Gordon's auto-complete gives him a "D'oh!" moment

Bless him.

Guido reports that a beleagured Gordon Brown was recently reduced to asking Downing Street functionaries how to switch off auto-complete on his email account. He'd typed in "Wend" in order to send a mail to Bendy Wendy Alexander. Sadly, he didn't notice that the auto-complete had done its dirty work and ended up publishing his innermost thoughts on parochial Scottish matters to the News Corporation via Wendi Deng, wife of its owner, Rupert Murdoch.

Gordon Brown is disappearing up his own exhaust pipe

If you want a good laugh, read this snippet from the Scotsman, highlighted by Mark Pack on LibDem Voice.

Times: Cameron looks like a prat

The Cameron hairstyle, from left, February 2007, yesterday, March 2007

It's a long time ago. But I remember when I started losing my hair....just.

I think the rot started when I was in the sixth form. No radical skull space showed, but I could see I was slowly going the way of my father, grandfathers, uncles, great uncles, great...(you get the picture).

So I went the way of many sixth-formers: it was brush it that way, brush it right, brush it left, part it in the middle, sweep it back, sweep it forward, gel it, cut it, grow it....anything to delay the desperate day (which, in the event, turned out to be a gloriously liberating day) when I finally gave up and admitted to myself that testosterone and/or genetics had made me a slaphead. Or "Daddy made me a Baldy" if you prefer a somewhat more psychotic version. (About 15 years later some kids came past me in a car and yelled out "Slaphead". I really don't know what planet they were living on - I had got used to it about 13 years previously).

Well, David Cameron is doing those sixth form combing tricks a bit late. It is rather puerile.

Ann Treneman in the Times says that Dave's new middle parting completely over-shadowed reaction to PMQs yesterday. She commented on the new coiffure as follows:

Think of Billy Bunter goes to Eton.....The Prime Minister may be unpopular but at least he doesn't look like a prat.

By the way, he's making a habit of this ridiculous hair changing thing. He carried out a similar stunt in March 2007.

So, in the absence of anything other than a couple policies, Cameron silently announces a third policy: "I will change my hair style every year".

Vacuous or what?!

A word about Gordon Brown. Treneman describes him shambling into the Commons yesterday:

He's arrived looking chaotic, clutching a thousand pages of notes. His delivery was at times faltering and on auto-pilot. The stammer was back. He seemed about as bouncy as a flat tyre.

It seems Gordon needs some personal re-shaping advice. He should realise that it is very difficult for him to get any lower. So he's got nothing to lose. He should just chill out, clear his diary a bit, have some personal time, eat better, exercise more, spend more time on his appearance (no, he shouldn't get a new parting - but at least he should do up his blinking tie properly - so often it's five inches adrift from his collar) and enjoy himself.

Abroad they think a lot of him

The Labour cabinet have been having a minor nervous breakdown since the Crewe and Nantwich by-election result. As Iain Dale pointed out, Cabinet ministers chickened out of appearing on the Election night programme and Any Questions on Radio Four.

They finally managed to get their act together for Sunday AM, and Alan Johnson, bless him, put up a sterling performance.

To bolster up the great Johnster, Labour made it a "sons of the toil" double act with Presco!

John Prescott. Ah yes, I remember him. Again, a sterling defence of Brown, as long as you write out his words, cut them up into individual bits of paper, put them in a tombola machine, spin it round, let the words come out and see how they fall to understand what they say in English.

But as they were having their cosy ending sofa chat with Ann Leslie (I notice that Prescott and Johnson were sitting quite close but allowed half a mile of distance between them and Ann Leslie) and the credits were just about to roll, Presco come up with up with his coup de grace. His shattering argument. His unarguable reason why Brown should continue:

Abroad they think a lot of him

Oh well that's all right then. We'll all go along with what the French and the Germans think. I'm sure the C2s will be only too pleased to do that, Presco.

Isn't the "abroad they think a lot of him/her" argument what they said about Mrs Thatcher just before she was given the old heave-ho ? And about Churchill in 1945 just before he lost by a landslide?

Gordon Brown's You Tube page

Gordon Brown, or at least his employees, is/are proving much more wired-up that Tony Blair. I remember being asked by my boss to find Tony Blair's email address and the best I could find was the address for his constituency office in Sedgefield which was only meant to be used for his constituency matters.

