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?