Poor Tony: domestic abuse drove him to the bottle. A Journey is misery literature for the political classes

  So that explains it:  Tony Blair was pissed half the time.  One of the most extraordinary revelations in the former PM’s foray into confessional literature, “A Journey”, is that he was, by many medical definitions, a problem drinker.  A stiff G and T (3 units) and up to half bottle of wine (5 units) each night put the PM way over the government’s safe limit of 21 units a week.  Did it addle his brain? make him careless? affect his judgement?  Actually, I doubt it. By the standards of his predecessors in Number Ten, notably Winston Churchill who began his day with a large Scotch, had a bottle of  Pol Roger champagne for lunch and kept himself liberally topped up throughout the day, Blair’s imbibing was purely recreational.  However, it is a curious thing to highlight in a political  memoir. 

   But then, as its title suggests, “A Journey”  is a very modern   memoir - aimed at a media culture of confessional womens magazines and celebrity journalism.  What better way to get noticed, and divert attention from the real issues - like Iraq -  than to get onto the therapy couch and admit to having a little bit of a drink problem - just like countless middle class, middle aged men and women.    Just like his hero George W. Bush, in fact -  though Dubya gave up the bottle after he found God.  Tony lied too - and was “manipulative”, he tells us. But always in a good way.Amd of course he never felt comfortable in Scotland because it was Gordon country.

Do the Blairites want Labour to lose?

 “Out of the night that covers me; Black as the Pit from pole to pole; I thank whatever gods may be; For my unconquereble soul”.  Those who’ve been speculating about the Prime Minister’s state of mind had further material yesterday in those lines from “Invictus” by the High Victorian poet William E Henley, which Gordon Brown says consoled him during his recent trials.  The poem also gave moral sustainance to Nelson Mandela when he was incarcertated in Robben Island. 

  Make of that what you will.  Certainly, there is a darkness surrounding Gordon Brown’s personality.  But there is also defiance, dogged determination.  He is, in lines from the same poem, “bloody, but unbowed”,  a fighter not a quitter. Which makes it all the more bizarre that the leaders of the Midwinter Mutiny last week bothered with their comic-opera coup.   Over the past week, commentators struggled to explain why two senior Labour politicians, Geof Hoon and Patricia Hewitt - not noted for their rebelliousness in the past -  should  have launched their  revolt when they hadn’t even secured the backing of any cabinet ministers, let alone significant back bench support.  Surely they realised that this prime minister would need a whole army of grey suits to prise his bitten finger nails from the door of Number Ten. 

   It didn’t make sense, and it still doesn’t.  Why did Hoowitt choose to strike in the very week when Labour appeared to be recovering in the opinion polls and Gordon Brown had his best outing at Prime Minister’s Question Time in months?  Why, indeed, launch an attack on the Labour leadership at the very moment when the Tory leader, David Cameron, had stumbled into his worst policy error since he became leader over tax reliefs for married couples? Do they want Labour to lose the election?  A BBC/Daily Politics poll on Thursday showed that 60% now believe Labour is the most divided party -  and as we know a house divided is a house defeated. 

   Well maybe they do want Labour to lose.  It may seem unbelievable that Labour politicians who have devoted their lives to the Labour Party would actually want  to lose the general election.  We haven’t had that kind of active disloyalty since the days of the far Left Militant Tendency that tried to wreck the Labour government of  Jim Callaghan in the 1970s.  But I’m having great difficulty coming up with any other explanation.  It’s not the first time either.  Think back to the ‘Night of the Stilletos’ in June when three women cabinet ministers resigned along with the work and pensions secretary, James Purnell. That was on the eve of the European elections, which Labour went on to lose so badly that it came third behind UKIP.   Even then Brown stayed put.

  Could it be that Blairite diehards are now afraid Brown might remain in charge even after a general election defeat?  Are they now trying to ensure that Labour goes down so badly that there is no question of Brown remaining as leader?  I’m beginning to think that this is the only plausible explanation.  Certainly, the destabilisation campaign is continuing.  Yesterday, Geof Hoon released highly damaging correspondence to the Sunday Times suggesting that the Prime Minister vetoed the purchase of vital military helicopters for British troops fighting in Afghanistan. This is tantamount to saying that Gordon Brown endangered the lives of British soldiers.  Serious stuff - especially since Hoon, the former defence secreatary, is due to appear before the Chilcott Inquiry into the Iraq War.  Moreover, the current defence secretary, Bob Ainsworth a close friend of Hoon, is thought to be on the point of resignation over the situation in Afghanistan. 

