Go To Your Happy Place

At a time when Plan B is desperately needed - when UK MPs are required to process the narrow but unambiguous rejection of their advice and get on with the job that they were elected to do - those who have found it easiest to adjust are the ones who are just pushing Plan A. The SNP (led by the person who is currently probably today the UK's most popular politician on any side: pocket dynamo Nicola Sturgeon) thinks that Scottish Independence may be the answer. Sinn Féin feels that Irish Independence may do the trick. Conservative MPs are getting down to the serious business of trying to stop Boris Johnson getting to Number 10. And Labour MPs are trying to remove Jeremy Corbyn.

Removing Jeremy Corbyn is, of course, not so much the Plan A of Labour MPs as the One Plan To Rule Them All. Since this mild-mannered and rather bland specimen of Far Left extremism was foisted on them by the contemptible rank & file they have been waiting on the steps of the capitol with a murderous gleam in their collective eye hoping to catch sight of him cycling by, but have been repeatedly cheated of their prey. They were already to pounce after the Oldham West & Royton by-election last year (which confounded their hopes by resulting in a ringing Labour victory) and almost did so at the time of the underwhelming council election results in May. Had he delivered in terms of the election failure that all Labour MPs so clearly covet, he would have been gone by now.

Under the circumstances, the Parliamentary Labour Party has picked now as its time to strike (if strike be quite the word for the centrist wing of the party with its inherent mistrust of unions). Seemingly, the EU referendum result is to be laid at his door due to the tepidity with which he campaigned for a Remain victory.

Well, that's the ostensible reason at least.

Setting aside for now the question about whether changing the leader is wise at such a time of convulsion, what is the benefit to the party to remove anyone, let alone the leader, on the basis of a lack of Euro-enthusiasm? Broadly there are two options: Brexit or a rejection of the Brexit vote by the political elites. If the political elites refuse to enact Brexit (which may still happen) then it doesn't really matter where people were on the referendum. On the other hand, if Brexit is going to be enacted then it will require Brexiters, Bremainers and everyone between those two camps to come to the aid of the country.

Labour can turn itself into the perfect pro-Bremain party, but that transformation will be too late to be anything but position the party on the other side of the question from the majority view of its voters, and any leader palatable to the PLP will almost certainly be someone whose wisdom on the question has just been rejected by the electorate.

Of course, Labour MPs are not thinking straight at all. They know that Cameron is going, that a general election may be years closer at hand than expected and that the bloody business of decapitation needs to be done now. In response to the crisis, they have gone to their happy place not by means of calm meditation & positive visualisation but with a massive intracardiac injection of whatever high-potency variant of cocaine fuels them. They think that - like Mia Wallace in Pulp Fiction - all they will do is thrash around the floor for a second and sit bolt upright with everything alright again.

Except - like Mia Wallace in Pulp Fiction - what they think is cocaine may be a fatal overdose of something else.

Careful What You Wish For

Like participants in an especially hedonistic stag party, UK voters awakened today to the challenge of distinguishing reality from the ghastly fever dream that had troubled their sleep. A dawning realisation will be transferred from face to face as people pass one another on the street and look nervously away. By God, it's true, we did that.

That (for those tripping over this very small corner of the internet whilst looking for something else in years to come) is this: the UK voted to leave the EU. Yes, the Little Train That Couldn't, did, and it turns out that Casey Jones was at the engine, going full steam to catastrophe.

When many of us went to bed last night we did so in a markedly different world: Farage had reputedly conceded; David Dimbleby had announced that the pro-EU campaign seemed to have prevailed; and even the pro-Leave talking heads seemed to think that the issue had been settled for the status quo. This consensus, however, was based on the idea that a large turnout would favour Remain: a narrative that was at odds with what many were saying about the demographic of their supporters. If those who vote Remain are the most educated, metropolitan, Guardian-reading members of society, aren't these the people who reliably vote in every election? Who were these other people registering and voting in large numbers? Why was the assumption that people who took too little interest in politics to vote in a General Election were suddenly rallying to the flag of the European Union?

The reality of the matter - that the Leave campaign had prevailed on the basis of a massive turnout - has proven to be a national act of civil disobedience. The vice anglais was well-named: the British people has cast aside its safe word and asking to be whipped a little harder please Miss. We're often told in the political context that turkeys don't vote for Christmas, yet the UK electorate has basted itself, cooked itself to perfection and has a saucière of cranberry sauce balanced on its left wing.