Gordon Brown has a prominently displayed email form and also, now, his own You Tube page. You can submit your questions via video, and the top voted ones will receive a reply from the PM himself. The deadline is 21st June.

Brown: credit where credit is due

Call me a fuzzy-headed old numpty if you will, but I was reasonably impressed by the tone and seriousness of Gordon Brown's appearance on Today this morning. (Mind you, after 10 minutes I thought I'd better get into work, so perhaps if self-combusted after that...I know not.)

He's had a lot of derision fired at him, but I find it very difficult to imagine that Cameron could do any better in terms of managing, and answering questions from the Humpster about, the economy. I thought Brown put things into perspective in terms of the price of oil and inflation.

I do think there is a danger that the media community are often not old enough to have lived through a real red-blooded recession, and therefore there does generally seem to be a tad of hysteria surrounding our current position, combined with a lack of wide realisation about the comparative strengths of our economy.

Having said that, whatever Vince Cable said about the interview, I agree with him. ;-)

Gordon Brown - one sandwich short of a picnic

Gordon Brown was on BBC news earlier looking very bedraggled and, frankly, knackered. Tie askew. Double chin well showing - or is that a triple? The man couldn't relaunch a dinghy, let alone his premiership. He's doing worse than Callaghan. That's saying something.

The basic problem is that he lacks a section of intelligence. Call it "emotional intelligence" if you like. So that, he seems incapable of sufficiently showing empathy towards people, so that he is incapable of leading. In comparison to Blair, this shows up very sharply. You can't imagine Brown doing a "Princess of hearts" can you? He replaces this lack of empathy with people by withdrawn moods and "tempers of an indescribable nature" (Frank Field's words)

To put it bluntly, he won't be a success as Prime Minister as long as he has a hole in his bottom. This is a shame because if you take his chancellorship (minus the last budget) he was one of the most successful chancellors in the history of this country.

Labour LPs fear Brown has become poll liability

...so screams the Observer front page.

Disappointingly, there are no equivalent revelations concerning bears, woods, popes, balconies etc inside the same newspaper.

Levy does Brown a favour

Lord Levy, the man who brought us "My Coo ca choo", says there is a lack of strong leadership under Brown. Gordon ought to thank Levy for reminding us of the "strong leadership" of his mate Blair, against which comparison, Brown is a breath of fresh air.

What David Cameron doesn't want us to focus on

I've got a feeling that the NUT strike today will stay as a grievance in the memories of many voters, long after they have forgotten about the chicanery of the 10p tax rate compensation, which was the talk of the Westminister Village, via PMQs, yesterday.

It is a sharp example of the contrast of the real world v the Westminster Bubble.

In the real world, parents have had to rush round to make sure their children are looked after today. Then there is the worry that 11 year olds are about to take SATs and older children are about to take they GCSEs and A levels.

In the Westminster bubble there was a load of hot air about something that didn't happen. I've just read Roy Jenkins' biography of Gladstone. In the 19th Century there were these sorts of parliamentary wrangles all the time on a much larger scale - the parties hardly ever voted as one, there were break-off groups all over the shop, legislation was brought in, then pulled back, modified and tried again - often with intervening dissolutions or government resignations, with Queen Victoria sometimes seeing potential Prime Ministers on a taxi rank basis until she found one who stuck.

I think we have become too sensitive to political debate, and the adjustment of proposals.

To hear David Cameron bleating on about poverty is pathetic.

The truth is that Gordon Brown, in his last budget, dealt a major blow to the Conservatives. He lowered the basic rate of income tax to 20 pence. This is a sort of Holy Grail for the Tories, which they have been trying to get to for years. Gordon Brown has "shot their fox" by introducing the 20 pence rate himself, leaving the Tories with very little else to offer on the tax front. Brown has left the Tories a bit flat footed. No wonder David Cameron is trying to divert attention from this by blowing up the 10p tax rate compensation debate out of complete proportion.

Gordon turns into a sofa

2000th post

There is a determined and subtle sofa-isation of Gordon Brown going on. On GMTV this morning they were trailing: "We'll be talking about violent video games and how to better protect children from them. Psychologist Tanya Byron will be here....with the Prime Minister".