  In another move clearly designed to destabilise the Prime Minister, the former general secretary of the Labour Party, Peter Watt, has said that Gordon Brown is not fit to be in Number Ten.   In a book serialised in the Mail on Sunday he gives further evidence of the PM’s unpopularity in his own government. He quotes one of Brown’s longest and closest political allies, the development secretary, Douglas Alexander, as saying:  “We’ve spent 10 years working with Gordon and we don;t like him.  The more the public get to know him he less they will like him too.” Watt also reveals bungling and treachery over the abortive 2007 election-that-never-was and over the “donorgate” affair when businessman David Abrahams was allowed to disguise his cash payments to Labour by registering them under false names. The former general secretary claims he was lied to and set up by Brown. 

   The Watt revelations are clearly motivated by personal grievance , and some of the charges - such as that Gordon Brown sulked at a dinner party with US politicians - are faintly ridiculous.  Nevertheless, scheduling this embarrassing account of domestic life in the Brown cabinet on the eve of a crucial general election campaign remains highly damaging, and calculating.  Watt’s actions should surely be condemned by every member of the Labour Party.  Indeed, you wonder how the party can expect its footsoldiers to start canvassing the icy doorsteps this winter when the leadership seems to have acquired a death wish. But once again, this could be exactly what the Blairites want:  to so weaken Labour morale as to guarantee a Tory landslide.   

    If this is indeed all part of a ‘scorched earth’ campaign by the New Labour old guard - and I’m not the only person who’s thinking this - then the sections of the party that are not determined to lose the election need to consider how they respond. It’s one thing to believe privately that Brown isn’t up to it; quite another to side with the Tories.  Retaliation is necessary,  but it is hard to fight back without making he party look even more divided.   

    Brown’s last line of defence is the Scottish MPs who have in the past acted as defenders of Labour’s core values and as his Praetorian Guard.   Perhaps they need to make a move now to isolate the Right and ensure that Labour, under Brown, fights a principled campaign based on social democratic policies.  Following the financial crisis, and given the behaviour of the banks, this should be Labour’s moment.  The public are waiting for a lead against the plutocrats and banksters. It isn’t too late. Time for all good men, and women, to come to the aid of the party.

Midwinter mutiny leaves Brown dead in water, Miliband overboard.

  The best thing to be said about the latest tragicomic episode in the decline and fall of New Labour, was that the latest coup attempt was at least quickly over.  In fact, it was over almost before it began,  on Wednesday lunchtime when the Labour former cabinet ministers, Patricia Hewitt and Geof Hoon launched their kamikaze raid on the Prime Minister’s bunker.  The move was so preposterously mistimed - in the middle of the deepest freeze in thirty years and with an election campaign only weeks away - that no one in their right minds could take it seriously.  Eighteen months ago, perhaps.  Last summer, maybe.  But on the eve of an election?  Barking. Not so much the men in grey suits as the men in white coats. 

 The PM is someimrd compared with Joseph Stalin in his rigid approach to party loyalty, but Stalin never had to face anything so inept.  It’s as if the plotters had all liquidated themselves instead of targeting their leader.  No need for show trials with enemies like these.  One MP said that Charles Clarke, the arch Blairite former health secretary who has was one of the ringleaders, was like “a suicide bomber who only kills his own friends and family”. 

  

  The midwinter mutineers had clearly hoped finally to winkle out Gordon Brown’s cabinet critics, bouncing them into the open, but even this was botched. They briefed journalists to the effect that the Scottish Secretary, Jim Murphy, was one of those willing to wield the knife. Anyone who knows the ultra-loyalist Murphy would realise that this was ridiculous, as Murphy made clear on his own website.  New media is adding an interesting new dimension to political coverage.  Unattributable briefings can be almost instantly denied now by politicians writing in their own blogs, making it much more difficult for malicious rumours to spread,

  Indeed, you might call this an analogue coup in a digital age.  Things move too fast now, with twenty four hour news and the internet, for backstage plots to work.  The cabinet ‘rebels’ couldn't afford to wait around to see if there was much support for the plot on the backbenches  before deciding which way to jump.  It was back Brown or sack him within hours -  delaying for six hours made David Miliband look like a dangerous rebel.  

   The prime minister is damaged, of course, by this latest challenge to his leadership, however farcical.  It confirms the continuing dissent in the party and the government over his leadership, while also making the Labour party look a laughing stock.  Piss ups and breweries come inevitably to mind.  If they can’t organise a coup properly, how can they be expected to run the country?  If David Miliband is the best they have got, then God help all of us if he ever becomes prime minister. 