Quite why that is we will probably never know because the votes that swung this referendum are not the votes that we could see (the active, UKIP-voting people of Middle England who could be heard on every radio debate prior to voting day) but the votes that we couldn't: the quiet, unannounced votes that tipped the balance.

But if you're looking around today for someone to blame in the weeks, months, perhaps years to come, it's worth bearing in mind that the referendum only took place due to a cynical piece of manoeuvring from the man who professed to want it least. David Cameron jeopardised (History may say "sacrificed") his entire nation solely to minimise the UKIP vote at the last General Election, promising a referendum that would/could never pass in a bid to cling to power. On the morning after the night before, he proved to be not the result's only - but certainly its most prominent - casualty.

If the poets have tragedies yet to write then let them ponder that.

The Little Train That Couldn't

If you believe the mythology of these things, Neil Kinnock sunk Labour's chances of victory in the 1992 General Election at a rally in Sheffield where he uttered the deathless soundbite "We're alright!" The rally - which fittingly took place on April Fool's Day - is notable as being just about the last time in British political history that a politician ever made the mistake of showing spontaneous feeling at a conference podium. But the sentiment was at least positive.

Two days out from the EU Referendum, Sordel is ready to capitulate to the prevailing logic. Cameron has me convinced. The Department of Trade & Industry can't negotiate trade agreements. Countries investing in Britain are not after anything that we have to trade; they are primarily interested in our access to the Continental marketplace. Membership of NATO and the United Nations counts for nothing, and if you're pining for The Commonwealth, pine on Grandad. Britain cannot make it on its own, and certainly not with any of the likely potential pilots at the helm.

And this isn't sarcasm.

There is, admittedly, a positive argument for remaining in the EU. We're better inside helping shape the decisions than outside suffering the consequences of them. This affords the UK to effect genuine global change through multilateral action with European partners irrespective of their frankly waning power and relevance. None of that is wrong; people join exclusive clubs for a reason and they don't give up membership on a whim or without qualms.

But the positive logic is as nothing compared with the negative logic of staying in Europe. The UK didn't need an EU to shape international affairs in the past, but then it had leaders who would not have dreamed of devoting months of their time fighting a completely unnecessary referendum on the basis of the UK's fundamental weakness.

This is not party political sniping: Labour, Conservatives and Lib Dems (whatever happened to them?) are as one on this point. It can't be done, and - if it could - we can't do it.

Maybe some other UK with some other leader. Not this one. Not with Cameron, or Corbyn, or (let me check my notes) Tim Farron. Not with Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage or Michael Gove either, lest you think that Sordel dreams of princes across the sea.

If you can't trust your politicians, Brexit is too big a risk to take, which is why I cannot vote for it.

Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Slogan, and the slogan for these times is this: "We're All Wrong."

Your Cheating Heart

The Times leader today has a lesson for those of us interested in the ethical status of tax avoidance: "Tax avoidance is not justified solely by the plea that it is within the law. Tax avoidance is a way of playing the system to gain reward that has not genuinely been earned. It is, indeed, a form of cheating."

Not so, O mighty Some-guy-behind-an-editor's-desk. If a game has rules and you play within the rules, then you are not cheating. There is no "spirit of the rules" to a game: Fool's Check is not a friendly thing to do to someone, but it is an exploitation of a position on which the rules of Chess pass no comment. In Chess, if you're stupid enough to walk into Fool's Check, tough luck.

While tax avoidance does, therefore, seem to have some sort of ethical character, it is precisely not cheating. (Which is just as well, because I'm not sure that cheating is immoral either, in and of itself.)

You might counter: this is not a game, it is people's lives & livelihoods. And you'd be right. But for someone to be cheating on the tax non-game, you'd need to show that there are two parties to the relationship, and most of us do not sign up to be taxed.

In the extreme, it's like saying that you would be cheating not to mention the fiver you have in your back pocket in the course of being mugged. Tax money is not a voluntary payment and most of us have it subtracted by our employer before we ever get our hands on a wage.

Before you tell me that there's an implicit Social Contract ... who told you that? Was it the guy who has your wallet, by any chance, and is haring down the nearest ally to blow your money on foreign wars and bail-outs for bankers? Did he mention that he was only going spend your money on the National Health Service and the Police Services before or after he relieved you of your watch & wedding ring?

Moreover, HMRC does not play within the rules of a game: it makes the rules. But the most ghastly rules ever made with regard to taxation is this: you are now regarded as morally culpable if you do something deemed intended to avoid tax.

