The End of the Affair

The Regime is looking decidedly out of kilter. It holds Downing Street but not the Treasury, the Foreign office, or the Bank of England. Nor does it control the Leader of the House. It has lost the Speaker and without the Speaker and the Leader of the House government business is no longer firmly in its hands. Consequently there is the thinnest of government business programmes. Notably it is so unpopular in the country, (receiving only 15% of votes cast in a nation-wide election and beaten soundly in every by-election except where it used enormous numbers of doubtfully elicited postal votes and destroyed the voting register) it is unable to guarantee the election of any candidate for office in any by-election anywhere in the country. All sorts of ranks of ministers have had to be dumped or found in the Lords, including the Leader's effective replacement and full time minder.

When this happens to an administration the permanent governance begins to more than fray at the seams. It collapses. Civil servants will serve the elected government, and they will serve too the interests of the country that are longer term than a single elected government. But they will do this only when there is a governance derived from recognised, agreed terms. A social contract if you like between government and governed. That base has been destroyed by New Labour in its own interests of permanent power, of partisanship as a proper stance, rather than common interest and political morality.

So our government collapses. Commonwealth administered countries ignore our regime and settle their own affairs. Bermuda does not consult Brown on what it does any longer. Major financial interests, central to the economy of the country are placed under the tutelage of others. Europe does not consult Brown on regulation and control of financial behaviour. Industrial sectors, what wretched, ragged few remain, are disposed of without consultation of any interest of ours. Germany does not consult Brown on car assembly plant employment. And what Karl-Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg makes of 'Lord' Mandelson is his to know and ours to discover.

A control freak, as is our Prime Minister, might think that he is now in the best of all possible worlds. Every governmental decision must be referred to him or his nominee, as all other governance, political and administrative, is in a state of confusion and deshabille. The boiling water of electoral and political contempt has been poured into the nest. Now we watch as external and internal authority and regard collapses not just for the Brown New Labour regime, but for our country.