When you look at this morning’s YouGov poll in the Torygraph you have to wonder if the Labour party is having a collective moment of Lemming-like lunacy. Blair is undeniably more popular than Brown. Voters would far prefer to live under a Cameron government than a Brown government by a 10% margin.

Even if Brown signalled straight-away that he intended to bring the boys back from Iraq, (something that would be popular), he would be supported in this by the Tories, so no real advantage will come even from that. The much heralded “Brown Bounce” seems as real a prospect as a “Brown tax cut”. Left-wing voters will still remember that he wrote the cheques for the war and right-wing voters will always say it was his fault that the army was ill equipped, under-funded and over-stretched. The Brown bounce will be a dead-Lemming bounce.

The nose picking, nail chewing, always mincing, hair greasing, cluster-headache suffering, pension grabbing stealth-taxer also tucks his trousers into his socks? Inevitably Labour reaches a poll low not seen since Michael Foot in 1983 and the bookies shorten the odds on the Tory favourites to win the general election.

Remind Guido why they are getting rid of three-times-winner Blair early?

As my own country makes steps towards unity and complete self-determination, Guido will say a prayer to St George that one day England too can achieve sovereignty and freedom from rule by foreigners.

Even your patron saint is actually a Turk and sadly you don’t get a national holiday today. With both a German-descended head-of-state and a Scots dominated government, it must all be a little demoralising. Without even your own sporting English national anthem, the Irish Rugby team easily kicked English ass, and even the English cricket team looks susceptible to the rise of the Irish cricket team.* Things could, with the prospect of Prime Minister Brown, be depressing for the English.

Nevertheless, this Irishman would like to wish all his English readers a happy St George’s day.

*We beat Pakistan.

Over 70,000 people have so far watched Gordon’s two minute bogeytastic excavation via YouTube, making it by far the most watched political video outside the US. Guido put the video together in a bit of a hurry and looped the Twilight Zone theme tune on repeat.

According to a source the “dee doo dee doo” tune echoed around the new Millbank Tory open plan HQ all day as the boys and girls watched it on their screens mesmerised. Back to work chaps before Hilton finds out…

Betfair punters now reckon Jack Straw is the favourite to succeed Gordon as Chancellor when the position becomes vacant. Which has a certain logic to it, but did Gordon actually make Straw an offer he couldn’t refuse? If Gordon “I don’t bear grudges” Brown asks you to run his campaign, what are you going to do? Learn to swim with the fishes? Alastair Darling won’t be pleased, but what can he do? Has Gordon calculated that another Scot at the Treasury will be too much?

The question is why hasn’t Gordon asked Miliband to be his deputy campaign manager? Seems awfully uncharacteristically brave to leave Blair’s chosen successor at a loose end…

Jack Straw is obviously going to need to top up Gordon’s male dominated team with some women to give it a more inclusive feel. Why not people he has some experience with? Gisela Stuart, the Labour MP who sat on the EU convention’s 13-strong presidium has experience, and Oona King has a younger funkier appeal with the bonus of ethnicity thrown in. She also charmed Gordon at the Fabian conference recently with the improbable (pre-Kylie) claim that “If you want celebrity and glitz, Gordon is not your man.” No harm in boosting Gordon’s campaign with some female talent…

The amazing spin now being pushed in all media outlets is that he doesn’t bear grudges and he cuts taxes as well. He is a completely changed man, we are being spun, in time for the coming of the feared dark days of his premiership.
So out goes the dour Scottish Presbyterian, mincing, psychologically flawed, vindictive sulking socialist loser. In comes the smiley, touchy-feely, Kylie loving, British, loving father-of-two and premier. Yeah, right.

It is going to be all Gordon, all day today. He will be telling us how we live in a heaven on earth and tractor production in the Urals is up 500% since the last 5-year plan.

Meantime the government spends even more than it taxes us to the tune of something like £100,000,000 a day. The BBC always like to tell us it costs less than a newspaper a day, well Gordon overspends three newspapers a day for every man, woman and child in the country – every day.

The result? Inflation at the highest since 1991, government indebtedness out of control and the whole public sector pay and prolifigacy being done off-balance-sheet means the City is demanding more and more to hold government debt. His main boast is that he removed monetary policy from his control by ceding interest rate decision making to the Bank of England. The longest sustained period of growth in generations that he boasts about began under the Tories after we came out of the ERM system – a decision he bitterly opposd at the time. Child poverty rates were lower under Thatcher, youth unemployment is higher now than it was in 1997 and social mobility is lower than it was under Thatcher as well. Everything he has meddled with has become overly complex and muddled. Ask any Blairite why after ten years the welfare state and the public sector remain largely unreconstructed and they will tell you it is because of Gordon’s obstructionism. The business sector is groaning under the weight of over-regulation and over-taxation, Britain has tumbled from the top to the bottom of the competitiveness tables. In benign times he has had no major economic disaster, but no economic success either.

For all his talk of reform and renewal of public services for the benefit of ordinary working people, remember when he dazzles his new sincere smile, he went private for it…

Apart from the Mirror and The Times, the Daily Mail is (counter-intuitively) the biggest dead-tree-press cheerleader for Gordon. The Mail’s brilliant Quentin Letts has a Straw-not-Gordon article published in online-only magazine First Post. Strange that it didn’t appear as a Mail column really. Did it get spiked by Dacre?