Imagine that you are driving your car at 49 mph in a 50 mph speed limit, when you are pulled over by the police. It seems that driving at 49 mph is now deemed as penalty avoidance and the police rely on those penalties to support policing in the area. You have a car more than capable of 130 mph, you wealthy bastard. Stop grinding the faces of people who can only afford a bicycle.

Then when you get home there's a letter from HMRC condemning you for attempting to avoid VAT by saving your money rather than spending it: they have ordered a new television for you and charged your credit card accordingly. Oh, and they find that you could afford the mortgage on a house in a higher Council Tax band, so the furniture van will be calling next Thursday, some time between midnight and midnight.

Oh, and if it's against the law to enter into a scheme to avoid paying tax, there will be a lot of people after the next election looking very shame-faced ... because avoiding tax has always been the strongest reason for voting Conservative.

Cameron Behind

A report in The Huffington Post this morning suggests that Tory activists have been using tactical voting methods in the London mayoral elections in an effort to push Liberal Democrats candidate Brian Paddick into a humiliating fourth or fifth place.

Even The Huffington Post's own article suggests that the number of voters using this tactic may be very low, but it is sadly indicative of the times that it should even have been formulated.

Ever since the Tories romped back to power, they have behaving like someone who has stepped in something, desperately scraping the soles of their shoes in order to remove the Lib Dems. Indeed, for the first year of the coalition government both Labour and the Conservatives found common ground in their desire to return the Lib Dems to their former state of total unelectability.

That was all very well when the Conservatives were working towards the idea of a clean victory in 2015, but right now hopes of that seem to be draining away.

Moreover, events may yet conspire to strengthen the Lib Dems' hand. Remember Business Secretary Vince Cable, whose responsibilities to oversee News Corp's bid for BSkyB were removed from him and given to Jeremy Hunt? At the time Cable was made to look very stupid by a Daily Telegraph sting (which was later the subject of a successful complaint to the Press Complaints Commission). Now, however, he looks remarkably like the only British politician to shake hands with the Murdochs and retain his small change & pocket watch.

To a different extent the same can be said of Clegg himself. Having been variously depicted as hapless, clueless and ineffectual, he can scarcely be portrayed now as having anything more than a bystander role in the policies that have proved most unpopular for the coalition. While George Osborne was preparing his politically catastrophic budget, Clegg & Cable were pushing the idea of a "Mansion Tax".

As fig leaves go it may be small, but it beats going around stark bollock naked.

Of course, the recovery in Lib Dem fortunes has been predicted more often than the end of the world, the only difference between them being that at some point the world assuredly will end. Of less concern to the Conservatives than the rise of the Lib Dems, however, will be their own fall: something in which they are likely to prove the principal architect. Had they kept the Lib Dems relatively strong, they might have prevented Labour from jumping from third place into first in the Birmingham council elections last night.

In an ideal world the Lib Dems could act like a hedge fund for the Tories: an opportunity to invest both in ice creams and umbrellas. Right now - as Britain wrings out its prematurely knotted handkerchiefs beneath the pitilessly grey Spring skies - Cameron seems to have gone full-tilt into the ice cream business.

Gang Aft Aglay

The question posed by the Book of Job can now be recast. No longer do we wonder what it is that mankind has done to earn the wrath of God. Instead we can boil it down to a single person.

What has David Miliband done to have deserved being so cruelly smitten by The Lord?

Daviband (for lo, thus is he known in nutshells) has been awaiting the moment of his brother's downfall with the patience of Richard of Gloucester putting in the monthly order for barrels of Malmsey. His Acme 100-ton weight was already nicely hanging from the merest of canine whiskers above his brother, and - in the event that this failed - his denizens (betoga'd and fully equipped with the contents of a Sabatier display case) were ready to greet Ediband on the steps of any convenient government building.

Yet Ediband - and not through any great display of competence on his own part - seems about to saunter past every lethal trap with the slightly distracted air of one standing upon a precipice to admire butterflies.

Cameron (the swinish toff) had gone and messed it all up on the metaphorical eve of the May council elections, falling so precipitously in the public esteem that the only precedent is said to be the pride & joy of Old Mother Brown. Since becoming as unpopular as Gordon logically necessitates the occurrence of a miracle, we can be sure that The Creator Himself has His thumb in the scale.

