old Brute, to the extent that he can be bothered to post anything at all these days, has, even at his busiest, conspicuously strayed clear of foreign affairs, the limitless horrors of Gordo McManiac's premiership, if it can properly be called that, transfixing him in horror to the extent that everything else – global financial systems disintegrating, Iran edging ever closer to nuclear weapons, the Chinese richer and nuttier than ever – has left him cold. Or at any rate coldish.

But, emboldened by a dicreet glass of sherry (and contemplating a second), the Brute would like to offer a comment or two on last night's debate between Obama and McCain.

One, sturdy Republican or not, McCain cannot hope to win with his cheeks apparently stuffed with several pairs of underpants. It isn't just the chipmunk-like swelling. It's the lisphing these barmy protuberances produce. Confidence is not inspired.

Sorry.

Ombama, meanwhile, master of properly Blair-like insincerity, voice lowered, sound-bites mastered, liberals swooning, East Coast hearts bleeding, has a wife, duly ushered onto the podium after the debate in the best gushing Sarah Brown style, who can surely only derail his march on the White House. It isn't her fault but her arse is, honestly, the biggest I have ever seen, the whole crammed into a skirt not so much under serious pressure as threatening an explosion that might instantly end all sentient life within several hundred miles. And I speak as a one-time habitue of Hammersmith's King Street shopping mall. She is packing some mighty acres of flesh under those svelte skirts. Scary stuff.

Tricky, in other words.

Wither the Free World?

Can anyone help?

Certifiable

This has been the week of Gordon! Sing his name out loud!

Here he was, a man rejunvenated, a man reborn, a man whose crazed smiles and loopy facial tics had now, at last, begun to be appreciated by the wider world. Thus stern promises were issued to spend sums of incomprehensible magnitude - none of which he had, of course – not merely to rescue the world's crumbling financial systems but single-handedly to bestow his limitless wisdom to countries great and small (except Iceland, of course) to make clear to them what has always been abundantly obvious to him: THAT ONLY GORDON KNOWS!

ONLY GORDON UNDERSTANDS! ONLY GORDON CAN SAVE US!

Oh! Undeserving world! See who has come among us! See who strides benignly among us feeble pygmies!

Were the veritable agent of death himself to reveal himself to us, it would be as nothing to the Great Gord.

Begone dwarf Cameron and your pointless toff crew!

Britain's greatest-ever chancellor, the man who BANISHED! boom and bust, has been let loose again!

In as much as ... ooh! ... a week? Gordo himself will PERSONALLY DEMAND! that we will all be allowed to eat AT LEAST! half a rat PER FAMILY! PER WEEK!

In the meantime, after personally restoring democracy to Burma, ending global warming, slashing the price of oil and giving serious thought of the VAST kind only he understands about how to change the movements of the planets, his head, currently only marginally smaller than the universe itself, will, I earnestly trust, explode with a tiny phutt and this properly vile, lying and deeply dishonest lunatic will cease to be for ever.

Oh, if only. If only. What have we done to deserve this endless punishment? Who will rid us of this crazed imbecile? That Britain – Great Britain, ha! – should be led by this bloated buffoon.

It is just too painful.

Fed up with Gordo, fed up with Mandy, fed up with ...

... well, pretty much everything.

So, a change of topic.

Next Monday, the Madrid Tennis Masters starts.

And Andy Murray will win it.

That is my prediction and that is what I am sticking with.

So, yah, booh, sucks and whang your head down the bog if you disagree.

I DON'T CARE!

You read it here first.

Why Gordo never lets you down

Amid the vast reams of comment – stunned, delighted, appalled, dismayed: take your pick – about Gordo's recall of Lord Mandy of I-Guarantee-I'll-Shaft-You-Before-You've-Even-So-Much-As-Thought-Of-Shafting-Me, a central point seems to have been missed.

Over the summer, his poll ratings plummeting, Gordo attempted to cast himself as above the daily din of Westminster trivia. His focus was on far weightier matters – climate change, African poverty, should I deem to meet Bush again? how can I wrong-foot Sarkozy? This, surely, was the stuff only mighty intellects such as his could properly contend with. Talk of in-fighting within the Labour party, to say nothing of his own imminent demise, could – must!– be dismissed as froth, day-to-day nonsenses of the sort his own immense brain was obviously beyond.

Bollocks, of course. But in his own desperate terms worth a try.

Predictably, it came to precisely nothing.

Now, with global financial Armageddon upon us, he has tried the same trick again. Gordo the Vast, he proclaims, is all that stands between us and living in caves, rooting around for so much as a shriveled berry, on good days perhaps part of a rat. His huge, frowning brow is even now being deployed non-stop to avert a catastrophe he alone can comprehend.

So, poised at this moment of political redemption, what does he do?

He brings Mandy back into the Cabinet.

Eh? At a stroke, every petty, vicious, nasty, venomous Labour internal feud is ushered centre stage again – and every attempt to portray McBigBrain as a global giant is scuppered. The daily round of Gordo's poisonous in-fighting is therefore guaranteed to resume its deadly primacy.

This isn't just stupid. It suggests a kind of death wish.

Flashman or Gladstone?

Jacquie Ashley, still desperately attempting to square her pro-Gordo instincts with the obvious realities of his catastrophic premiership, came up with what she may well have thought a wizard wheeze in her Guardian column this morning. Are the Tories more Flashman than Gladstone, she asked? – ohh! provocative, Jackie! Sounds like you may have read a history book or two. Bit of of proper context coming our way? Stand by!

She's got this 100% wrong.

Clearly, Flashman = public school thug = David Cameron = George Osborne/Boris,/Bullingdon Club/beastly hearties is an obvious enough line to take.

But who is really shoving the junior boys' heads down the bog, roasting them over the fire and, swanking around in his study, demanding that his toadies properly terrorise them?

Very, very important message to our American friends

Gordo, our well-known prime minister, stern but all-encompassing in his kindly Scottish wisdom, has explained to you trusting Americans why only he can redeem yours and the world's teetering financial systems.

I urge you to listen.

My message is simple. It is:

America awake! Gordon is among you! Only he can save you!

Be dazzled by his poll ratings! Be astounded by the fact that he has – and IS! – presiding over a mutiny in his Cabinet! Revel in his lying! Be dazed by his ineptitude! Celebrate his nastiness! Above all, be stunned by his country's level of debt – NONE OF IT ANYTHING TO DO WITH HIM AT ALL!

He is truly a colossus.

Quite a lot of his hair, even at the back, hardly sticks up at all. Even on his worst days, his trousers can't be more than six inches too long.

This is the man to follow.

If you doubt me, look at his wife. See! Little more than three stone overweight! Who needs Carla Bruni when you can have Sarah Brown? And she can use a microphone!

Gordo! Man of destiny!

Meanwhile in Burma

What a pointless experience ...

I hadn't really wanted to watch the great McNutter's 'speech of a lifetime' this afternoon. If nothing else, it was certain it would make zero difference to the inevitable fate of this hugely nasty man.

But I did nonetheless, the second half anyway.

What struck me most, amid the apparently spontaneous bursts of applause and the predictable claims that Labour (for which, in his own over-heated imagination, read G. Brown) had been responsible for every 'progressive' advance of the 20th century, was the claim that he, the Mighty McGordo McMadMan, was going to restore democracy to Burma.

This, admittedly, was mentioned only in passing, thrown off amid his other vast claims to immortality (rescuing the NHS, ending child poverty, re-defining the global banking system, etc).

But it was made nonetheless.

That McLoonyTunesGordo is currently the world's No. 1 tosser, lunatic, cretin goes without saying,

That, despite the best efforts of vast gangs of PR stylists (and God knows how much tax-payers' money), his suits always look as though they have been pinched from Howard Hughes's madder, drooling cousin and his hair cut by the loopy aunt everyone thought had been locked up years ago, is similarly beside the point. No one expects him to be anything than what he self-evidently is: a crazed, embarrassing obsessive.

That he has buggered Britain's finances in ways even Neil Kinnock couldn't have managed is no less a given.

But that he should now pose as the liberator of Burma, the stern champion of its oppressed peoples, the implacable enemy of its cruel government (socialist, by the way), the mighty defender of its human freedoms, the beetle-browed champion of its human liberties, is a great deal more than just preposterous.

It isn't just a huge, vast, immense joke. It is a giant-size affront, a grotesque parody, a laughable, sickening insult, a preening piece of nonsense, a revolting inversion of the truth.

For this one demented claim alone he deserves to be tormented for eternity.

The Burmese have been oppressed in ways we in the West can scarcely comprehend. And now, purely because he sees it as one, tiny, aid to his political survival, McBroon poses as their saviour, knowing full well there is nothing he can do to help them.

