[Edit: 'dead' image removed] Apologies in advance for so little original comment in this post; please be content with the wonderful prose from this week's The Spectator - who can express in a far more effective way than I - the disgraceful conduct, lack of mandate, lack of accountability and lack of democracy that the UK is currently suffering; the first two links open in print mode for easier reading (all on a single page) simply cancel the print window if it opens. "Matthew d’Ancona says that, by sticking with Brown, Labour has opted for a mad collective delusion. The party is still in thrall to the trio who invented New Labour and cannot think beyond the Blair-Brown era — an incapacity for which it will pay a terrible price."

"Gordon Brown remains Prime Minister, he has formed a new Cabinet — just — and the Parliamentary Labour Party did not rise up on Monday night to defenestrate their leader. On they limp, these shambling, morally broken MPs, muttering to themselves that it could be worse, that catastrophe has been averted, that the moment of maximum danger is behind them. How deceived can a political tribe be? The expenses scandal shed unforgiving light upon a parliament of spivs. Now we have a parliament of zombies."

"The real sickness is Labour’s, not Brown’s" "Fraser Nelson says that the governing party has lost its hunger for office — and is now unhealthily dominated by the mega-union Unite and its political chieftain, Charlie Whelan."

"...it is unfair to blame Gordon Brown entirely for Labour’s demise. Truly awful political leaders do surface from time to time; the question is what their parties do with them. In the last two weeks, it has become devastatingly clear that Labour’s modus operandi is to flail around — and then do nothing. This is not just a matter of cowardice, as important as that doubtless is. There are deeper, institutional reasons for this collective paralysis. For the once-awesome New Labour organism has contracted a disease, which will not only take it out of government but may yet finish it off in opposition, too.

Crucially, Labour has now become a factional government in a way it was not even a fortnight ago. Mr Brown’s attempt to build a ‘government of all the talents’ has ended with a government of virtually none. Instead of Tony Blair’s Big Tent, which notionally had space for everyone, we have Mr Brown’s fiercely defended military bivouac. His key lieutenant, Lord Mandelson, now runs a department so vast that ten ministers report to him (just five report to the Chancellor)."

That last sentence is astounding for a man twice forced to resign from government. "Post-reshuffle, Mandelson wields more power than any peer since Salisbury"... Or, as William Hague said hilariously, "It would be no surprise to wake up in the morning and find that he had become an archbishop" likening Mandy to the power possessed by Thomas - later Cardinal - Wolsey