Not since Pharoah hardened his heart has a human been blighted more pitilessly than Daviband. His Lamentations must indeed constitute a Jeremiad ... not least given the Culture Secretary's looming presence at the end of the list of plagues.

Why do bad things happen to such good people?

Only a vile Manichaeist, surely, would suggest that Daviband's ultimate goal of leading Labour to the Promised Land has been scotched not by the malevolence of God but by the actions of t'other fellow.

Yet ... take a look at that photo and tell me that horns and a tail wouldn't complete the picture.

From Eton To Cheatin'?

Had Sordel started cracking this particular nutshell little over a week ago then its kernel might well have been the resilience and avuncular charm of David Cameron. Obviously one distrusts anyone who rises far in British Politics, since one cannot be a Snake Charmer without (at the very least) having more access to venomous serpents than is decent or proper in any human being. Nevertheless, Cameron has an air of broad decency that is difficult to gainsay.

If Cameron has a type, it is surely that of the young housemaster: unfailingly smooth with parents and boys, capable of the winning joke but also with just enough steel to suggest that one wouldn't want to be carpeted by him for smoking in the dorm. He gives the impression of being utterly fair-minded, though his dealings with Miliband Minor also have the sort of cheerful brutality that might send a fat boy on an impromptu cross-country run.

Quite how the nickname "Flashman" has attached itself to Cameron is hard to say, since he is very much more the type to have handed Flashman his prefect's badge.

Except that now he faces the dual accusation of swiping Granny's gin-money and pocketing a sizeable series of donations to the Conservative Party in return for an invitation for to dinner.

Where did it all go so wrong?

Part of the problem, of course, is that Cameron (being fair-minded himself) doesn't expect others to be such colossal bounders. Such is his innocence that he honestly believes that decreasing the highest taxation rate from 50% to 45% will encourage those previously evading tax to pay it. It would never occur to him that this is akin to a shop's offering reduced prices in an effort to appease shoplifters.

Another thing that Cameron's straight bat will not block is the politician who wants to spin a broadly neutral tax measure as a swinging tax increase for the elderly and infirm. Only the Conservative Party at its most ingenuous can believe that it would be given the benefit of the doubt when cutting pensioners' tax allowances, but ingenuousness is Cameron's stock in trade. One might call it his Achilles' Heel were he not so clearly more of the Hector stamp.

And finally, it would never occur to Cameron that there was anything in the least improper about opening up pot luck chez David & Samantha to wealthy business interests. These are just the sort of fellows that he's been dining with all his life, after all, and what greater evidence of personal integrity than kicking in a couple of hundred thousand to the club funds?

The problem is not so much that he might be cheating himself, then, as that he might be cheerfully oblivious to the illicit still in the prefects' common room.

A gentlemanly bearing is all very well & good ... so long as one is only required to deal with gentlemen. But when, as a politician, can you count on doing that?

Tomfoolery

Here's a challenge: try to think of some characters from Four Weddings and a Funeral and write down either the character name or the name of the actor or at least some distinguishing characteristic. Four or five should do.

Go ahead, I'll wait.

All done?

Now, take a look down your list and see if you have Tom, played by James Fleet. You may have described him as "upper class nitwit and brother to Kristin Scott Thomas's character, Fiona", although if so you would seem to have been taking this exercise more seriously than I anticipated.

What's that you say? Not at the top? Didn't really think so.

Now, to my point. Sordel believes that the very best that David Cameron can do in his entire career is to come away with a place in people's hearts as dear as James Fleet's Tom. That's it. It doesn't get any better. Cameron was never going to be the romantic lead of British Politics.

Tom is the quintessential example of the tolerable aristocrat. If someone were building a guillotine, his would be the last head in line for the basket, and by the time he arrived for execution he would have so won over the crowd that he would be set free with a gentle cuff of the ear.

Under the terms of their Hippocratic Oath, all would-be Toms fall under a strict enjoinder to "do no harm". They are also sternly admonished to keep well out of the way of trouble: something that Cameron has managed quite ably thus far, but "Golly ... bloody Thunderbolt City!" is still some way off.

If one is aiming to be Tom, the last thing one wants to do is to create the impression that your jacket is out at the elbows from brushing up against the likes of Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks.

Moreover, finding yourself on the other side of the issue to Hugh Grant, unlikely wielder of the Sword of Truth, is definitely a misstep.

The trouble with Tom is that really, deep down, the British Public has an instinctive hatred for him that only some clever mugging and a self-deprecating joke can attenuate. He who would be Fleet must first be fleet.