This is miles beyond shamelessness.

It is properly vile.

And this from the man who proclaims 'fairness'.

Is there a fate worse than death? I'd like to think so.

It would be no more than Brown deserved.

Let's not get excited ...

... but let's face facts.

Gordo is history, baco-foil, toasted to a crisp and beyond, washed up, gone, a tiny fragment, a footnote, an irrelevance.

Granted, he has as good as left us all bankrupt.

But I think we can take it as read that his 'legacy', so long sought, so pitifully delivered, so painfully endured, will be consigned to one of history's more obscure dustbins.

How very fitting.

Could The Daily Brute ...

... really be back?

He may be.

If only to celebrate the disintegration of Thuggo McGordo's vast and elaborate empire of inanity and corruption, as shot through with vacuous idiocy as it is inept and incompetent.

It goes without saying that McNutter is now definitively round the bend.

All that remains to be resolved is the precise moment of his final defeat.

My betting is this Friday, September 19.

I hope you will then all be able to join me in celebrating the end of the nastiest man ever to infect British politics.

He is – and always has been – properly loathsome.

Twats of the week

This is insane.

Demented, deranged, daft.

Listening

If, as we are now constantly told is the case by Gordo, his government is now 'listening', will it 'listen' to the overwhelming majority who want a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty/EU Constitution and grant a referendum?

I wish someone would put this question directly to McNutter.

David Cameron at PMQs, for example.

And one more thing. If inflation is 2.5%, how come, to quote another favourite government phrase of the moment, people are 'feeling the pinch'?

It gets better ...

This is seriously good news. And it comes, moreover, on a day of already seriously good news.

Looking a bit gloomy for McJonah.

One point that immediately leaps to mind is that if the judicial review does rule that the government must hold a referendum on the EU Constitution that, all jokes aside, can only mean curtains for Gordo. He could never survive such a set-back.

Imagine a referendum is held and, inevitably, rejects the Constitution by a vast majority. What was left of Gordo's threadbare authority would shrivel instantly. This being patently obvious, he would have to step down beforehand.

Still, this is only Round One. Long way to go yet.

What NuLab really means by 'listening'

Perhaps Gordo might like to consider adopting the Geoff 'Hearing-aid' Hoon technique at PMQs.

Downing Street: No news is good news

Struck, like so many others, by McJonah's failure to put in any media performances this morning, Heffalump Harriet wheeled out into the firing line in his place to explain why last night's local election result do not represent a precise indictment of Gordo's catastrophically inept premiership, it struck me it might be interesting to see what the No. 10 website had to say about the results.

And the answer, intriguingly, is nothing. Not a squeak. Not so much as a single word. It gives an interesting new meaning to the 'listening' the government is now so fond of.

You can read about what McNutter calls the 'real economic opportunities in the Middle East and a chance to build peace and prosperity across the region'. You read how Gordo has 'warned against a protectionist backlash' and of how 'hopeful' he is of the 'Darfur talks'. You can even see the flag of St George flying over No. 10 or 'watch footage of prime ministers from the past'.

But information of any kind on the electoral meltdown is . . . well, just not there.

Perhaps this means it didn't actually take place.

Funnily enough, there's nothing on the official Labour site either. Or on LabourHome.

Oh dear.

Who's lying?

Apologies for lack of posts. Circumstances beyond control, etc.

Yesterday at PMQs, asked quite reasonably in the light of Levy's claims that Gordo, self-professed mastermind of Labour's election victory in 2005, must have known about the loans that financed the campaign he so magnificently oversaw, Gordo, almost under his breath, could do no better than semi-mutter: 'I knew nothing about these loans'.

You can see the exchange here.

He is lying. This isn't a matter of half-truths, of shades of grey, of interpretation. What he said was a straightforward lie.

A 100%, copper-bottomed, card-carrying lie.

I can't prove this, of course. I don't have the papers, the e-mails or the evidence of the killer conversations. I wish I did.

But someone does. In fact, quite a lot of people do. Including Blair and his henchmen.

So here's a scenario. It's perfectly believable.

As Gordo lurches from catastrophe to catastrophe, Labour plummeting all the while, wiped out in London, flayed in the rest of country, the prospect of a calamitous defeat in the next General Election inescapable, 100-plus embittered Labour MPs certain to lose their seats, what do those who do know that Gordo was lying do?

They make clear to him they have the evidence that shows he lied. And then present him with two very simple choices.

Gordo either steps down on plausible grounds of ill health to allow a new leader to take over. Or the evidence of his lying is trickled out and he is destroyed for good, all credibility vapourised.

These sound like reasons for Gordo to be very scared. A watery retreat, instantly seen through, or complete humiliation.

Yet another triumph for the towering intellect that is the clunking fist.

Barmy beyond belief

Is this the No. 1 barmy news story of the year?

How can it not be?

It only begs the question whether Jonah McNutter Brown might like to give it a go, too, on behalf on the Kirk.

Only the biggest brains . . .

Picture a vast brain whirling at higher and higher speeds, neurons flashing faster and faster, connections sizzling and smoking, the whole not just on the verge of total seizure but perilously close to exploding. It's the only explanation I can come up with for this bizarre assertion yesterday at PMQs by Gordo McNutter:

Why does he [Cameron] not admit that as a result of our tax credits, which we opposed ...

Only Gordo can do this! Simultaneously propose and oppose a policy! There is nothing this giant among men cannot do!

The lady's not for turning

Gordo is though.

"I don't think I've been pushed around at all. I have never shirked from tough decisions.”

Ha! Ha! and Ha! again.

Has there ever been a more precise measure of the cowering, simpering bully than his convoluted back-track over the 10p tax rate?

Has there ever been a more precise example of just what Gordo means by 'conviction politics'?

You can understand the rush to buy his book on 'Courage'.

The Bottler on 'responsibility'

Gordon McNutter yesterday speaking – or possibly pleading – to the parliamentary Labour party:

"We can't have a Budget defeated. We have a responsibility to listen, to hear, to understand, but we also have a responsibility – all of us – to unite."

Which translated means that 'listening', 'hearing' and 'understanding' – or at any rate pretending to – are less important than party unity, which in this case means maintaining the Bottler in No. 10. That is all that counts.

So bugger the poor.

The great black hole of 2012

A Labour MP no less – note that: a Labour MP – one Don Touhig, a member of the Commons Public Accountants Committee - has called the budgeting of the 2012 games the "most catastrophic financial mismanagement in the history of the world".

The story, hardly news to those such as your humble Brute who have long been predicting that the games will be an unmitigated disaster, is here.

What is genuinely intriguing about this is why, having knowingly presented an essentially bogus budget in the first place, anyone in the government can still conceivably believe they are not now facing a financial horror show on an epic scale, one that will make the Millennium Dome seem a model of far-sighted and prudent planning, the whole of course played out in the full glare of global publicity.

If McNutter Gordo is still after a definition of the hideous new Britain he so gruesomely presides over, I suggest he might like to consider something along the lines of: When in a hole, keep on digging.

Unknown Labour MP to plead 'not guilty'

You really couldn't make it up.

It's Joe Orton gone barmy.

'The shock move comes over allegations he clambered over the bonnet of a parked van to board a city bus.'

Here are the breaking details.

Overheating Britain

On April 28 last year, the Independent printed an article by Michael McCarthy, then the paper's environment editor, under the title:

Overheating Britain: April temperatures break all records

Will this be the summer when Britain reaches 40°C and the effects of climate change are painfully brought home?

You can read it here.

It began with this statement:

'The possibility is growing that Britain in 2007 may experience a summer of unheard-of high temperatures, with the thermometer even reaching 40C, or 104F, a level never recorded in history.'

Now, as we all know, however freakishly warm last April was, the summer as a whole was anything but, as those affected by the floods in late July can testify only too well. This, of course, despite the fact that the Met. Office in January had predicted that 2007 was set to be the 'warmest on record', a fact faithfully reported by the BBC.

I write this as one of the grimmest, wettest and coldest Aprils unfolds, day after day of shivering temperatures and howling winds. And rain, Above all, lots and lots of rain. There is, moreover, if the forecasts are to be believed, no end in sight to this miserable weather.

I know it is not yet the end of the month but I have yet to read anything anywhere suggesting that these freakishly low temperatures are evidence that global warming is not happening, rather the opposite if anything.

Where is Michael McCarthy when you need him?

Spot the difference

Fabulous prizes on offer for the Daily Brute quiz!

Clues:
Top picture: Britain's minister for families. Bottom picture (no pun intended): Italy's minister for families.
Top picture: Smug git, thug and and twat. Bottom picture: twat.

