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.