The News of the World scandal is Cameron's first real crisis, and it will be very interesting to see how he weathers it.

Those Nine Preferences In Full

Under the Alternative Vote system, voters would get (would have got) the ability to register up to nine voting preferences, which is all very well and good, but I got to the Voting Station this morning and made a disturbing discovery.

I don't even have a first preference.

While certainly I have been an undecided voter in earlier elections, this is the first time that I have looked at the voting form without having given any real thought for which party I would like to support with the mickle might of my vote.

Moreover, this was not just a "Lib Dems or Labour" thing. Even David Cameron - a man who probably used to wear a morning suit to buy his morning newspaper but now makes much show of not being able to put his hands on one for a Royal Wedding - was in with a chance of the Sordellian imprimatur.

Nick Clegg, aka the Leader of Her Majesty's Opposition, could well have swung it for the Lib Dems. Ediband The Unknown could have taken it for Labour. It was certainly not unthinkable that the Greens would stand secure beneath the impregnable aegis of my cross.

The problem, though, was not a lack of interest, but a genuine lack of what for want of a better word one must call an Alternative. If it's true that the Eskimos have an unusually large number of words for snow (and according to Wikipedia it isn't) then we had better start working on a larger vocabulary for the otherwise indistinguishable shades of political platform upon which we are invited to lavish our electoral enthusiasm.

It's a sad day for something-or-other when one has a more decided preference on what socks to wear than one does for which party should govern, but that seems to be my predicament.

(Admittedly, Sordel is unusually attached to socks, like a recently-liberated house elf.)

Still, it's comforting to think that despite my near-complete aporia, my vote will have been registered with the same vanishing significance as someone who actually cares.

Not Just For Christmas

David Cameron (whom, for these purposes, let us imagine in full Little Lord Fauntleroy garb with copious lace and silk knee-pants) must have cut an eager figure as he approached the harassed Obama for a new war. "I'll feed it, and walk it, and you won't even know it's there," he must have implored.

Forgetting that this is what Sasha and Malia told him about Bo (his only surviving election promise) the embattled president seems to have reluctantly agreed, the fit measurement of that reluctance being that he has left Libya in the hands of Cameron and Sarkozy while he addressed more pressing issues, such as the fact that his entire government is on the brink of being shut down.

And, indeed, Cameron and Sarkozy did walk the war, proudly and ardently ... for about twelve hours. Now, with matted fur and an unsettlingly wolfish expression of resentment, it is defecating on the hall carpet and howling through the night.

The last time Britain and France went on their own without American leadership was, of course, the Suez crisis, when at least we had Israel, the world's most bellicose nation, doing some fighting for us. As a world leader (and I use the the word leader loosely) the last news that you want to hear is that the U.S. has ceded control of the air operation to you.

This is a bit like a young comedian getting on the bill with Billie Crystal and then learning that Crystal isn't intending to do any of the jokes himself.

Currently, the losers in this situation are the Libyan rebels, who should really have looked up the phrase "Iraqi Kurds" on Wikipedia before they took up arms.

Disastrous though the current situation is, however, there is worse to come for the people of Libya. If NATO gets its way, and Qaddafi is toppled, normal civilians in Tripoli and Benghazi may well come to view these as "the good old days".

And as for the puppy ... it's a rottweiler ... with a gentle disposition ... and has never showed any signs at all of wanting to savage the small boys who currently only pay it attention to poke it with a stick.

From Eton to Beaten?

There has always been a trace of the Asian knock-off about David Cameron. The kid down the street was making all the running with its New Labour logo, and the Conservatives wanted one too, but there was always the suspicion that you'd get a hundred yards down the track and the stitching would come out. With the climax of the Ashcroft debacle, the Nike Heir-to-Blair label is definitely starting to peel off.

This fiasco is hardly a -gate or a scandal, but it has certainly been a running sore. For months, Tory politicians straying unwarily in front of the cameras have repeatedly been forced to squirm miserably at the name of Michael "I-can-get-that-honour-for-you-wholesale" Ashcroft. Indeed, it is arguable that the value to Labour of this constant emasculation of Conservative speakers has been worth more to it than the final revelation: that Ashcroft did what any other businessman in his position would have done and protected his income from the Inland Revenue.

Quite frankly, if there's a businessman who cheerfully foregoes the tax loophole, I'm not sure I want him at the shoulder of political power, whispering and advising.

