Drift

I heard on the news this morning that the decision to send in a force to rescue the journalist was made by David Milliband and Bob Ainsworth but that the Prime Minister was "informed". Come again?

You would be hard pressed to call up the name of a single Prime Minister, up to and including Tony Blair, who would not want to have the say-so on any military adventure that was likely to go pear-shaped, and be prepared to stand up for the consequences. If the action were completely successful then I suspect that we would have been told that the Prime Minister "approved" the rescue, but as it went slightly wrong the Prime Minister wants to distance himself.

This is pathetic; the man is afraid of his own shadow.

The leap from number 2 to number 1 is huge. I have seen several people in my time who have been excellent in junior and middle management positions who found themselves totally out of their depth when they finally got to the top. Usually they don't last. People find a way to move them on before they can do much damage.

But here we have a man who is the senior political figure in the country who can make vainglorious boasts about saving the world from economic collapse but is fearful of the consequences of any decision outside his comfort zone.

The word is out that Gordon Brown is now on a course of serious anti-depressants to moderate his spasmodic eruptions into uncontrollable rage. So be it, but does this not produce a rather more passive Gordon Brown, more along the lines of the ditherer, the one who hides when the political going gets difficult, rather than the hyperactive meddler in every detail of government? Neither extreme is desirable but it does appear that we get periodic doses of both.

Obviously those in and around Downing Street know what they are dealing with but is it not time to resolve the problem. As much as we might like the Labour Party to be severely punished for its disastrous handling of government I am not sure that our democracy is best served by demolishing a political party because of one man's madness. But somebody needs to do something. When George III went mad, the government of the day had the good sense to make arrangements to ensure the continuation of governance. In earlier times rulers were deposed or disposed of

Either way things were not allowed to drift.