Extra clue: Take no notice of the lady in black with the knitting.

How to be like a haggis ...

... according to Lord Desai, that is.

Now it's meltdown

For Mr Dreary to lay into Gordo is ... well, astounding.

This is a government disintegration without parallel.

Gordo is toast.

There can surely be no way back from this degree of disruption.

Astounding.

Telling the truth

This from McLoonyNutter yesterday:

'I've worked with Tony for years and we are very good friends.'

Why does he come out with such nonsense? It is a lie. Pure and simple. Furthermore, everyone knows it.

There is a sense that, for the Bottler, merely asserting an obvious untruth makes it true. He believes it. Therefore it is so.

It is a precise measure of why he is doomed.

Why Gordo is never wrong

There is a seriously bizarre cast of mind – manifested in its most extreme form by Jeffery Archer and Heather Mills, to take only two examples – in which fantasy dislodges every trace of truth and invented events are presented as fact. Reality is not so much distorted as obliterated, subsumed beneath the speaker's deluded, over-arching ego.

If I can't pretend to understand the convoluted psychological circumstances that impel the likes of these poor, sad sods to come up with such obvious lies, I can at least note them.

And now here, courtesy of the Crown Blogspot, we have another example, McNutter Gordo MadPerson claiming that his selling off of so much of Britain's gold reserves at an historically low price was the fault of the Tories.

What pounds through what passes for his higher brain functions that cannot allow him ever to admit to having been wrong? What deranged misapprehensions make him certain that he is always right? Why are failures always someone else's fault?

There is, properly, something profoundly disturbed at work here.

It prompts two obvious questions. One, just what was going on in that odd manse of his when he was growing up? Two, will his brain actually blow up – smoke, steam, flames, limbs flung outwards, etc, gore and nastiness galore – when the contradiction between what he must believe and what is actually happening finally becomes inescapable.

Stand well clear. It promises to be spectacular.

He is, in short, one seriously fucked up human being.

Shuffling around

There has been a great deal of talk lately of how McNutter hopes to regain the political momentum by a re-shuffle. Here is the Coffee House, for example.

I have never understood how these periodic and pointless exercises work. And in this case it seems particularly senseless. One bunch of useless tossers chucked out and a second bunch of even more useless ones brought in. How can this possibly help?

For one thing, the McLoony cabinet has only been in business for 10 months. What is the sense of chopping and changing it so soon? It can only cause disruption. For another, presumably those appointed in the first place by Jonah Gordo were considered the best men and women for their jobs at the time. So does moving them around mean that they weren't in fact any good? That McGordo appointed the wrong people? That he made a mistake?

Even more to the point, does anyone seriously imagine a reshuffle is going in some magical fashion to help transform Gordo from a spectacularly inept thug into an all-wise statesman? Self-evidently not. It will, rightly, be seen as a desperate and futile attempt to revive his political fortunes.

In other words, a total waste of time.

It would interesting, too, to know how much these exercises, entirely party political, cost.

In short, the only reshuffle that could be of any conceivable use would be if the Barmy Bottler were to reshuffle himself off into the distance. And there is not much chance of that, needless to say.

The mighty McIlvanney

If I could just once produce a sentence as exactly perfect as this, I would, I promise, die happy. This from the sumptuously wonderful Hugh McIlvanney in today's Sunday Times:

Perhaps the only adequate way to convey the labyrinthine magnificence of the mess the rulers of English rugby have made of implementing their determination to give Martin Johnson total control of the national team is to say that it threatens to outclass anything produced by the Football Association at the zenith of their capacity for dithering ineptitude.

You can feast on the rest of his column here.

Balls

It is an exact measure of the bizarre dislocation from reality that characterizes not just Jonah McGordo but the vile Balls that either could seriously imagine the latter not just as leader of the Labour party but as prime minister.

Balls has the electoral appeal of a turd for the simple reason that, contrary to his own heroic view of himself, he is near universally loathed. It is instantly obvious even to the only semi-sentient that he is properly nasty.

So how appropriate that the ever-barmier Bottler sees him as his natural successor.

Bullseye from Parris

The Bottler precisely skewered today in the Times by Parris.

That Gordo is a dead man walking, certain to be forced out of Downing Street by a party horrified at the electoral humiliation he is so magnificently engineering on its behalf, goes without saying.

But it doesn't mean we shouldn't extract every ounce of malicious pleasure at the prospect of the utter ruin of 'the cleverest prime minister in living memory'.

Still, at least he will be able to boast that he never lost an election as leader.

Balls vs Straw: seconds out

This made my day.

Poor, poor Polly

Here she is writing in today's Guardian, her subject, as ever, Gordo; her tone, for the first time, dismayed.

'The mystery of this premiership deepens with every day,' she writes, 'perplexing some who thought they knew Brown best,' the 'some' quoted here presumably being Polly herself.

She continues:

'Most dismayed are those who toiled for him for 10 long years, drinking midnight toasts to the king over the water, plotting and obstructing, singing the old Gordon-is-my-darling songs, and telling any of us who would listen that when the bonnie prince sails home, the egregious sins of opportunistic unprincipled Blairism would be expunged. But now the prince is here, his leadership is a pale shadow of what they promised. Inept generalship looks in danger of leading the Labour clans towards their Culloden - and they can see it coming.'

Perhaps for the 'dismayed' Polly, portraying the Bottler as the self-aggrandizing, self-pitying drunk that was Bonny Prince Charlie is the only way she can come to terms with the 'pale shadow' of Gordo's leadership and his 'inept generalship'.

She attempts a rally of sorts, however, claiming Gordo 'is certainly the cleverest prime minister in living memory,' thus booting Harold Wilson off the top spot of the bigger brains rostrum. But the tone is downbeat, depressed, 'dismayed' indeed throughout.

'The Wizard of Oz stands exposed, the emperor has no clothes, the box of secrets is empty,' she sobs ... 'Even some erstwhile closest confederates are at a loss - and many feel cheated.' Is that you again, Polly?

Thus even the faithful Polly turns against the Bottler. Happy, happy days.

And needless to say, the comments are near universally anti Gordo.

Oh dear.

Peking or bust

Poor old Gordo has passed into the realms of the half-life. It is surely the only explanation.

Even the simplest decision now seems to involve him in a series of (Gordian?) knots and tangles from which, squirming and twisting, tie and hair askew, grin resolutely forced, lower lip juddering uncontrollably, he invariably extracts the worst of every possible world.

And the faster he commands the Downing St. spin machine to turn, creaking, groaning and heaving, the revs visibly in the red zone, threatening at any moment to expire in a spectacular explosion, parts flung outward from its disintegrating centre, the more, absurdly, preposterously, laughably, he pins his dwindling hopes on it.

Never has the clunking fist been more clunking.

His latest 'sophistry' that attending the Bejiing Olympic 'ceremonies' – of which there are precisely two, please note: the opening ceremony and the closing ceremony – always made clear he would only be at one – the closing ceremony – would shame a 10 year old. And he expects people to take this seriously?

There is a silver lining, however. Two actually. First, that if Jonah McNutterBrown is not present at the start of the Olympics, those British athletes who might otherwise have feared his inevitable curse would mean only a succession of British disasters, injuries, falls and other ignominies have at least been spared.

Two, that if he is only at the closing of the games, he can only inadvertently set off the sprinkler system at the Olympic stadium – more probably set the whole thing on fire, burning it to the ground – when it is too late to matter. The Chinese may be breathing signs of relief already.

Nothing up top?

Goodness, I must stop going on about this.

Nonetheless, just one final thought – I promise – re the perfumed Rachel S. in the Telegraph today and the implosion of Gordo's loony dreams. She quotes Rory Bremner (good on Geoff Boycott, a lot less reliable on NuLab). She writes:

As Rory Bremner, who used to be a fan, put it yesterday: "It's like having an uncle who's been building something in the shed at the bottom of the garden for 10 years… you look through the window and there's nothing there."

On the contrary, there is only too much there, the precise product of Gordo's 10 years of resentful brooding and late-night slobbering as he plotted his vengeful triumph.

What there is is a huge, hulking and very angry out-of-control Frankenstein-type monster (looks very much like Ed Balls, in fact) that is about to burst out of the shed and indiscriminately lurch about, smashing through buildings and swatting aside anyone unfortunate enough to be in its way.

Then, primitive wiring already aflame, limbs lumbering and pressing what passes for its hand to its short-circuiting brain, mumbling and groaning 'My brain hurts! My brain hurts!', it will explode ...

KABOOOM!

... taking a great many innocents with it.

Best of British, Gordo!

Someone's lying

Now here's a funny old thing.

