The Prime Mentalist saw team manager Harry Redknapp on a visit to Tottenham Hotspur on Friday. A mere 24 hours later on Saturday, Spurs went bottom of the Premier league. Doomed…

The effects of the curse were as malign as ever. Tottenham captain Ledley King (pictured) was stretchered off the pitch on Sunday. He is set for a lengthy injury lay-off after tearing a hamstring during the 1-1 draw against Portsmouth at White Hart Lane on Sunday. Redknapp says “Ledley King has a torn hamstring and is going to be out long term”. Beware the malign hand of the accursed One Eyed Son of the Manse…

The dangers of shaking hands with Jonah Brown cannot be overestimated. Keith Dye was proud to welcome Brown on a visit to his offices, it was the pinnacle of his 24 year news career:

Gordon Brown Visits Media Wales
WalesOnline - 9 January, 2009
After arriving under a heavy police escort just before 3pm, Mr Brown was given a tour of our multimedia newsroom by Media Wales’ managing director Keith Dye …

Trinity Mirror Redundancies
Press Gazette – 13 January 2009
Keith Dye, managing director of Media Wales has been made redundant and leaves today, following 24 years at the group. Media Wales’ finance director…

Tragedy struck a mere four days later. Beware the dead hand of the accursed One-Eyed Son of the Manse…

For a moment after Glenrothes it seemed Gordon’s personal reverse midas touch had been lifted, he even wished Lewis Hamilton good luck and he still managed to win the F1 Grand Prix. However the new year has shown the curse to be as strong as ever.

The signs are the curse is back, big time, here are two examples. At a news conference last month with Salam Fayyad, the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, Brown spoke before the opening in London of a two-day Palestine trade and investment forum, saying there were “considerable opportunities” for economic partnership between Palestinians and the UK, “The UK enjoys a close relationship with the Palestinian people and I hope today’s conference will cement this. I hope in the coming days we can move further and faster towards the peace settlement that everyone wants to see happen,” he said. Whoops.

This Sunday the Observer reported “Brown is studying a scheme pioneered by Nissan to avoid redundancies in manufacturing, which would see ailing firms given government funding to move staff on to part-time working and use the remaining time for training.” Last year Jonah Brown met Nissan chief executive Carlos Ghosn to discuss job creation.

Inevitably yesterday “Car manufacturer Nissan has announced it is to axe about a quarter of the workforce at its Sunderland plant. The company, which sent workers at the site home early before Christmas to cope with the economic downturn, said it will cut 1,200 jobs.” The curse of the One Eyed Son of the Manse is back. Email Guido any more examples.

UPDATE : A bean-counting Brummie co-conspirator emails to tell of the consequences of a visit from Jonah and Yvette Cooper.

The Dear Leader visited our Birmingham offices in October to discuss the Credit Crunch. Two floors in the same building were destroyed by arsonists yesterday morning. So instead of rebuilding confidence in the financial system, we’re rebuilding our office. Thanks Gordon.

Jonah opened the Lehmans HQ in London and look what happened to them. KPMG got off lucky.

Jacqui Smith must be really worried about losing her marginal seat. After her husband was exposed for writing letters of support (whilst being paid £40,000 by the taxpayer) it turns out that a Labour councillor who campaigns for Jacqui used her maiden name to write a letter to the press.

Patricia Lailey, using her maiden name Hill, told how the politician sympathised during a recent bereavement.

But Mrs Lailey didn’t mention she had been a Labour councillor for four years, and had worked with the MP on local issues.

She lives in Redditch, Worcs — the marginal seat Ms Smith is fighting to keep at the next election.

Mrs Lailey wrote in a national newspaper: “I recently lost my mum and Jacqui wrote a personal letter to me. She cares about us in Redditch.”

It is all getting a bit like the dying days of Nicolae Ceauşescu’s Romania; only the party faithful, the nomenklatura, senior police officers, those on the welfare payroll, the state bureaucracy and state broadcaster support a government led by a leader increasingly out of touch with reality. The ruling party is forced again and again to fake support in the media.

The Prime Mentalist told Andrew Marr* that he foresaw the economic dangers that he previously has repeatedly denied were real up until only last autumn. Taken in conjunction with his oft stated belief that he had abolished boom and bust, you have to wonder at his state of mind. Peter McKay this morning takes up the “Is Brown Bonkers?“ meme, asking “Is He Barmy?“

*Andrew Marr saying on Sunday that David Frost was a “lightweight” was classic. Here is a clip of Marr demonstrating his gravitas.

Hat-tip : The Sun

Gordon is off doing a flying visit to India, Pakistan and Afghanistan doling out millions to people who would rather the British were not there. Gordon loves being photographed with men in uniform, they however are not so keen on him. The ARRSE site is an online forum for soldiers, here are some excerpts from the site today:

Steffen Kampeter, is the budget spokesman for Merkel’s CDU, last night he backed Peer Steinbrück (the SPD finance minister), saying he was “exactly expressing” the views of the government. Yesterday Balls and Brown were spinning bullshit saying that this was internal German coalition politics – in fact it is the shared view of both the CDU and the SPD.

Kampeter put the boot into Crash Gordon: “Peer Steinbrück’s comments have nothing whatsoever to do with internal German politics as Prime Minister Brown has suggested. In questioning the British Government’s approach, Peer Steinbrück is exactly expressing the views of the German Grand Coalition. After years of lecturing us on how we need to share in the gains of uncontrolled financial markets, the Labour politicians can’t now expect us to share in it’s losses. The tremendous amount of debt being offered by Britain shows a complete failure of Labour policy.”

“All this will do is raise Britain’s debt to a level that will take a whole generation to work off” says Peer Steinbrück, the German finance minister. He isn’t a conservative finance minister from Merkel’s CDU, he is a Social Democrat member of the coalition government.

UPDATE : Ed Balls lying on Sky this morning basically says Peer doesn’t really mean it and is only saying it because of “internal coalition politics”. Which makes absolutely no sense. Total Balls.

Every day the pound hits a new record low and the markets now see Britain as a bigger credit default risk than McDonald’s Corp. So much for “Britain is best placed to weather the global financial turbulence”. The global capital markets think Gordon is a bigger clown than Ronald:

Guido can’t remember anything like this happening in his lifetime. This was not a national security issue. Counter terrorist police arresting opposition politicians?

UPDATE : David Davis on the Today show made the same point, that locking up opposition MPs for 9 hours is a tactic “reminiscent of Robert Mugabe”, Tim Montgomerie doesn’t approve of the comparison.

Gordon’s dithering now appears to be the official government macro-policy stance. We all remember the introduction of the 10p tax rate, the disastrously implemented abolition of it, then Gordon being forced to compensate losers he denied existed. We can see with this inadvertent release of the Treasury document on the implementation of the immediate VAT cut and the planned subsequent VAT hike, how Gordon’s government really operates:

These are indeed serious times, so this kind of low political maneuvering is not just politically dishonest, it further damages confidence. It also shows politicians in the worst light, Guido would argue it actually shows them in a truthful light. World weary columnists like Michael White and Polly Toynbee say that Guido’s political analysis is flawed by his hostility to politicians. Guido argues that the public interest is ill-served by pundits who are too sympathetic and close to politicians.

Well here is a chance for them to demonstrate their superior powers of political analysis of this fundamental dishonesty with the voters. Go on Michael/Polly, stop sneering in the margins, explain how this is in the public interest and not narrow party electoral interest. Go on, for once: justify this behaviour.