   The boy wonder may charm women of a certain age, like Hillary Clinton, but he is manifestly unsuited to the role of leadership. Three abortive coups have been mounted in his interest, leaving a trail of ministerial casualties in their wake.  The first was sparked by Miliband himself when he set out his stall in a Guardian article before the 2008 Labour conference, announcing that the party needed a new direction.  That ended famously with Miliband wagging a banana disconsolately at the cameras after he disowned the rebellion he had inspired.  But among those who lost their careers as a result was junior minister, Siobhan McDonagh and the former Scottish secretary, David Cairns.  Then in June 2009, the high-flighing cabinet minister, James Purnell, committed political suicide by leading a ministerial walkout following Labour’s disastrous showing in the European elections, when they came third after UKIP.  Miliband sat on his hands and then backed Brown - just as he did this week.  His belated endorsement on Wednesday sounding about as enthusiastic as a sun cream salesman in mid winter.  Hewitt, Hoon and Clarke now have to answer to their constituency associations for their incomprehensible act of pre-election treachery and will justifiably find their true place in the rogues gallery of Labour hate figures.

   But there was more.  The cabinet ministers who denied joining the plot then briefed journalists to the effect that they had all wrung concessions from Gordon Brown on the back of it. Alistair Darling got assurances on the government being more honest about spending cuts, Harriet Harman on being less nasty and blokeish, and Jack Straw, that Brown would abandon the class war against Tory toffs.  This made matters even worse, confirming the depths of cabinet discontent with Brown and making it look as if the PM was being held hostage by his own cabinet. 

   Needless to say, the Tories are laughing like a drain. After all, it was the week when David Cameron admitted he had “messed up” his own manifesto pledge on tax relief to married couples.  It doesn’t get much worse than that, and yet it was Labour that crashed and burned.   This inept and divided government will surely now drift aimlessly to defeat in May when Gordon Brown finally meets his date with the voters.  Though no doubt he will be looking for any pretext for delay, arguing that the risk of an asteroid hitting the earth means an election would not be in the national interest.

   For what it’s worth, Alan Johnson, the affable home secretary is the probably winner in the leadership stakes.  His humility and loyalty will have elevated him in the eyes of the party, since he was the only member of the cabinet who wasn’t looking out for number one last week.   A shoo-in when Brown goes.   Lord Mandelson of Foy consolidates his place as Her Majesty’s Fixer-in-Waiting. Mandy was once again the centre of attention as he offered just enough support to Brown to make it look as if he were indispensable to the government while carefully distancing himself from his boss. 

   And for Labour? Well, the immediate future looks bleak. The party will be racked with recrimination and remorse after defeat at the election.  Brown is hoping to do a deal with the Liberal Democrats, but Nick Clegg is making clear they don’t want a deal with him. This Labour government, and Brown personally, will be in the dock of history for the most irresponsible credit boom since the South Sea Bubble.  But at least in opposition Labour will be able to rediscover its soul.  That’s if it still has one. 

Brown's Tobin tax bombshell.

   Shake me, I must be dreaming.  I could have sworn that Gordon Brown just called for a “Tobin tax” on international financial transactions to curb the excesses of the banks and  provide funds for developing nations and climate change.   Can’t be true, surely.  I must have nodded off, somewhere.  

   This is the prime minister whose ‘light touch’ regulation and tax breaks turned Britain into the biggest offshore tax haven in the world. A man who has been bought and sold by the City of London.  A First Lord of the Treasury whose minions rubbished the idea of a tax on financial transactions when it was floated by the boss of the Financial Services Authority, Adair Turner, only three months ago. 

  But there it is  in black and white in the communiqué from the G20 summit in St Andrews.  Gordon Brown has asked the International Monetary Fund to look into the feasibility of “a financial transactions tax” - a tax on international bank transfers first proposed by the American economist James Tobin over thirty years ago to rein in the anarchic forces of financial globalisation and dampen currency fluctuations.  The Prime Minister appears to have conducted the most dramatic economic u-turn of his entire period in office. 

   Brown says that he wants a new “social contract” with the financial services industry. “It cannot be acceptable”, he said in his speech to the G20 meeting of finance ministers in St Andrews, “ that the benefits of success in this sector are reaped by the few, but the costs of its failure are borne by all of us”.   Powerful stuff: the St Andrews Declaration, it should be called.   This column has been pretty tough on the prime minister in recent years, along with the rest of the UK media, but on this at least, Gordon Brown deserves to be praised.  That is, if he means it.  There is a suspicion that the PM has floated this idea secure in the knowledge that it will never happen.  But let’s dream on for a moment, and imagine that he really is serious.  

