Published: 16/02/2010 15:19 - Updated: 16/02/2010 15:25

May I wish all of you the very best for 2010, including a swift end to the difficult weather, with a big thank you to all those volunteers and public workers who have done their best to look after others during the cold snap.

 

Westminster began what will be an exciting year with a story straight out of the ‘you couldn’t make it up’ department, with the coup which never was last week.

A dying government has a few key traits which become obvious to the public, though rarely to the dwindling party faithful.

It begins to talk to itself, and believe its own publicity about how well it is doing when all around there is a rather different picture emerging.

It gets more strident about its opposition, again believing that everyone else automatically thinks the worst of them.

It never fails to pull out the most tired and fatuous of reasons for existence, that its experience means that it must be reelected, ‘no time for novices’ it says, conveniently forgetting how anti-democratic that must be, or that once upon a time they too were the inexperienced.

How do I know all this? I was a Minister in 1997, so trust me on this.

One of the last nails in the coffin is to become completely careless about appearing divided.

The public are fairly ruthless about this, in my experience. While often proclaiming that it likes its MPs to demonstrate some independence of thought, it does not like a Government to be fighting internal party battles while it should be concentrating on running the country.

It seems to take the public for granted, and they express their opinion very sharply at the ballot box.

If a party is seriously terminal, however, it ignores this. It believes that it is impregnable, and must be re-elected because of what it is saying about its opponents, so it does not matter if it sorts out its own local difficulty.

That is where the present Government is, and is the background to the coup attempt. Although I do not think Gordon Brown should carry on either, I think it sheer madness to try and ditch a party leader within weeks of a General Election.

Then for no-one to come forward and support the coup, when obviously that had been planned, compounds the error.

We now learn that Cabinet Ministers ‘extracted concessions’ from the PM in meetings last Wednesday afternoon.

The Chancellor was allowed to tell the truth about how bad the finances were, and that cuts were certain and Harriet Harman had her place confirmed on the election team. Oh, and Gordon announced he would not be a one-man band anymore.

We can’t go on like this. Give us a break.

This is an insult to the British people and no way to run a party or a Government.

When a Government is in such a crisis it stops thinking about the people and is only concerned for its own survival. The public deserve better.

There is only one election ballot we now need, in which Labour MPs can all play their part.

It is called a General Election, and we need one. Now.