La belle Rachel S. wrote this morning in the Telegraph (see post below) that she was 'reliably informed' that Balls and Straw had as good as squared up to each other, Prescott-style, during a Cabinet row over who was 'responsible' for 'youth crime'. (This doesn't mean, or at least I think it doesn't, that there is a government department charged with promoting youth crime, at any rate not yet, and that each was seeking to take the credit for it, or more probably to deny the other credit for it.)

On the other hand, the dinky Ben Brogan of the Mail has since written that the claim has been comprehensively denied by No. 10, who, upholding the highest of the Civil Service's high-minded, disinterested standards, have dismissed it as 'total b******s'. Brogan asserts that by 'Westminster standards' – code for standards not out of place in most sewers – this amounts to 'a fairly comprehensive denial'. Meaning Rachel's dead wrong. She's been sold a pup.

Just how 'reliably' Sylvester was 'informed' is impossible to say.

Just how impartial the No. 10 press office is is much easier to say.

So was Sylvester being led up the garden path? If so, by whom? And why? Labour 'insiders' bent on doing down Gordo? Surely not!

Or is No. 10 simply hoping to bluff this one out (code for 'lying')?

Place your bets.

Rachel Sylvester repenteth

Evidently tired of being nobbled by No 10, the fragrant Rachel S, writing in today's Telegraph, lays into Gordo with real and welcome venom.

Particularly interesting is her claim of a bust-up between Jack Straw and the repellent Balls in a Cabinet meeting no less, after which Straw claimed 'he had never been spoken to so rudely by a colleague in public and that he was not going to put up with it'. Straw 'threatened to punch Ed Balls'.

To say it rings true is an understatement. Being deliberately offensive is a calculated element of Balls's plan to take over the Labour party before having himself proclaimed world leader. It is needless to say one lifted wholesale from his (temporary) boss.

Welcome back Rachel.

Cold is the new hot

The mighty Mr Eugenides has discovered a magnificent quote from the Met Office which repeats, yet again, the intriguing belief that lower temperatures mean the Earth is getting hotter.

You can read him here.

It's clear that even were we all to be encased in ice thousands of feet thick while woolly mammoths and sabre-tooth tigers raged around the snowy wastes, for your average eco-nutter the Earth would still be well on the way to be being turned into a man-made crisp.

Think how much trouble Capt. Scott could have saved himself if only had brought his bathers to the South Pole. Silly fellow.

Politics and sport

The scenes yesterday in London as the Olympic torch was hustled through the streets shielded by what looked like half the capital's police and a gang of Chinese heavies were astonishing, a precise comment on the semi-police state Britain has been reduced to under Blair and Brown.

Forget the talk about sport. This was an explicitly political event, designed both to cosy up to the Chinese and to celebrate what the Labour party, more out of touch than ever, still hasn't realised will be a disaster entirely of its own making, to wit the 2012 games.

That Gordo somehow thought he had not been contaminated by these sordid scenes because he had not touched the torch himself was utterly pathetic.

Simon Jenkins sums it all up precisely here.

Brown and the great EU sell-out

This from the Coffee House should plastered over the front of every newspaper in Britain and lead every news bulletin.

It is a precise flaying of Brown's lying over the EU Constitution/Treaty.

In the short term, it will be his devastating combination of economic mismanagement and cack-handed deviousness that does for him.

But in the longer term, I am sure that his great sell-out over Europe, an outrage of staggering proportions, will be what finally seals his reputation as Britain's worst – as well as nastiest – prime minister, the man who made Harold Wilson seem a paragon of principle.

Gerry Sutcliffe: new brain needed

'My comments do not accurately reflect my views.'

Thus a member of Gordo's dysfunctional government of all the talents speaks.

Summed it up exactly, I'd say.

Headline of genius

From the BBC, 'Global warming dips this year'.

Anyone spot the logic gap?

The temperature 'dips' yet it still constitutes global warming. In other words, as the world gets colder, it heats up.

I am not sure I get this one.

Promoting Cretins

What is this preposterous Progressive Governance Summit? Why does it have such a dainty, twinkle-toes, listhping name? Why 'governance'? What is wrong with 'government'? And can even the most deluded of its delegates really believe it is 'promoting prosperity'? (Note hyper-cool alliteration). 'Promoting expense claims' is surely nearer the mark, though I would settle for 'promoting self-importance'.

Best of all, however, is that it instantly fell victim to the Curse of Gordo in coming up with a barely disguised swastika as its logo. Nobody doing the vetting noticed this? It beggars belief. We are permanently assured that Gordo's new Mr Big Cheese, Stephen Carter, is a PR big-shot of genius. I can understand Gordo – he is blind in one eye, after all – not spotting it, however 'towering' his vast intellect. But Carter?

And how much did it cost? I think I might ask for my money back.

Bugger off Balls

Ed Balls's attempts to deflect criticism over his department's numerous, near limitless, shortcomings by seizing on the charges levied, or attempted to be levied, by a tiny handful of 'faith schools', as we now have to call them, on parents of prospective parents is an exact measure of the nastiest instincts of this endlessly repellent man. And this odious bully seriously believes he can be PM?

Every classic NuLab smear technique is pressed into action. 100,000 children are denied their first choice of secondary school? Instant agenda switch required, new victim urgently sought. Answer: put on smarmy, fake concerned voice and lie.

It's called 'seizing the agenda'.

You'd laugh if it wasn't so unbearably depressing.

Education, education, education?

If only.

Nastiness, nastiness, nastiness is the reality.

And fuck the schools, fuck the children.

So what?

Climate change 'underplayed'

This lot are nutters.

Clearly, some people will only be satisfied with a return to the Stone Age. Or, better still, the elimination of all humans.

Harman at PMQs: Not many dead

There's been much chit-chat across the blogosphere about Fatty Harman's performance at PMQs today. The consensus is that, far from have been rent to shreds as had been widely predicted, she more than defended her corner.

Cuddly Iain Dale called it 'a high score draw'. The Spectator's Coffee House was equally flattering. 'Harman holds her own at PMQs', it asserted. Even Guido weighed in on Harman's side, declaring that 'she gave as good as she got.'

They key here, not yet picked up by any commentator so far as I know, is not just that she did better than expected – which is far from saying that she shone - but that, compared to Gordo, she appeared almost human. And that, I strongly suspect, is Gordo's No. 1 big problem as he struggles to assert himself as the 'towering' political figure he so obviously considers himself to be.

The miswired, ranting, wierdo Gordo was replaced by someone you could almost identify as a human being. True, she ducked all the hard questions about tax and the economy. Likewise, she dug herself a couple of holes, in particular defending a decision by NICE not to approve a certain drug by saying that NICE's decisions were based on 'evidence-based ... er ... er... '. Evidence, Harriet? Even she recognised the folly of that. So, findings, maybe? Results? Conclusions? She settled in the end, stumblingly, for 'process'.

In much the same way, her repartee gave every sign of having been learned by rote. Her delivery was wooden at best. Words were stumbled over. She consistently stuttered. There was a significant sense that, however well briefed, at key moments her notes swam before her eyes, tantalisingly, tauntingly beyond her semi-panicked reach. She was, in short, no natural, let alone galvanising, Commons performer.

But at least it looked as though a sentient human being was speaking.

So is she, in short, a serious contender as the next leader of the Labour party? Is she a figure around which an increasingly demoralised Labour party can assemble? Even more to the point, will Gordo now accordingly do his best to demote her?

Admittedly, the competition to replace Gordo is hardly strong. But compared to the misfits and creeps who cluster round him (and the Cabinet table) she surely makes a strong case.

On the whole, bad news for the great Scottish odd-ball, the 'world leader' currently mixing it in Bucharest with his fellow NATO big-wigs.

Harriet less-than-bullet-proof Harman

Not the least amusing aspect of Harriet Harman's bizarre PR blunder in waddling around the streets of Peckham in the company of the police in a bullet-proof jacket – the kind of blunder you can be sure what never have happened in the happy days of Alastair Campbell – is her incoherent and batty defence of herself on the Today programme. I am not sure I have ever heard any government minister make a more staggering fool of themselves.

You can listen to it here.

Note her preposterous claim that in printing the picture the Daily Mail was guilty of malice, this despite the fact that the picture was already on her own website, itself a joyful confection of lies and empty-headed propaganda. Here it is in fact.

Note also the progressive spelling of 'presents' for 'presence' in the second paragraph.

Jolly well done Harriet!

Looking forward to PMQs tomorrow?

UPDATE: Is Harriet watching me? The misspelling of 'presence' on her wonderfully witty blog has now been corrected.