See what he did there ? ...Subtly smarms his way onto the sofa holding onto the skirt tails of our Tanya...

Never mind "This morning we'll be talking to the Prime Minister about global warming, the financial crisis, AIDS in Africa etc"... No, instead it's Gordie simpering on the sofa saying "Yes, Tanya....well done Tanya....very important....lots of hard work done by Tanya....vital to have a simplified classification for video games...well done Tanya".

....And not even a "while we've got you on the sofa, Prime Minister" question!

Gordon Brown's worst enemy

Brown does occasionally do something right and which sets him apart from Blair. I am thinking of the Bevin boys medal presentation yesterday and the cancellation of "Blair Force One" today. Both principled moves.

It's a shame he messes everything up by starting off by asking for a whip for the embryology bill. Doh ! It's obvious you have a free vote on embryology. Why on earth did he start the whip hare running and then take so long to shoot it ? He's his own worst enemy.

The government's £1 billion gift to Richard Branson ?

Alastair Darling's appearance on PM today was remarkable.

Despite being asked several times by Eddie Mair he could or would not answer these questions:

1. Is there a cap on the taxpayers' liability? (the answer was no, one assumes, as Darling wouldn't give a straight "yes")

2. On what date will the taxpayers' liability for Northern Rock end? (despite being asked several times from Mair, who was going into Paxo mode on this one ("What's the date?" x 3), no date was forthcoming from Darling).

3. Can you say that the taxpayers' money is safe and secure? (Can he 'eck as like)

Basically, the taxpayer is being abused. Public money is being used to underwrite the risk of a private purchase of Northern Rock. There are no guarantees that taxpayers' money will not be wasted or lost. Dickie Branson must be laughing himself silly. He's laughing all the way to his Virgin Bank. All the risk is with the taxpayer. Virgin have the remarkable opportunity to make profit without risk.

The BBC's Robert Peston says that the proposal means that the taxpayer will support the bank with £25 billion and could still have a financial obligation to the bank five years from now. Peston describes the scale of the government package as "breathtakingly large and without precedent". Peston says that the "guarantee would be the equivalent of a one-off injection into the Rock of more than £1 billion, a subsidy of that amount".

All this is because the government has decided that safeguarding taxpayers' money is not the first priority. Their first priority is to avoid what they, wrongly, regard as the humiliation of "nationalisation" of a bank. Brown wants to save face and avoid being compared with the old Labour nationalisation guard by the likes of the Daily Mail. He is prepared to seel taxpayers down the river in order to save face. It is scandalous.

I'm delighted that Vince Cable unravelled all the double-talk from the government and simplified the situation with his usual economist's authority:

The reality is the Government has ingeniously come up with a private sector sale that doesn’t involve any private sector money.

“In order to save face Brown has decided that losses of Northern Rock should be nationalised, but that profits should be privatised.

“Taxpayers now face years of underwriting Northern Rock, giving the opportunity for a private bidder to make an absolute killing - this is of course assuming that the EU decides that the Government position of guarantor is even legal.

The Morning Star on Brown and the Heathrow crash landing

The Morning Star is an extraordinary newspaper. Year after year, it keeps going as the one national daily newspaper which does not normally pass the consciousness of most people. Whenever I see it on a newsstand, I snap it up - if only for rarity value.

Today's edition leads with an interesting take on the Heathrow airliner crash-landing. Under the headline, "The shape of things to come" it says that anti-airport expansion campaigners described (the accident) as a "wake up call to the dangers of expanding an airport in an urban area". Good point.

The Guardian has some excellent detail on the accident. What I find very spooky about some of the modern generation of aeroplanes, such as the Boeing 777, is this:

Rather than relying on cables to move ailerons and rudder, wires carry electrical signals from the pilot controls to its primary flight computer.

That scares the living daylights out of me. We've all been in a situation of a power cut when everything goes. And computers? Don't get me started...

