we are all fed up with em,this says it quite nicely.

The Safety's off

It's amazing to think that New Labour looks to be
going out like a bunch of screeching playground chavs squabbling over the last
Marlboro Light. Shedding all claims to dignity and self-awareness, and
confirming the essentially hollow nature of New Labour, its 'ideology' (the term
is used loosely) and intellectual underpinnings (ditto), the main protagonists
are going at each other's throats, having nothing else to argue over other than
the grottier aspects of their respective personalities.

And it's ony to
be expected, all of them being complicit in the crimes of the New Labour era.
They can't criticise each other over Iraq or the fact they spent billions on
computer systems only to receive steaming turds in return (to read but two
charges from the epic rap sheet). It's like Reservoir Dogs
where the characters soon forget about why and how the heist went wrong and
instead focus on the personality M r Blonde. Blonde in this case, of course,
being Gordon Brown - he's mental say his detractors and a coward (more Mr Yellow
than Blonde, it has to be said).

It probably goes without
saying that the rocks hurled at Brown by Charles Clarke this week would have
carried more weight had they been thrown by just about anyone else. As Nosemonkey points out, Clarke's hardly the model of
consistency on these matters. Six months ago The Safety Elephant was talking about Brown and Blair
conducting a 'dual premiership' but now is telling anyone who'll listen< /a> that Brown is, in effect,
the political equivalent of Holden
Caulfield ('control freak', 'deep weakness', 'deluded'). Then he says, 'I'm
trying to give a reasonable, dispassionate view of what I think the issues are'.
You never knwo, he might really believe that.

What seems to pass people
(including Clarke) by is that he's speaking to newspapers (the Telegraph today
and the Evening Standard yesterday) whose reasons for existence
are to do down Labour governments of every stripe at every turn. He's gone
carping to - fraternizing with - his party's enemies. And they're loving it. What next? Writing an article for ConservativeHome? A
whis per in the ear of Guido Fawkes?

Still, as with all these things there
are diamonds of truth nestling amongst the horseshit of hysteria dressed as
statesmanship. They're welcome no matter whether they're Freudian slips or
intentional coded attacks on Blair. 'What people are looking for is some sense
of authenticity,' says Clarke, "People don't want someone with an image of
slipperiness.' Hire a plane and write it in the sky, Charles.

All this
can be taken on board, even coming from someone so lacking in introspection as Clarke. We are talking
about someone - Brown - who wants the power of life and death over every last
one of us after all. If he's going to receive this level of scrutiny, that can
only be a bonus. Charles doesn't like it when it's done to him, of course, but
nicking him for hypocrisy lacks the same satisfaction as convicting Al Capone for tax fraud. It's the smallest of his
misdemeanours.

But then Charlie blows it. '[T]he Chancellor wants to run
the country by "pulling levers at the centre", while the Prime Minister is more
inclined to "trust the people",' he says. Which is a hilarious piece of (self)
deception which only causes the laughter die on your lips when you survey the
wreckage of our democracy caused by such innovations (to name but two) as
Blairite 'kitchen cabinets' and the giving of power to those like Paul Drayson and Lord Sainsbury by the simple expedient of them being filthy
rich.

Clarke finally calls the nurse for another shot of Thorazine by
declaring Alan Milburn as 'leadership material'. Big, bruising, bouffanted Alan
Milburn, a man described by Matthew Norman in the Independent yesterday as
someone whose 'belligerence is matched only by his irrelevance'. A man who is to
consensus politics ('arrogant', 'patronising' and 'macho') as
a stingray is to Australian wildlife botherers. As somebody for who the phrase
'promoted to his level of incompetence' could have been invented, Milburn's been
a rich source of material for this blog in it's short life. Clarke's
suggestion, however unlikely, of Milburn's potential kindles idle, wistful
daydreams that the geordie privateer could be again. At the very least a
Milburn premiership would put paid to the dangerous and damaging reasoning that
clings to nostalgic notions of Britain being a great nation punching above its
weight on the world stage.

Still, all this fallout torpedoes the witless
yammering talk of a 'stable and orderly transition' - surely, hopefully, a
phrase shortly to slip into usage as a ironically bathetic description of
destruction and misery. A knowing, sarcastic companion to FUBAR and SNAFU. 'It's good to
s ee Iraq making a smooth and orderly transition to democracy'.

There
are many who don't want to see a smooth handover of power. It goes against
justice. As Alex Harrowell says of Blair:

I don't want an orderly succession. I want him to be dragged out of
Downing Street, screaming and clinging to his Anthony mug, and then conveyed on
the sharp steel floor of a black Maria or army truck to Northolt and the jet
that will deliver him to the Hague Tribunal.

As spectacles go, the
current baiting and counter-baiting is worth pulling up a chair for. How anybody
can say that this kind of thing is turning off voters is a puzzle. That said,
just why country isn't baying at the gates of Downing Street in an attempt to
warm this crew's heels to the cells is another mystery. Maybe the whole stroy is
like William S. Burroughs' 'Man Who Taught His Asshole to Talk '. 'After a while the ass
start talking on its own' until eventually:

...finally his mouth sealed over and the whole head would have
amputated spontaneous... except for the eyes you dig. Tha'ts one thing the
asshole couldn't do was see. It needed the eyes. But nerve connections were
blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain couldn't give orders any
more. It was trapped in the skull, sealed off. For a while you could see the
silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes.

While
Blair, Brown, Clarke are trapped in their arguments and bitching, they aren't
doing much damage anywhere else. We
haven't had a policy announcement since Tuesday which for this lot, for who
press releases and ill-thought ideas usually come on a roll like toilet paper,
is an eternity. We should just board up the doors with them inside and pass
pizzas and toast and other flat sustenance through the letterbox.