After the catastrophic mismanagement of the economy and other aspects of British society, the Labour Party should be facing a massive defeat at the next election. However, recent opinion polls have predicted a very slim majority for the Conservatives.

Let me introduce the Labour Party’s secret weapon: George Osborne MP, please stand up! I can’t quite work out whether the Shadow Chancellor is an imbecile. He throws up a lot of daft suggestions, but then so does Boris Johnson and I don’t really think Boris is an imbecile. Boris’s apparent barminess is an integral part of his persona; he has a certain wit and charm and, more importantly, his bumbling manner allows him to make abrupt changes of policy when he has encounters public opposition or realises belatedly that an idea isn’t quite as good as it appeared to be.

I do hope George Osborne will prove to be as adaptable as Boris. His latest - particularly preposterous - proposal is to sell off shares in the nationalised banks early at a discount. It is hard to envisage a more effective mechanism for transferring vast sums of money from the poor to the rich than this. Poor people have no spare cash lying around to buy shares, so only the rich will buy them - and they will be buying them from all the other taxpayers who cannot afford to buy them - at a discount!

Forget what I said before. I think I can work out whether George Osborne is an imbecile.

The Labour government under Tony Blair and then Gordon Brown has been a complete disaster on so many levels that it is hard to choose any specific reason to get rid of them, but here are a few:

1. The invasion of Iraq on the specious ground that Saddam Hussein possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction. If Tony Blair didn’t realise that this was wrong, he should have. He even ignored warnings from the security services that invading Iraq would make Britain less secure. As predicted, it has stimulated recruitment of islamic terrorists (a term banned by the BBC).
2. Gordon Brown’s raid on on pension funds, which was used to finance ill-conceived and grandiose public spending schemes and social engineering (another term for buying votes).
3. Disastrous Public Finance Initiative schemes which will see vast outflows from the tax payer to private companies for many decades to come. How these shabby confidence tricks accord with Brown’s much-vaunted Presbyterian Conscience it is hard to conceive. From the outset PFI schemes (originally devised by the Tories) have been constructed to place the risk with the taxpayer and the rewards with private companies. A particularly shameful example (although there are many others) is the London Underground PFI scheme which has not only delivered pitifully little but has also landed the London taxpayer with an enormous bill when the Metronet consortium went into administration. The other Underground PFI consortium, Tube Lines, is way behind schedule and has been trying to extract more money from the Tax Payer.
4. The disastrous tripartite system of controlling financial services which left each of the three responsible parties - the Treasury, the Bank of England and the FSA - confused about its role.

I could go on.

Tony Blair bleated about attacks on his integrity at the time of the Kelly Inquiry. Will he have the temerity to bleat again, now that the former Director of Public Prosecutions has put into words what so many of us were thinking?

Kevin Macdonald QC said:

It is now very difficult to avoid the conclusion that Tony Blair engaged in an alarming subterfuge with his partner George Bush and went on to mislead and cajole the British people into a deadly war they had made perfectly clear they didn’t want, and on a basis that it’s increasingly hard to believe even he found truly credible.

Revelations about the invasion of Iraq just keep on coming. Sir John Scarlett told the inquiry into the invasion that intelligence indicating that battlefield munitions could be made ready in 45 minutes were misinterpreted by the government as referring to chemical or biological weapons - WMDs.

Now Tony Blair has disclosed that he would have thought it right to invade Iraq even if he’d known that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction.

I would be the first to admit that Saddam Hussein was a very unpleasant dictator (although this didn’t stop the US government from backing him for many years) but the UK and US broke international law in the most flagrant way. Their actions will be used as an excuse to annex attractive neighbouring countries by despots the world over. British security services warned the government before the invasion that it would increase rather than decrease the terrorist threat to the UK and there is every reason to believe that they were right.

This has been one of the most disreputable foreign escapades since the days of Cecil Rhodes.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer has announced a change to the age at which buss passes will be issued. I shall not now get mine until I am 63. GRRR!

Many months ago I wrote a long, rambling and rather intemperate letter to Ann Widdicombe MP about some remarks she made on Radio 4 concerning MPs’ expenses. I shan’t go into the details but I was most impressed by her long and detailed reply. I didn’t agree with everything she said but she made her points well.

I do not share her politics or her religious views (my own opinion being that all religion is just the most foolish peasant superstition, and no branch of Christianity more so than Catholicism) but I admire her honesty and integrity. She was in no way caught up in the expenses scandal herself and it is a great pity that she is planning to stand down at the next election.

I have underestimated Sir Fred Goodwin again. His pension is now apparently £703,000 per annum. Moreover, it appears that about half the amount was discretionary. So why did they pay it? The decision was apparently made in the early hours of the morning and the Government were not informed. The Chairman and the Remuneration Committee certainly have some explaining to do, and it would seem quite in order for the British Government, as the largest shareholder, to sue them. It won’t get the money back but it may serve to encourager les autres.

However, compared with the vast sums which the Government itself has squandered, and continues to squander, Sir Fred’s pension is unimportant. Having devised a scheme, the Public Finance Initiative, to rob the taxpayer blind while cooking the Government’s books, the Government is now going to bail out the very companies which made so much money from the scheme in the first place.

If it is right that Sir Fred should be hounded into returning at least some of his pension, it is surely even more appropriate that senior ministers and mandarins be expected to forego at least half their pensions.