Squeals, pouts and plots

Whatever the obvious inadequacies of Dave's Tory party, it is impossible not to contemplate the current chaos, back-stabbing and panic in the ranks of the Labour party without a profound sense of satisfaction. This is not because I welcome a Tory government, or at least not unless Dave gets back to proper Conservative principles – above all setting people free, rewarding enterprise, cutting taxes and detonating the vast, bloated, useless monster government at every level has become. But to see the panic in the Labour ranks is nonetheless a rare pleasure.

First, because the great, brooding, scheming Gordo has been left utterly high and dry. It isn't merely because his claims to economic competence have been exposed, 'our greatest-ever chancellor' revealed as little better than a bullying shyster, a trail of shattered debris in his blundering wake. It is that his obvious personal shortcomings have been so starkly highlighted.

Can anyone doubt that this seriously disturbed, deeply unhappy man is wholly unfitted to be prime minister? Completely without charm, instinctively devious and unprincipled almost as a matter of principle, his laughable attempts to project himself as the grave and wise father of the nation, guided by his fabled moral compass, instantly highlight his every shortcoming. His paralysing horror that he has become an object of scorn, a worthy rival to Anthony Eden not just as modern Britain's most inept prime minister but, potentially, its most short lived, informs his every action. He MUST succeed, he MUST be great, he MUST be wise. Thus he prowls the corridors of Downing Street, grinding his teeth to stubs, obsessively biting his fingernails raw, his tie askew, his eyes deader by the day, his smile ever more bogus, his fate ever more inexorable.

I defy anyone not to take pleasure.

But it gets better.

There is no surer sign of Brown's warped world view than the gang of panting, power-seeking inadequates he has surrounded himself with. To begin with of course, their role was not just to reinforce Gordo's belief that he had been monstrously dealt with by the slime-ball Blair but to undermine Blair in every way they could. It was in-fighting of the nastiest kind, justified by their certainty than when they had, inevitably, done down the man who had won three elections in a row, their own time would come. And how they would then bask in the sun. How they would exercise their new power. How smug would they then feel, how certain of their own invincibility, their vast importance, their brilliant political calculation, their inevitable triumph.

The great election that wasn't was to have been their finest moment, the Tories consigned to electoral oblivion, their own, unstoppable rise emphatically confirmed. Days of destiny indeed.

The catastrophic collapse of Brown's government since his fateful decision not to hold this election, hands hardly shaking at all as he gravely announced one of the most ignominious climb-downs of recent times, a mighty underlining of the cowardice that comprises his core and governs his every decision, has precipitated the most astonishing disintegration of any governing party in modern history. An 11-point lead has been transformed into a 15-point deficit, a 26-point reversal of electoral fortune without precedent. And all in the space of six months.

It isn't just Gordo whose nerve is shot. It those of all the nasty, creeping, scheming non-entities who clung to him. Balls of course is the most conspicuous. But there are plenty of others who, their complacent certainty of electoral victory swept aside, suddenly have no idea where to turn. This was never in their script. It was never supposed to happen.

The result, predictably and delightfully, is a burst of properly nasty in-fighting. Gordo, panicked but clueless, brings in outsiders. The hard-core Gordo camp are suddenly under threat. They revert, instantly, to type. Briefings, counter-briefings, leaks and counter-leaks proliferate. Hints, innuendoes and snears are suddenly the order of the day.

Meanwhile, Gordo, while not lying about 'Britishness' (a concept curiously inconspicuous in any of his earlier political pronouncements), the Lisbon Treaty and the rate of inflation, is also confronted by an economic crisis he is wholly unable to deal with other than by blaming it on everyone else. He blusters, he strikes attitudes, he commands, he splutters and he asserts. And all the while he plummets in the polls. In short, a man revealed for what he actually is: lost, confused, out of control.

Two final points. How long before Gordo implodes, driven beyond the point of sanity by the realisation that he is, after all, Anthony Eden reborn and destined for a similarly humiliating end? And which now is the nasty party?

Charlotte Green: Important announcement

Oh, Charlotte. I think I am in love.

You can hear her here.

God, I wish I'd heard this live.

The ravishing Carla Bruni

I was going to post a side-by-side compare-and-contrast series of images of Sarah Brown and Carla Bruni. But then I thought it just wouldn't be fair. All the nude pictures I have of Mrs Brown really aren't suitable for publication on a blog of such high moral tone. So instead, here, simply, is a picture of the delectable Carla.

Warning: there may be others to come ...

Regulatory reform Mk. 2

There is something properly odd about this attempt to re-introduce what only two years ago was rapidly identified as a profoundly and dangerously illiberal measure and thrown out by even as supine a body as the Commons. So much so that it suggests the work of someone either terminally stupid or suffering from a kind of electoral death wish.

If it didn't get through two years ago when NuLab still had a healthy lead in the polls, how does Gordo imagine he get away with it now with the Conservatives as much as 16 points ahead and his own ratings heading towards single figures?

Attempting to sneak this act through will only further confirm the widespread and already perhaps fatally damaging view of him as inherently untrustworthy, inherently dishonest and strategically cack-handed. Further, more damagingly still, it must raise the question of whether his sense of 'entitlement' is not coming perilously close to active derangement. Could he, seriously, be already entertaining the possibility that the 'national interest' will demand the cancellation of the next election, something this act would allow him to ordain?

He is clearly either desperate – or mad.

My vote is firmly on the latter.

Regulatory reform: the bastards are at it again

The blogosphere is seething with stories about yet another shameless attempt by the government to grant itself unlimited powers. Read about it here, here and here. And that's just for starters.

The Daily Brute is delighted to throw the weight of his immense organ behind the campaign to highlight just how pernicious, nasty, stupid and grasping Gordo's government of all the talents really is.

The word should indeed be spread.

Gordon runs away – again

This story in The Times is exceedingly revealing.

It highlights how, having come to the conclusion that Ken Livingstone has no chance of being re-elected mayor of London, he, Gordo, plans to be in the United States at the time of the vote.

He really is extraordinary. Failures are always someone's else's fault, successes exclusively his. He can never be seen to be wrong, or to have made a mistake. He is always right. Always.

I tell you, there must have been something bloody odd happening in that old manse of his up in Bonny Scotland. One fucked-up childhood.

Why I love the EU

Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.

Read about it here.

Authentically Brown

This appeared in yesterday's Observer. It was written by Andrew Rawnsley. Self-evidently, it reflects an early stage in Downing Street's efforts to regain the high ground to halt the catastrophic hemorrhage Brown has engineered in Labour's electoral prospects. It is, in short, an inside job.

Here is the penultimate paragraph:


The other mildly encouraging development for Labour since the New Year is that Gordon Brown has found an overarching theme on which to hang his policies. The unlocking of talent as a narrative has the advantages of meshing with Labour values and being potentially appealing to both affluent and poorer voters. And the Prime Minister clearly believes in it. This is not just a presentational construct. It is authentically Brown.

Can anyone read this without laughing? Is this seriously the best the 'new' Downing Street can come up with?

The 'overarching theme' – note use of meaningless, aspirational phrase – consists of an 'unlocking of talent as a narrative ... meshing with Labour values' – note use of further vacuous phrase – the whole amounting to ... what? Nothing is specified. There isn't even the coyest hint of what it might mean in practice.

You can read and re-read this paragraph as many times as you like. You can read it standing on your head. You can squint at it from behind the sofa. You can sneak up at it and try to take it by surprise. You can read it to your cat. You can ask your cat to read it to you. You can try it out on your goldfish. You can stand outside and declaim it to the skies.

And it will always amount to exactly the same. To wit, nothing, diddly squat, nada.

It is noise born of a moral compass spinning out of control, inhuman smile in place, awkwardly expensive tie instantly skewiff, hairdo rather more obviously so, desperately seeking to wrench the machine back on course.

It is only too authentically Brown.

Official: cold weather caused by global warming

I have been looking for ages for a definitive statement that apparently abnormally cold weather is the result of global warming. And now, thanks to Mark Wadsworth, I have found it.

Thus, this magnificently deranged claim in the Hong Kong Standard:

'As Hong Kong shivers through its second-longest cold spell since 1885, scientists point to global warming to explain the abnormal cold weather phenomenon worldwide.'

Can we now look forward to volcanoes freezing and glaciers catching fire? I do hope so.

In Which We Serve . . .

. . . was on the telly – again – this afternoon. So of course I watched it. For perhaps the 20th time.

And as per bloody usual I blubbed more or less throughout.

Funny thing is that even though it's my own childhood I'm mourning, even manly tears were frowned on then.

They fall much more easily now.

He is mad

This is from today's Telegraph:

But the Prime Minister will only allow Government MPs opposed to the [embryo] bill to vote against the parts they have a moral or ethical objection to if it does not lead to its defeat in the House of Commons, the BBC said.

