The President has gone mad, long live the President

To give Blair his due, it's probably not all his fault. He's an actor, and now his scriptwriters have given up the ghost, and deserted him. He never was a rocket scientist, as his proud admissions of supreme computer illiteracy might have warned us. As a manager, he's quite obviously out of his depth.

His judgment with sycophantic colleagues was clearly flawed from the off: the preposterous Mandleson, the even more preposterous Prescott. The unimaginably awful Patricia Hewitt, the permatanned Hain, the ghastly Hazel Blears, the increasingly weird Straw - and then his crowning glory - Tessa Jowell.

Tessa is the minister once married to a lawyer involved in distinctly dodgy goings on with that unimaginably dodgy Italian, Silvio Berlusconi - Italian premier and one time provider of luxury B&B services to President and Mrs Blair.

The litany of Blair's incompetence is endless. Moreover, integrity and talent has been (at the very least) a career setback to any would be Blair apparatchik: witness the late Robin Cooke and the late Mo Mowlem. Clare Short is wisely keeping her head down.

Much of Gordon's frustration is that Gordon thinks he's a lot smarter than Blair; and entirely personally responsible for providing the stability of the economic platform (mostly by continuing the previous Tory administration's core policies) while Blair collected the plaudits. He only gave in over the leadership issue the first time around because he was told that Tony was electable, and assured that he wasn't.

Of the scriptwriters, Alistair Campbell went mad first; and now his simply dreadful wife has run out of preposterousness at long last, and left her husband standing on the burning deck as his administration sinks slowly under a hail of Iraq-inspired suicide bombers, and the sort of systemic sleaze and incompetence that put the relative misdemeanours of the previous Tory administration into interesting perspective.

After all, the quicker he's out of office, the quicker all the memoirs can get published and the sooner the much-needed fees can start rolling in to pay off the mega mortgage and her various other ambitions.

So how come he's clung on this long? Perhaps this has more than a bit to do with the BBC's efforts to avoid getting deservedly gelded in the next license review, and the fact that the BBC is overtly operated by anything but Tory sympathisers.

So, now what? Despite the shambolic state of the UK in 2006, the incumbent government is still being allowed to get away with it, and technically, could do so for another 3 and half years. After all, how many Labour MPs are likely to vote for their own demise? Why on earth does the Great British Public allow this to happen? I suspect that much is down to the mindset that has grown up around the simple but widely held view...

"What's the point? They're all as bad as each other, aren't they?"

Which is a view that now applies to much more than just the Government. It is an indictment of 10 years of Labour's mismanagement of the country, where the government has actively encouraged the creation of vast monopolies and cartels, since they are much simpler to manage centrally and coerce politically than a multiplicity of smaller and more agile competitive businesses. And bigger businesses mean bigger party donations. Or they did...

The tacit permission for the concentration of near monopoly powers and the operation of cartel tactics means that bully-boy providers of anything from satellite TV to software to groceries to phone services to banking services have no fear of come-uppance arising from their arrogant and poor service - simply because the public have given up hope of finding anyone that cares.
Ironically, this attitude bears more than a passing resemblance to the resigned fatalism that prevailed in Russia under communism.

So the Useless Opposition needs all the help it can get, and I'm gathering together a check list of everything that's gone sour during the Blair Presidency.

• Government elected by a minority of English vote
• Scottish and Welsh assemblies - so what about the English?
• Creeping EU takeover
• Pension Thefts
• Foreign call centres
• No Go Zones
• Dangerous tolerance of BigCo Monopolies
• Peerages for donations
• Political Correctness gone mad
• The War on Terror Fox Hunting Speed cameras
• Immigration out of control
• Pointless job creation
• Sports worship
• Ladettes Boozing all hours
• Tattoos for women
• Gambling more attractive then working

All contributions welcome.