An opposition in waiting

It would be premature to get too hopeful, but it seems increasingly possible that the British public has woken up from a 10 year sleepwalk towards the precipice, and noticed the undeniable smell of decay coming from Downing Street.

No amount of perfumed rhetoric can now mask the stench of those dead promises about a referendum on Europe, and it seems that the press has already agreed amongst itself that Brown and his second raters are looking increasingly like an opposition in waiting.

Brown's instantly exposed and supremely tawdry efforts at spin have been embarrassingly and contemptibly poorly executed. Where Blair was a natural, Brown is painfully unnatural. Whatever respect Brown's (alleged) towering financial intellect might have once commanded was blown away in a single badly judged move in Iraq - probably egged on by his closest advisers, notably the gurning Ed Balls and the vacuous David Milliband. Thankfully for the opposition, this lot are the palest of pale shadows of Blair's original spinmeisters, headed by the odd couple of the cocky Campbell and the manipulative Mandelson.

Brown is plainly a bloke with no bottle, and his period as PM looks like becoming the longest train wreck in history. A realistic prospect of victory should unite the Tories (and their supporters that have been hiding) just as the prospect of annihilation did at the start of their conference. 18 months to prepare should mean that it will possible to put together a really well thought-through strategy. Given the scale of shambles they see increasingly likely to inherit, they'll need one.

TMP will be making plenty of suggestions - starting with the old-fashioned notion that they should represent the majority of the population of the nation - and abandon New Labour's disastrous practise of forever pandering to the apparatchiks of a cabal of coteries of minorities. By all means abandon forever the 5-8% swing vote to New Labour, and address the other 92% instead, please.