The problem is not what Ashcroft did or did not do. It's Cameron.

For months he and Hague have seemingly been hanging their heads and mumbling in a corner, hoping to God that they would never have to be forced to admit that Ashcroft was diddling the British taxpayer. Sordel cares little that the Conservatives have been so spineless, but it is terrible that they have been so unprepared. Like the MPs whose last vestige of protection - the wisp of lawn on their marble nudity - was the hope that their expenses would never be published, Cameron and co. appear to have been sleepwalking towards their doom.

Where was the bold counterattack that Cameron should have had in his back pocket, ready for this situation?

Instead, he simpered about his delight that Lord Ashcroft had decided, voluntarily (and the people at the Oxford English Dictionary will be examining this new definition for future validity), to 'fess up to his private tax arrangements. Yes, Cameron looked delighted. (Delighted, adj., experiencing the sensation of dejection appropriate to one unrepentant yet discovered in wrongdoing).

So, now Gordon Brown is in possession of a retort that will be crafted by his speechwriters for the live debates. Here are some he can have for free:

"Where was his concern for our brave fighting men and women in Afghanistan when he took for his political campaigns money that ought to have been paid to equip them?"

"Let him lecture me on the good stewardship of the public finances once he has control over the money flowing, unscrutinised, into the coffers of his own party."

"His only clear policy is to maintain a system of honours that he has shown himself all too ready to manipulate to his party's financial ends."

"It is a strange campaigner for Education whose own knowledge of Geography led him to believe that Belize was in the British Isles."

And so on.

Haplessness is an unattractive quality in a politician. This is a very bad time for Cameron to make it his most prominent quality.

Snow News Day

Much to the surprise of BBC editors, they have had to shelve their customary plans to drum up interest in obscure social and overseas stories during the sleepy New Year period. B-roll reports on the condition of women, animals or possibly agriculture in countries hitherto unknown to Thomas Cook were returned to their hard drives unplayed. Tales of marital discord, credit card fraud and the drinking habits of feral teenagers were held over until the stars (or at least, the heavens) were propitious.

Instead, it has been all hands to the pump as the necessity arose to cover something rarely dreamt of in their philosophy. News.

As in, something actually happening.

Admittedly, what was happening was only weather, which happens all day every day whether it is covered by the BBC or not. Nevertheless, weather in general is to be distinguished from photogenic weather, and what can be more visually appealing than the sight of every regional news reporter in Britain shivering in a snowfall for hour after pitiless hour? ("Let's go back to Amanda, who is going to tell us about school closures while standing outside some gates in Cheshire ..." smirked the presenters, probably squirming their feet joyfully in Christmas's fleecy slippers.)

News 24 has come of age ... as a blood sport. No wonder Sordel was hooked.

As it turns out, however, not only does bad news come in threes, but news in general seems to as well, for today was also the opening of the hunting season, a.k.a. the first PMQs of the parliamentary New Year. Undesked from his office, shot full of that most bracing of stimulants (Fear) and determined to shake off his seasonal disappointment at being named GQ's Worst Dressed Man of the Year, Gordon was brimming with vim as he tackled Cincinnati Kid Cameron.

Cameron got in one exquisite dig (approximately: "At least when lean over to say "I love you, Darling" I can do it with sincerity") but Gordon was back at him in a flash. If wordplay can be likened to the experimental rough-and-tumble of a pair of Labrador puppies, they were all wagging tails and bitten ears for five minutes before coming, panting, to a halt. A good day for both and every expectation that their respective party faithful would bear them shoulder-height to greatness.

Sadly (well, for one of our protagonists) the third piece of news hit just before 1pm and scattered even snowshowers before it. Geoff Whoon? and Patricia Who-it? - two minor Labour bulbs who must be grateful that anonymity, like virginity, never quite grows back - launched what was rather optimistically described as a "coup".

Given that Whoon? is actually a former Defence Secretary, it is saddening to note the lack of military planning that went into this insurgency. By the evening most of those micturating out of the cabinet had disappointed the hopes of those micturating in the complementary direction by swearing blood oaths in Gordon's favour. Wet shoes were certainly experienced by all parties - not least the shoes of David Milliband, who demonstrates himself to be sodden through and invertebrate at every opportunity - but once Mrs Brown's little boy is tucked up in bed tonight he can take great comfort that the snow seems to have more sticking power than his opponents.

BBC news reporters and cabinet ministers seem to be of one mind one the subject: it's cold outside.