Liveblogging the Cabinet Reshuffle

Except there isn't any fucking reshuffle. All Gordo seems to have done is filled the empty spots along the trench where Blears, Smith, Purnell and Hutton had stood until they decided, not unreasonably, that charging the machine guns was preferable to another year under the command of the gibbering madman in the command bunker, "Melchett" Brown. Even then, as Ben Brogan rightly notes, Purnell glanced behind him as he went over the top, only to find his cabinet colleagues studiously avoiding his eyes as they wiped each others' blood off their bayonets.

(N.B. I am not the Devil's Kitchen.)

As for this letter that may or may not be circulating round Labour MPs calling for Cyclops to go, the email address that co-conspirators were supposed to contact to express support - signonnow@hotmail.co.uk, apparently - got leaked, and so the fuckwits behind all this are now getting comedy emails from the likes of "alistairdarlingisacunt@gmail.com" and "fuckyou_youmonocular_twat@hotmail.com". Talk about the shitest coup plot in political history.

Hilariously, having briefed all week that he was going to fuck Darling and replace him with Balls, Brown now finds that he does not have enough blood surging into his cock to actually do the deed, and so the badger-faced fanny stays in situ with, one presumes, a seething Balls ringing up to cancel the delivery vans as we speak. Pitiful. Say what you like about Caligula, the historical figure that our PM is increasingly coming most to resemble, but at least he actually had enough authority to make his fucking horse a consul.

And so we have... well, what? The Postman shunted into the Home Office - a nominal promotion, sure, but also a poisoned chalice. Hutton steps down with a cockamamy story about wanting to spend time with his family and carefully chosen words of support, thus inviting us to forget that he called it right long before Blair ever stepped down by saying that Gordo would be a "fucking disaster" as PM - though it didn't stop him, naturally, from voting for him in the shameful sham 'election' in which the hapless Fifer was crowned by acclamation. (These bastards got us into this mess, and now they don't have the brain cells between them to find a way out of it.)

We round things off with a few assorted dullards and non-entities being promoted to the front ranks as new cannon-fodder - or, as Obo puts it, "a selection of dimbulbs, fuckwits, prodnoses, makeweights, morons, twats and cunts have either resigned or failed to resign and an even less impressive selection of halfwits, lightweights, windowlickers, vegetables and nonentities have been called in to fill in the gaps" - and that's about it so far. Oh, and, most ludicrous of all, Sir Alan Sugar joining the team as "Enterprise Tsar", with Richard and Judy no doubt on the point of taking over the International Development brief. Jesus, talk about polishing a turd.

Really, this man is utterly hopeless. What is this, the great fightback? It's as if Sir Alex Ferguson, finding his team 2-0 down in a cup final, decided to roll the dice by putting John O'Shea in at centre forward. These are the sort of people you'd be disappointed to find running your local water board, let alone the great offices of state. Yet it looks at this moment, incredibly, as though Brown may stagger on, like the Black Knight in Monty Python's Holy Grail whose pointless belligerence is undimmed by the realisation that all his limbs have been cut off.

You see, the thing is that Prime Ministers cannot carry on, so we are told, once their authority is shot. Resignations, like those we've seen this week, fatally undermine their credibility, turn them into a laughing stock. But the problem here is that Brown was already all of those things - a walking joke, an empty shell, a grunting, monosyllabic pillar of shit. How do you undermine something that has already lost all visible means of support? How do you discredit a punchline?

The Tories must be loving this, and it would be wildly dishonest of me not to admit to a planet-sized case of schadenfreude. But, while this goes on, we have the worst of both worlds; a government that is doing nothing, passing no laws, promoting no real (as opposed to imagined) programmes or initiatives, yet still siphoning off grotesque amounts of our money to fund its wasteful schemes. While this goes on, we are effectively - at least in political terms - a failed state. In Normandy tomorrow, Prince Charles will have more bloody legitimacy. What a sorry spectacle we are.

Much as I'm enjoying the long, drawn-out death agony of this government of shallow, self-serving, corrupt bastards, it really is time that they put us out of their misery. Enough already.


(cross-posted from Mr Eugenides)