In other words, to allow Gordo to pretend he is responding to their moral and/or religious objections provided he still gets his way. I guarantee he will subsequently claim this was a 'free' vote.

Another pig-ignorant and nasty socialist

I have been torn between posting about Gordo's belated decision, born of electoral desperation, to add his support to the 'inspirational' Ken Livingstone, a man he clearly despises, in the May 1 elections for London mayor, and highlighting the grotesque idiocy of a man called Bill Greenshields, president of the National Union of 'Teachers', who has called for private schools to be, in effect, nationalised and brought within the state sector on the basis that 'then we would soon see some urgent improvements in our state system'.

On the whole, Greenshields wins. Just. You can read about this card-carrying moron here.

But I think there will be plenty more about the Bottler's horrified realisation that his own political life – and never forget: clinging to office is all, repeat all, that matters to him – depends at least in part on as bitter an enemy as Livingstone remaining in power.

But I wonder also if it hasn't occurred to Ken that endorsement by Gordo at the moment is akin to an electoral death sentence.

This week's stupidest member of Gordo's government

The competition is naturally keen.

As ever, I am tempted to make a joint award to every Labour MP, all of them (until they stab him in the back) fawningly supporting Gordo as well as self-evidently stupid (because why else would they have they joined the Labour Party in the first place?), and, in the time-honoured traditions of NuLabour, relentlessly greedy (aka hypocritical, smug, fake and deceitful).

Nonetheless, after due deliberation, this week's award goes to 'Jim' Knight, the schools minister, a man who apparently sees nothing wrong in classes of 70.

Except that everything he says on the subject is a lie. And he knows it.

But his grotesque claims suit the short-term interests of his boss, Ed Balls, and, inevitably, those of Balls's boss, the grimly barmy Gordo.

So breathtaking a surrender of principal by Jim Knight in the interests of his career can only be applauded.

It is always reassuring to know that every higher goal will always be sacrificed in the cause of personal advancement, however temporary.

What's so great about gold?

Can someone tell me, please? In these uncertain times, there has been a striking move back to owning gold as the only certain investment– and jolly well done Mr McBroon, Britain's greatest-ever chancellor (until Ed So What, of course), for selling off so much of ours!

Thus, banks in turmoil, stock markets disintegrating, confidence plummeting, recession apparently looming, billions being lost daily around the globe ... and people turn to gold? Because it is the only safe, the only certain option? Because it always holds its value?

Why? I have never understood this. It is just a metal. It has no inherent value. You can't eat it. In fact, you can't do anything with it except put it in vaults with VERY big steel bars. Or make jewellery out of it. This hardly suggests it might be the bedrock of a global financial system, the underpinning of economies across the world, the investment of last resort.

True, it's quite rare. True, it also doesn't tarnish: you can bury in your garden, chuck into the sea or hide it under you mattress and it will always emerge with its dull gleam intact. There is also the matter of what Goldfinger called its 'glorious heaviness'. But then lead is heavy, too. So is concrete. I am not aware of the globe's bigger financial brains rushing to stock up on paving slabs as an investment of last resort.

Christ, if you want 'heavy', to say nothing of dense, take a look at Jackie Baillie (conveniently located immediately below this post). You could hardly get much heavier than her mighty frame. Is she supposed to become a unit of universal global worth (though if she is, I would seriously suggest not hiding any gold you might be hoarding under any bed in which she is sleeping – unless that is your taste is for gold leaf ... and your floors are reinforced).

It's not even as though gold has always been thought valuable. The Incas considered it purely decorative, though admittedly this may be because they had so much of it. They assumed the conquistadores' fanatical determination to get their hands on theirs was because they wanted it as food.

Nonetheless, why should these lumps of useless, inert metal invariably be believed to have such value?

Is this any way for grown-ups to behave?

Is this the most revolting woman in the world?

I know this is old stuff but every once in a while I like to remind myself of just how unutterably disgusting, dishonest, patronising, repellent and repulsive the Scottish Labour 'party' is by watching it.

Well, I say watching it but normally I can only bear myself to see about 30 seconds' worth before running, screaming, out of the room.

My sanity can only take so much.

Baillie is also incredibly ugly, of course. And very, very, very fat.

Am I going mad?

I am still not sure if I have merely imagined this story or if, as it appears to be, it genuinely is in the Telegraph.

Can anyone help?

Nuts

Perusing, as is my well-known wont, a plastic container of Tesco's NEW! Genuine American Mustard, I discovered the following on the back:

Allergy advice
Contains mustard
Recipe: No nuts
Ingredients: Cannot guarantee nut free
Factory: Product made in nut-free area, but nuts used elsewhere

Interesting, no?

Blog advice
This post may, or may not, have been written under the influence of nuts after eating mustard which may, or may not, have contained mustard and/or nuts. I cannot guarantee if any other nuts or mustard were being used and/or eaten elsewhere.

Bullseye from Jenkins

I know he is a bit on the pink side, but Simon Jenkins has hit top form in today's Guardian, ripping into the government's endless stupidity, incompetence and dishonesty. Read it here. A palpable hit, dead centre.

Then compare and contrast with this in the same edition from 'Johnathan' Freedland in praise of Ken Livingstone, congratulated by Freedland for introducing 'an era of socially progressive attitudes', a phrase as meaningless as it condescending and stupid.

Fuck off, Freedland.

No soft landing

I am haunted by an image, highlighted here by the consistently remarkable Wat Tyler of Burning Our Money, of the British economy as Wile E. Coyote in mid-air having just run off a cliff and not yet quite realising that in about a second, however fast he pounds his legs round and round, all that will be left of him will be a couple of plummeting vertical lines. Thereafter, there will be no more than a distant cloud of pulverised and silent dust on the canyon floor thousands of feet below.

It is a brilliant image, Gordo's devious ineptitude, hubris, conceit and deceit precisely summed up and skewered.

When I first read it, I only thought it funny.

Now I find it only properly frightening.

Because there's a catch. It isn't just the Bottler, 'our greatest-ever chancellor', freeze-frozen in that mid-air split-second of horrified doom.

It's the whole country.

Civil Serf trapped in Stasi swoop

I am only partly joking. Here's the story.

Consider this:

"A source in the DWP said it was an extraordinary outlay of resources as the team was told to clear their desks of everything except their hunt for Civil Serf."

Criticism is not allowed.

Balls

It seems positively redundant to say that Ed Balls is repulsive. I think we can all take this as read. Ditto that he is shifty, toadying and a liar.

But what I find truly astounding about this deeply unpleasant man is that he seems to believe entirely sincerely a) that he is enormously clever when he is merely devious; b) that he is a credible contender for PM.

That said, it is no coincidence that Gordo, in the manner of a medieval monarch, should have as good as anointed him as his successor.

Both inhabit a curious, semi-human realm, as notable for its utter lack of charm as for its instinctive dishonesty and inexplicable self-regard.

That they seriously entertain the prospect of the repellent Balls as PM says all you need to know about these two very strange and nasty men.

Tennis Totty

Lady Jane, who I revere and adore in equal measure, has welcomed me back but warned me off more of what she calls Tennis Totty.

It wounds me more than I can say. But I must stay true to Ana, the Serbian light of my benighted life, the six-foot sizzler only the most stony-hearted could not worship, the goddess of the first serve, she of the mighty Balkan thigh.

So here she is again.

Note super-strength elastic round under-skirt garment, here being tested to destruction.

Whang this one up your British bum, Brown

The instant Gordo started going on about Britishness last summer, adopting his most special I-am-being-very-serious-because-I-am-such-a-deep-thinker frown and tone of voice, it was obvious bollocks. From first to last.

Here we had/have a Labour prime minister urgently seeking to project himself as a statesman and man of gravitas who was also:

a) Unelected as prime minister

b) Scottish

c) Near universally loathed across much of England

At the same time, the SNP had just ended 50-plus years of Labour control in Scotland.

There was also the inconvenient matter of the West Lothian question.

Oooh, thinks Brown. This could be tricky.

Dung! Light bulb goes off in said Scottish head! Brilliant idea coming from master political strategist (because he is, you know – or at least so he has to persuade himself: after all, he hadn't just been our greatest-ever chancellor, he was now PM, the biggest of the big beasts)! Stand by!

The answer? BRITAIN!

Worked at Rorke's Drift, after all. Worked in two world wars as well. Think about Adam Smith! Think about the Queen Mum! Billy Bremner! Billy Conolly! Sean Connery!