   So what would this Tobin Tax look like?  Well, first of all it needn’t necessarily be a tax.   Brown wants to create a fund to ensure is that, in future, it is the world’s banks that pay the cost of banking crises not the taxpayer.  At present, when one of our mega banks, leveraged 30-1 and loaded up with toxic mortgage bonds, becomes insolvent, it holds a gun to the government’s head:  either bail us out, or we’ll wreck the economy.  It’s the Dirty Harry approach to financial regulation: “Ok punk. Do you feel lucky

    Politicians don’t want to go down in history for creating economic depressions and throwing millions out of work, so they generally hand over the money.  It isn’t theirs, after all. The Bank of You and Me is the most generous financial institution in the world, ever ready to empty its accounts in order to salvage the spivs and speculators.  After they get their hands on our bail out cash, the banks then just carry on speculating as before, paying themselves colossal bonuses,  sowing the seeds of the next crisis.  It is our old friend moral hazard. 

  Banks are intellectually and morally incapable of seeing that this is an unacceptable way to behave.  They are blinded by a curious, almost religious conviction in their right to hold the world to ransom.  As the boss of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein,  confirmed bankers believe they are on a mission from God - doing “God’s work”.   Society must find a way to make this deluded cult see that their personal wealth is derived from the expropriation of millions of ordinary people around the world.  If it hadn’t been for the bank rescues, all of the Wall Street banks would have gone out of business, Goldman Sachs included.  Mr Blankfein would have gone to meet his maker 

   Socialism for the banks is unacceptable. It's time to liberate them from the state.  They must be made so contribute to a stabilisation fund, either through taxation or through insurance, so that in future when “systemic” banks like  HBOS or  Royal Bank of Scotland go under as a result of their own greed and irresponsibility, they do not turn to the taxpayer for help.  The money is already there.  This is simply prudent financial management - based on the same principle as the hedge fund.  The only difference is that the banks pay for their mistakes, not society. 

   Needless to say, the bankers aren’t keen on this. They say it would wreck competition, deprive productive industry of capital, slow down the wheels of finance.  Well, they would say that wouldn’t they.  More seriously, the idea has been dissed by the most powerful banker of all, Tim Geithner, the American Treasury Secretary, and if the US doesn’t adopt the system, then it will fail because no other country will take it up.  But it is not acceptable for a country which has been the epicentre of the greatest global financial mismanagement in history to have any veto on attempts to prevent it happening again.   I believe Barack Obama can be made to realise this.  

      It is certainly feasible technically given the information technology that allows international finance to take place.  If we can trade Collateralised Debt Obligations and Credit Default Swaps then we can tax financial transfers. If it is international, then no country faces a loss of competition.  A Tobin tax is not just a financial measure, but a call for a form of world governance and would require to be administered by the IMF or the United Nations.  Pah, say the critics - they’ll never get their act together.  Well, if they don’t we are all doomed, because climate change will also demand a form of world governance.  Brown was right to link the financial transaction tax directly to the environment because humanity no longer has a choice but to manage its affairs on a global basis.  The financial transactions tax is a suitable vehicle since the richest nations would be making the greatest contributions. 

    Yes, Brown may be guilty of cynical posturing, trying to sound tougher on the banks than George Osborne.  But now that this issue is on the international agenda it will not go away. The Prime Minister has finally given the world a moral lead. And as Roosevelt said, the only thing to fear is fear itself.  

   

MPs expenses- how did we get here?

“UK opposition leader dumps lawmaker over duck pond”, said the Taiwan News. It was the story that caught the imagination of the world. The duck island, charged to expenses by theTory MP Sir Peter Viggers, turned the great British parliament into an international laughing stock.  Quackers...out for a duck...you silly ducker".  The pond ornament was even spotted on Google Earth, until it mysteriously disappeared from aerial view.  What had the mallard community done to deserve this indignity?

   Today presenters were reduced to helpless laughter, but in the House of Commons they weren’t laughing as parliament’s dignity and authority finally collapsed under the relentless bombardment of sleaze stories from the Daily Telegraph through May 2009.  MPs cowered in disgrace, afraid to face to their constituents and some - we are told - were contemplating suicide. The Speaker, Michael Martin,  was forced to resign - the first to do so for three centuries. Not to be outdone, the House of Lords suspended two Labour peers, Lord Taylor of Blackburn and Lord Truscott for offering parliamentary services for money -  the first in three hundred and fifty years. 