The Morning Star has an excellent cartoon by Martin Ronson. With the title "China flight crash latest", it has Gordon Brown as a BA Boeing 777, crash landed on a runway amongst discarded tyres labelled "Northern Rock" and "Looming recession". To puzzled Chinese officials, Brown says: "Greetings Comrades! Let's Trade".

ePolitix verdict: Clegg beating Cameron at PMQs

Edward Davie (no relation) on ePolitix passes "The Verdict" on Prime Minister's Questions each week. So far, Nick Clegg has beaten David Cameron both times:

9th January Verdict:

Gordon Brown: 6/10 - Not bad but he set the bar low in '07.

David Cameron: 6/10 - Some way to go if he is trying emulate Obama.

Nick Clegg: 8/10 - Sensible question, competently delivered - a sure-footed debut.

16th January Verdict:

Gordon Brown - 7/10 - Sounded more comfortable but then you would expect that on economic issues.

David Cameron - 6/10 - Tried to make the "ditherer" label stick to Brown but breaking the rules was not very edifying.

Nick Clegg - 7/10 - Nothing too challenging but competent on a bread and butter issue that matters to "hard working families".

Gordie steals a sofa moment with a half-baked idea

After a weekend PR offensive, Gordie had his "sofa moment" with Fiona on GMTV on Monday.

Gordie deigned to inform us plebs that he wants the NHS to focus on preventative measures.

Brilliant. So as Fiona gently pointed out, forget about all this nonsense about people picking up hospital-based infections, cancer cure rates being one of the worst in the civilised world and people having to wait weeks to see their GP.

Forget all that.

Let's prevent illnesses in the first place.

Brilliant. In a way he has a point and, as he is Prime Minister, he's right to finally let us into some of his "vision" for the country.

But the screening and preventative measures happen already and it is not clear that further extension of check-ups is money well spent.

And what extra resources are going to be made available to doctors to do all these check-ups? It is not clear.

And once doctors identify people with a problem will there be extra resources to treat it? It's not clear.

The details are all going to be worked out in February apparently.

But it did give us all a wonderful Gordie sofa moment, so that's all right.

"Explosive" and "dangerous" spin onslaught by Brown

BBC1 is promising an "explosive" interview with Gordon Brown on Sunday AM tomorrow. Baked beans for breakfast perhaps?

And the Observer reports that Gordon Brown has a vision for a "dangerous" year ahead:

Gordon Brown today issues a powerful declaration that 2008 will decide the fate of his premiership as he pledges to push through a series of controversial decisions that will shape Britain for decades to come.

So, there seems to be a major spin offensive afoot from the Brown camp. However, when you examine the specifics of Brown's "dangerous year" vision, it becomes a little deja vuish.

The "dangerous" bits which he is going to "push through" are:

· a strong indication that the government will give the go-ahead to a new generation of nuclear power stations, possibly as early as Tuesday when John Hutton, the Business Secretary, addresses MPs;

· a warning that conservationists can expect a battle as Brown ploughs on with planning changes to meet his target of building three million houses;

· a declaration that major infrastructure projects will be given the green light despite environmental objections.

The latter seems to imply more airports and/or airport extensions.

It is all sickeningly familiar. Rather than a sort of radical/dangerous agenda which is personal to Gordon Brown, this really does seem like the confirmation of things which Blair planned but didn't get round to finishing off. Gordon Brown said after his non-election that he wanted to set out his "vision" for Britain. But all he seems to be doing is sweeping up after Tony Blair.

That was the year that wasn't

The Number Ten website has a "Look back at the PM's year 2007".

It is more notable for what isn't included, rather than what is.

No wonder Nick Clegg said that "this is taking spin to new levels".

Gordon Brown isn't up to the job of UK PM

I have been in two minds about this Gordon Brown Lisbon/London diary double booking tizzy.

At fiirst I thought it was all a kerfuffle about nothing.

However, I have seen the image of the United Kingdom Prime Minister shuffling up to the signing table with EU dignatories hastilly and confusedly forming up behind him.

It was most undignified.

There is no excuse for this late signing shambles. Gordon Brown is a prize nanna. This is just one wrong judgment to add to his growing list.

The Generals - A very British coup?

Via Nick Robinson I was alerted to this blog from Ben Brogan which notes that as soon as Brown flew abroad the (former) generals took over the airwaves.

It normally happens the other way round though - African President flies to London and ends up staying longer than anticipated. This time Brown flew to Uganda - and, sadly, it seems likely that he will come back.