We need a Britishness Day! We need to swear an oath of allegiance to the Queen, to sing the national anthem, to have children clutching their little hearts with their little fists, to allow a manly tear to slide down our cheeks as we contemplate our great and glorious nation and, of course, our great and glorious leader.

It is pathetic. It is laughable. It is grotesque.

Has there ever been a more transparently self-serving or stupid idea? A more obvious attempt to occupy the apparent moral high ground precisely so as to gain a narrow political advantage?

This is Gordo all over, the clunking fist at his most clunkingly cretinous.

And amazingly, I think he seriously believes no one recognises what he is up to.

It is stupidity and sanctimoniousness on a gargantuan scale.

Legitimate Tangent

With all the fuss and excitement about the sudden disappearance – more than a little Stalinist, on the whole – of the Civil Serf, whose blog I regret I never read, there is another mole burrowing away in the heart of Whitehall who in my view has been unjustly overlooked. You will find him here.

This is Legitimate Tangent, an occasional blogger admittedly (though who am I to complain?), but wonderful.

For an insight into the sclerotic absurdities and wanton waste of government, it is hard to beat, a profoundly depressing commentary on the utter uselessness of the tossers and twats who rule us.

That said, if he gets the exposure he so clearly deserves, no doubt he, too, will suddenly disappear. Grim stuff.

Ohh! Blogging again?

I am not sure that earthquakes, tidal waves and tornadoes will necessarily follow – or even that Guido and Iain Dale will give up in instant despair, hurling themselves over cliffs, sobbing all the while – but there is a chance that The Daily Brute, more brutish than ever, will be back among you in a week or so.

If so, Gordo will be excoriated, Balls destroyed, Blears haunted, Harman tracked to her inevitable demise and both Milibands (to say nothing of the repellent Alexanders, bro and sis), tormented to destruction. (There will be no need to bother with Darling, his being dead meat already.)

Well, maybe.

On the other hand, maybe not.

On the other, other hand ...

I have hopes ...

We shall see.

Blog temporarily suspended

It pains me but The Daily Brute, much like Newmania, is officially now a non-blog.

I don't have the time – and crucially I am also not sure I have the desire – to keep blogging.

Still, if inspiration and means strike again, I may yet be back to torment and illuminate.

Rest assured that, should I burst back into your lives again, the Bottler will remain in my sights.

I'd also quite like to be around to pronounce a final word or two on his inevitable demise.

But for the moment ... well, that's it.

Au revoir.

Where's Gordo?

Will the Bottler, our greatest-ever chancellor, now make any comment on the nationalisation of Northern Rock?

Here's a prediction.

No.

Incidentally, I wonder what he would have to say to what Anatole Kaletsky in The Times calls a financial and political disaster of almost unimaginable proportions?

Je reviens!

Yup, here we go again!

Cue trumpets, cue drum roll! Cue spotlights, expectation and sudden intake of breath all round. Cue, in fact, amazement.

The Daily Brute is back!

Well, sort of.

I know I have been missing of late. Oh! Where were those instant, cruel lacerations of the Bottler and his government of none of the talents? Where were those incisive highlights of his and their utter ineptitude? Where were those piercing insights into his and their hopeless failings? Where, more particularly, were those unanswerably withering responses to Ed Balls's clunking attempts to position himself as the natural successor to El Gordo (Ha! Ha! and Ha! again)? Where were the Brute's compelling exposures of Gordo's preposterous claims of 10 years of growth-full-employment-lowest-ever-inflation-unprecendented-record-of-economic-success?

Where, in short, was the Daily Brute's daily scorning, always justified, of Gordo's weird, scarcely human, always hesitant, never convincing, pretend attempt to be prime minister (a job that can always be yours if you huff and puff enough and stamp your feet while sulking and threatening to burst into tears at any minute – provided you don't have to worry about being voted in of course – or take the blame if it all goes wrong)?

Good questions.

Well, the Brute been working (however shockingly badly paid). Meaning busy. But he has also been thinking. Thinking that there can surely never have been any government this inept. That, whatever the pleasure of seeing Gordo and his grisly gang run out of office (as they undoubtably will be), the price we will all pay – a ruined economy, schools incapable of imparting even basic knowledge, hospitals that cost billions and cure no one, a transport system buggered in every sense, councils grown mad on self importance, an army left defenceless and demoralised, and, worst of all, 300 years of painfully won national sovereignty willfully handed over to a group of unelected pen pushers and bullies in Brussels in direct defiance of an explicit manifesto promise – will be horrifying high.

It is a seriously grim prospect.

The only consolation – and it will be meagre – will be the Bottler attempting, ridiculously, to justify himself.

That might make me laugh.

Not much else will.

Mighty systems, crap results

One, for all you millions out there wondering why I have been so uncharacteristically silent this week, I can only apologise and plead pressure of (very badly paid) work.

Two, bouncing back undaunted, here we have a perfect example of every reason why this (in fact probably any) government cannot be trusted.

January 31 is the deadline for filing tax returns in the UK.

At vast, not to say prodigious, expense, our right-on, fully wired-up government has made it easier for us to do so by providing an interactive website to allow those who can to file their returns on the web.

Except that it doesn't work. Today it crashed. Exactly when it was supposed to be working as (hideously expensively) advertised.

In short, a precise example of the fatuousness, incompetence and idiocy underpinning our relationship with those who govern us. They trumpet their inclusiveness. They spend billions claiming to deliver it. Yet they are incapable – institutionally and systematically – of living up to their laughably over-inflated preening.

Welcome to a world that is as catastrophically inept and bloated as it is complacent and useless. And all of it at our expense.

To which the only rational response is to suggest that Gordo sticks this, yet another comical government cock-up, right up his vaunted inflation rate.

Roll on ID cards ...

This is simply magnificent

Did you know that 2008 is the International Year of the Potato, a programme launched under the auspices of the UN?

Neither did I.

What a fool I have been not to have realised that this seminal event was already underway.

I know it will transform not just my life but the lives of millions.

And how wonderful to know the UN spends its money so wisely.

There is hope for mankind yet in this cruel and dark world.

H/T Squander Two

The wonderful Ana Ivanovic ...

... lost to the unspeakable Sharapova in the Australian Open final, going down 7-5 6-3.

Yet another of my predictions bites the dust.

But she remains ravishing.

But, of course.

Parris at his best

Another palpable bullseye from Parris today in The Times.

This in particular is brilliant.

This combination of stubbornness and vacillation is getting to look really creepy. Here is a chicken that flaps into the middle of the road, half thinks better of it, then, paralysed by a kind of furious vexation, stands his ground in the face of the oncoming truck. Winston Churchill once described Stanley Baldwin's Cabinet as “resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity and all powerful for impotence”. Speaking at the Mansion House in 2004, Mr Brown, then Chancellor, quoted the remark. Interesting that it had impressed itself on his mind. I remember thinking at the time that this insight went a mite close to home.

Read it and weep

Daniel Hannan has written a really terrifying post at the Telegraph on machinations at the EU parliament that are quite jaw-dropping.

And this from a democratic institution? It is beyond shameless.

French rogue trader: UPDATE

FRIENDS of rogue trader Jerome Kerviel last night blamed his $7 billion losses on unbearable levels of stress brought on by a punishing 30-hour week.

Kerviel was known to start work as early as nine in the morning and still be at his desk at five or even five-thirty, often with just an hour and a half for lunch.

One colleague said: "He was, how you say, une workaholique. I have a family and a mistress so I would leave the office at around 2pm at the latest, if I wasn't on strike.

"But Jerome was tied to that desk. One day I came back to the office at 3pm because I had forgotten my stupid little hat, and there he was, fast asleep on the photocopier.

"At first I assumed he had been having sex with it, but then I remembered he'd been working for almost six hours."

As the losses mounted, Kerviel tried to conceal his bad trades by covering them with an intense red wine sauce, later switching to delicate pastry horns.

At one point he managed to dispose of dozens of transactions by hiding them inside vol-au-vent cases and staging a fake reception.

Last night a spokesman for Sócíété Générálé denied that Kerviel was overworked, insisting he lost the money after betting that the French were about to stop being rude, lazy, arrogant bastards.

Brilliant Tsonga

I watched bits – well, I was supposed to be working, you know – of the Tsonga–Nadal Aussie Open semi on the telly this morning and I can truthfully say I have never seen anything quite like it.

Tsonga was overwhelmingly brilliant. It wasn't just a ferociously brutal display of tennis. It was a performance shot through with sudden shafts of subtlety and delicacy, miniaturist meets mugger. It was irresistible.

Nadal is a genuinely frightening player, jaw-droppingly competitive, astoundingly aggressive, a three-time winner of Roland-Garros. Yet he was left flat-footed and bemused throughout. He looked about as good as me.