   Both institutions have been declared dysfunctional, unfit for purpose, ready for the knackers yard.  A very British revolution, said the newspaper that had for fourteen days exposed the venality of MPs.   It seems that the Fourth Estate - the press - is the only part of the British constitution that is still functioning.  Just think what Westminster would be like if there had been no newspapers?  What would politicians be doing now - buying duck mansions?

    As the revelations rolled on and on, a window was opened into the private lives of  Honourable Members.  From tree surgery to trouser presses; from alarm clocks costing £250 to 28 tonnes of manure.   MPs who claim to be servants of the people had been dipping deep into the public purse for their own enrichment.  Buying London flats for their daughters at public expense; building property empires through  “flipping”  = dishonestly doubling and tripling their second home allowances.  Lavishly equipping their own homes and gardens with luxury items paid for by the taxpayer. 

 . “The public are just jealous because I have a very, very large house”, complained the Tory MP for Totness Anthony Steen   questioned about £80,000 worth of work to his country estate. “What right does the public have to interfere with  my private life?”.  What right?  What right do voters have to ask how one of their MPs could justify claiming that £80,000 garden improvements was necessary for the conduct of his parliamentary duties? This arrogant sense of entitlement is what has most outraged voters - ordinary mortals who have to pay for their own houses, their own food and their own taxes.  Who do not regard £63,000 as poverty pay and cannot understand how MPs could have become so morally deficient, so divorced from reality and so poisoned by greed that they would casually defraud the taxpayer of tens and even hundreds of thousands of pounds, and then claim that the public has no right to question it. By their own mouths they have condemned themselves. 

   Enough, cried political leaders, leaping onto the bandwagon of public anger. The tumbrils, we were assured, were trundling down Whitehall to claim the miscreants.    Except of course that they weren’t. If this is a revolution, then it has been a largely bloodless one.   Very few MPs stand to lose their jobs over this epic scandal, the worst since the Great Reform Acts of 1932 ended the rotten boroughs. There has been a lot of talk about criminal charges, about resignations and deselections,  but no sign of handcuffs.  A number of superannuated knights of the shire have stood down to spend more time with their moats and arboretums.  A couple of Labour MPs have thrown themselves on the mercy of their constituency parties - though in the cases of Hazel Blears and Shahid Malik, the local parties backed the disgraced MPs.  The report into the expenses scandal by Sir Thomas Legg, confirmed that the former home secretary, Jacqui Smith, had wrongly claimed over £24,000 a year on her second home allowance - but all she had to do was deliver an apology.  Any benefits cheat would have been jailed. 

    Gordon Brown ruled that the Communities Minister Hazel Blears’ flipping her second home and avoiding capital gains tax was “unacceptable behaviour”.  But it appears to be acceptable in Her Majesty’s Cabinet.  For, after pressure from Blears, the prime minister cravenly back-tracked and said that she was "doing a great job".   We soon learned why Brown had to give in : other cabinet ministers were in the same disreputable boat and were making clear that if the PM didn’t back them the government might fall.  Geoff Hoon, the Transport Secretary had made a gain of £300,000 on his second home,  paid for on expenses, without paying any capital gains tax, and despite having had the use of a grace and favour residence at Admiralty House in London.  James Purnell, the work and pensions secretary, had also flipped homes in order to avoid tax on profits made on a London property financed by his expenses. He even billed the taxpayer for an accountant to help him avoid tax.   Brown is not secure enough in his post to stand up even to a cabinet of crooks. 

   Of course, they were victims of “the system” as they keep saying; MPs didn’t break any rules. But in the court of public opinion - as Harriet Harman memorably put it -  they are guilty as hell. Pocketing hundreds of thousands of pounds on properties bought with public money is legal theft. MPs expenses are there to allow parliamentarians to do their jobs, to give them accommodation when they are in London. The second homes allowance is not there to provide not seed corn for property empires.  Any financial gain  made on property transactions financed by the public purse should to back to the public purse. 

