Meanwhile, on the other side of the Pond...

...it looks like we may soon have a new Prime Minister, one way or another. The latest:

1. Four members of Gordon Brown's cabinet have resigned this week

2. We vote today in European and local council elections (our equivalent I suppose of Congressional mid-terms) in which it is almost certain that Brown's Labour Party will get a pasting

3. Brown may well face a leadership challenge, further resignations or at least defiance from the remaining members of his government (as happened to Margaret Thatcher ultimately in 1990 when she was forced to resign as PM)

4. He may also quite separately face a challenge from his Labour Party Members of Parliament (which also happened to Maggie in 1990 as a precursor to #3 above)

5. He may be forced to hold a General Election - which his party will almost certainly lose

6. Or he may survive - for the moment - but as a lame duck PM

 

PS If Brown does go, please pray that we don't get this man - a horrible militant secularist - as PM.

 

Already announced her resignation

 

Hmmm....I won't miss him; Air Miles Mick was a very bad Speaker who was blatantly partisan ( the Commons Speaker is meant to be utterly impartial and above party politics), as well as being corrupt.

Possibly, although I'm not sure that that would be a bad thing necessarily. What I'm more concerned about is yet more legislation forcing churches and church schools to kow-tow to the gay rights lobby, which is what Johnson is likely to promote

 

Another cabinet member quits; Brown's reshuffling his cabinet this morning in a desperate attempt to hang onto power, the odious Johnson being made Home Secretary

 

There are two discrete but connected pathologies here.

The first is the scandal over MPs expenses eg: Jacqui Smith q.v., which affects all parties not just Labour and has forced over a dozen (out of 648) MPs to announce that they will be quitting and many more to do so on a more voluntary basis (it is thought that as many as half the MPS in the next Parliament will be newbies as a consequence). The Speaker Michael Martin has been one of the casualties there.

The second is Brown's lamentable running of the country since he became PM in June 2007, a period which unhappily for him coincides with the onset of the credit crunch/downturn/recession/depression/whatever-we're-now-calling it (think Herbert Hoover); however Brown's policies in his previous job, Chancellor of the Exchequer (think Treasury Sec) have both contributed to and exacerbated this crisis: running up public sector debt and encouraging the explosion of private sector debt on an unprecendented scale during the boomtimes; his policies as PM have been more of the same - massive gvt bailouts for banks and others usinig more borrowed money, no cuts in public expenditure etc. See here for a devastating expose. Gradually confidence has ebbed away from him as a consequence. The beginning of the end however was the Damian McBride affair in April - one of Brown's aides tried to institute a dirty tricks smear campaign against some of his Conservative opponents; he was found out and had to quit but Brown refused to accept responsibility for it for several days and then refused to apologise for even longer. Then the expenses row broke and yesterday we had EU and local elections in which Labour is expected to be trounced. More and more Labour MPs are regarding Brown as an electoral liability and want to ditch him. That feeling has now spread to the government, and the resignations are effectively a vote of no-confidence in Brown by his erstwhile ministers.

The overlap between expenses and Brown is that Speaker Martin was a Brown ally, and three of the resigning Cabinet members - Smith, Blears and Purnell, were caught out claiming expenses wrongly.

 

Breaking news: two more rats desert sinking ship. John Hutton's gone and now so has Geoff 'Buff' Hoon.

 

3 more ministerial resignations in the last half hour: Caroline Flint (Europe Minister), Tony McNulty (Employment Minister) and Paul Byrne (Welsh Secretary), all whilst Brown is giving a news conference - his authority is haemorrhaging away as he speaks....