That said, can Tsonga, notoriously inconsistent, sustain this level of brilliance? Who can say? He has defied all expectations so far. So why not once more? He has nothing to lose, after all, and plenty to gain.

No less pleasing, the wondrous Ana Ivanovic also won her semi today. She plays the sneerily snide Sharapova, a compulsive cheat and full-time moaner, in the final on Saturday.

You have my permission to boo and hiss when Sharapova makes her prissy way on to the court. even more when she goes off for a 'comfort break', which I guarantee she will do if she is losing. No snippy advantage is too small for her not to try to exploit.

Bitch!

That said, because every prediction I have made on this blog has been wrong, I am saying nothing about who will win either the men's or the women's titles.

But I know who I will be supporting.

And it sure as onions won't be the lanky-legs Russkie whiner.

Hain's administrative errors

While, of course, jubilant at Hain's long-overdue departure – though only from the Cabinet, note: the loathsome, oily twat is still an MP – and happily expectant that Harriet and wee Wendy will soon feel the noose tightening (oooh! Gordo, feeling nervy?), the overiding question of just what Hain thought he was up to remains.

Self-evidently, his use of a slush fund masquerading as a think-tank to hide the identity of his donors – and what kind of sad, sorry creep do you have to be to want to give money to a man as transparently on the make as Hain? – is clear evidence of, at best, an intention to deceive.

But did he really believe he could expect never to have to declare the money? Did he feel that, as a NuLab Cabinet minister, he could get away with this breach of the law indefinitely?

It was hardly a coincidence that his sudden admission in November that he had omitted to declare a donation of £5,000 came at exactly the moment Donorgate broke.

But why just the £5,000? There was another £103,000 undeclared. The likelihood that this had simply slipped his mind as a result of his terribly (self-) important Cabinet post is self-evidently zero. By the same token, it was no less certain that sooner or later he would have to admit to it. So why prolong the agony, why string it out?

Because he could never admit he had been rumbled? Because he is instinctively dishonest? Because he hoped that something, anything would step in to save him if he could drag the business out as long as possible?

The answer to all three questions is clearly 'yes'.

In short, here we are presented with a near-perfect example of the true copper-bottomed NuLab cunt: deceitful, mendacious and dishonest, concerned only for his own well-being. The wanker incarnate.

Importantly, all his crude calulations, designed only to save his own skin, have come to zero.

In other words, he is as inept as he is obviously corrupt.

So what did he think he was up to? What did he hope to gain?

Who cares? All I can say is that I hope he goes to prison, where he clearly deserves to languish.

Because that really will have the rest of the little shits running scared.

So, now for Harriet and wee Wendy.

Hypothetically speaking

Go here and click on 0750 under Today's Top Stories (on the right-hand side).

It is hilarious.

And this woman is Home Secretary?

It beggars belief.

Note especially this scintillating insight: 'It won't be hypothetical if and when it occurs.'

How very true. How very wise. But, unfortunately for her, 'it' hasn't happened. Ergo, 'it' remains hypothetical.

I am very taken, too, by her kind donation to us of a brand-new word: unhypothetical (aka 'real').

The bastard's finally gone

Hain's resigned from the Cabinet.

Thank fuck.

So much for 'administrative errors'.

Prison next with any luck.

Well, what a surprise!

If you break the law and you happen to be the government, what do you do?

Change the law, of course. Easy

Read about it here.

Corrected

Newmania - may he live for 10,000 years (or longer, actually) - rightly wrapped me on the knuckles yesterday for my credulous claim that Gordo & Co were backing away from ID cards and that this was, I assumed, good news.

He pointed out that they were actually doing no more than reculer pour mieux sauter – in other words putting in place a tactical withdrawal, leaked to Tory papers (of course), that meant only that the presentation had changed, not the goal.

So I take it all back.

Him right. Me wrong. Brief moment of hope dashed.

Gloom re-asserts time-honoured grim, centre-stage role.

Good news at last?

Seems hard to believe but I think it might be.

The government from all accounts is backing away from ID cards. Of course, only a combined cretin/control-freak would ever have espoused them in the first place. Still, we must be grateful for whatever small crumbs are offered us.

Here is the full story.

Just a thought before bed

Consider the following fundamental measures of the health or otherwise of any modern democratic nation, all of them directly dependent on the state.

In no particular order, they are:

Law and order; transport; health; education; accountability; security; local government.

Can anyone doubt that in Britain each has seen a calamitous decline over the last 10 years?

Let's list them in more detail.

Law and Order: A police force obsessed with pointless targets and incapable of imposing even the simplest expectations of the rule of law and matched by a manifestly inadequate penal system.

Transport: An 'integrated transport' policy that has produced hopelessly congested roads and ludicrously overpriced and unreliable railways.

Health: A 'national' health service that costs billions, emasculates doctors, empowers self-serving bureaucrats and kills its patients.

Education: Schools that consistently fail to match up to over-heated government rhetoric despite immense sums lavished on them and laughably low standards.

Accountability: A ruling class that consistently ignores the wishes of those who have elected it while simultaneously paying itself more.

Security: Armed forces, once the envy of the world, starved of funds yet expected to perform ever more (as well as to endure periodic visits from preening, vote-seeking turds, cf The Bottler).

Local government: Driven by inane targets, incapable of emptying dustbins, bent only only closing libraries to fund equal-opportunities 'initiatives' and lorded over by 'chief-executives' conscious only of the imperative of guaranteeing their pensions.

This is just for starters.

It does no more than scratch the surface of all that is corrupt, distorted and gruesome in 21st-century Britain. It says nothing of the shameless determination of the ruling party and its cripplingly inadequate leader to ignore its own manifesto promises to hold a referendum on the European Constitution, forcing on the country a treaty it knows is near universally loathed. It says nothing about the same government's readiness to lavish billions on a clapped-out bank in Newcastle so as to protect its vote there. It says nothing, too, about its willingness to pretend that blatant law-breaking on the part of its own members when raising funds for pointless internal elections can always be justified so as not to compromise its patently useless leader, in effect an institutional readiness to assume that laws passed by itself in the hope of embarrassing its opponents should apply only to these opponents.

It is a world scarred by quangos, reviews and consultants, one in which insane wastes of public money and a vast, bloated public sector are taken as read; by an immigration policy manifestly out of control (if 'policy' is not too polite a term for a world in which no one has any proper idea of the numbers involved); and by gargantuan government departments that regularly lose details of their clients. Above all, it is a world defined by government ministers whose default position is always to lie.

Can I stress this last point? They don't obfuscate. They don't equivocate. They don't even mislead. They lie.

It's what they do. It's what sustains them. It is their life-blood.

On the whole, I'd say there were serious reasons to feel depressed.

Welcome to the world of the Bottler's moral compass.

Gordo's Black Wednesday?

Here's a small hand grenade lobbed at the Bottler by Peter McKay in the Mail today, which contains the following elegantly aimed detonation:

We're now at the fag end of New Labour, which began, you'll remember, with the adman's lie about being "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime".

Its leader, Tony Blair, is off making his fortune with an American bank and other moneymaking enterprises.

Nothing responds to Government action now - not the economy, not the health system, not our transport network, not the criminal justice system.

Living under Gordon Brown's Government is like being on a plane after the engines have died, like BA038 approaching Heathrow.

Can he get it over the airport perimeter fence before pancaking into a full recession and crisis of confidence?

You can read the whole thing here.

But here's the real thing, the equivalent of nuclear explosion which looks likely to vapourise the Bottler in his entirety, leaving behind not so much as a wisp of smoke. It's an offering in The Times by Anatole Kaletsky and is, in every way, devastating for the Bottler.

How to be a Bottler

The Bottler has apparently 'expressed ... growing disillusionment' that PMQs 'have become so noisy and bad-tempered that the public will be increasingly repelled'.

Even by his standards, that's rich. The man is serially dishonest, entirely unable to admit to any failing or shortcoming.

Thus, regularly made to look the clunking, cretinous clod he actually is at PMQs, he resorts to allowing 'aides' to plant transparently untrue stories about how, his moral compass all aquiver, the Bottler is saddened by the Chamber's descent into heckling and abuse, a descent in which he, the high-minded paragon, has played no part.

It's a lie. The truth is much simpler. He can't bear being laughed at or mocked. He can't bear the thought he isn't being accorded the reverence he so clearly considers his by right. Above all, he can't bear the thought that Blair was so much better at it than him.

So it's not his fault – well, nothing is, of course – that he is reduced to incoherent howls and grunts, endlessly stammering, frowning, twitching and glowering impotently.

How long before, regretfully, in the interests of the nation as a whole (ie him), he scraps PMQs?