   Resignations and deselectons are needed, not just for spectacle or to appease the mob, but to vindicate the honest MPs who didn’t stick their snouts in the trough.  And yes there are some.  The Labour MP, Laura Moffat, could have cashed in like Hoon, but chose instead to sleep on a camp bed in her office when the house is sitting late.  Not all MPs were waiting nervously for the four o’clock phone call from the Daily Mail. The Stroud MP David Drew travels standard class to London and stays in a Premier Inn.  Chris Mullin, the former Labour minister shot to fame last week for claiming a black and white television licence. There are hundreds of MPs who have not been flipping, bending, fiddling and dipping - but if the guilty ones are exonerated, what incentive do they have to stay clean?  Where is natural justice?

  At least David Cameron has been prepared to condemn the worst practices of Tory MPs without equivocation, and has made clear that any member not willing to pay the Legg levy will not be allowed to stand as a Conservative MP .  Mind you, since half of them are standing down, this is something of an empty threat.  Cameroan made clear to Anthony Steen that the public did have a right to know, and that it was time for him to go.  He condemned the duck house MP, Sir Peter  Viggers unreservedly and while he has not actually withdrawn the whip from  the miscreants, he has been prepared to draw a moral line in the sand.  He forced his closest aide, Andrew Mackay, to resign after it emerged that he and his wife had been “double flipping” and charging both their London and their constituency homes to expenses. Cameron has not condemned the practice of profiting from second homes. This may not be unconnected to the fact that he is one of the beneficiaries of this arrangement. He also claimed money to have his wisteria removed which is not quite in the duck house league, but an eyebrow-raiser nevertheless. 

   There’s no doubt that Gordon Brown has come out worst from this affair, and not just because Sir Thomas Legg told him to pay back £12,000.  He has been weak, blustering, confused.  He told MPs at prime ministers question time last May that holding an  election would cause “chaos”, a remark which betrayed a contempt for democracy in a leader who gained his office without any election at all.   Brown’s premiership is now beyond hope, his government heading for the rocks, his reputation destroyed. . 

  However, there is something more to be considered here than just the constitution, desperately though that is in need of reform.  The collapse of parliament’s moral authority has not taken place in a vacuum; it is part of a general decline in standards of public life over the last three decades.  We have seen the leaders of great institutions, like Sir Fred Goodwin of Royal Bank of Scotland, shamelessly enrich themselves why they helped to destroy their own companies and undermine British economy.  Anti social behaviour by plutocrats has wrecked the security of a million of families who face unemployment in an economic recession caused by excessive leverage and risk-taking by the banks. And now politicians are up there with the bankers as candidates for the lamp post decoration. 

    I have spent  nearly thirty years watching politicians in Westminster and Holyrood, but even I have been astonished to discover what has been going on.   Of course, the Fees Office is partly to blame for running a lax system, but that doesn’t explain why so many Labour  MPs, none of whom came into politics for the money, turned to self enrichment.  I think it may go back to the “prawn cocktail” offensive in 1992, when the late Labour leader, John Smith, with colleague Mo Mowlem, launched a campaign to persuade the City of London that they were safe with Labour.  Thereafter Labour MPs became much closer to the financial world, and many rising Labour politicians, like Patricia Hewitt, spent time working for city institutions. Mo Mowlem married a banker.  Financiers from Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch spent time in the cabinet office, and took prominent roles in government, like Baroness Shriti Vadera, Brown’s key city adviser.

   Some time after the turn of the century, as the property boom began in the South East of England, and bankers started paying themselves colossal bonuses, MPs stopped measuring themselves against the standards of their constituents and took to comparing themselves to the financial types they had taken to rubbing shoulders with in the City.  From Tony Blair down, they resented seeing people with no better qualifications then they had earning mega-salaries.  Unable to afford decent London houses, they used their flexible friend, the expense account, to even the score, surfing the housing boom to make themselves feel just that little bit richer.  What never seems to have occurred to them was that the property bubble they were benefiting from was crucifying young families with debt. 

   Now the property bubble has burst and so has their credibility. Labour was captured by the financial interests in the city in much the same was as were the regulators in the Financial Services Authority. They felt both financially and intellectually inferior to the money managers, which is why they allowed the credit and property bubble to inflate to disastrous proportions.  Tony Blair, true to form, got out when the going was good, and now has a comfortable sinecure in JP Morgan bank.  But the rest of them, now dreading the prospect of having to face the voters in an election, have been left high and dry.  They are loathed by their constituents, abused by the media, and laughed at by politicians in countries with much lesser claims to parliamentary probity.  The members of the duck house parliament will go down as among the most disreputable in the long history of British democracy. The only positive is that they have ensured, by their behaviour, that parliament and the British constitution, must now be subject to radical and irreversible reform.