After the long night, now for the night of the long knives....

It's 6am and I've just finished covering the local elections for our 30 this is websites - a very different kettle of fish from covering for one newspaper as I've done for most of my career.

Anyway, it's clear this has been a terrible night for Labour and that Blair is going to have to do something mighty big in today's reshuffle to knock this off the front pages.

The Labour Party - and even some of its traditional supporters in the media - is finally realising what some of us knew even before the last election - that Blair is now an electoral liability.

He got away with it in 2005 for the simple reason that he was up against Howard. But now the Tories have got themselves a half-decent leader, there's nowhere left to hide.

Surely the most chilling spectacle of the night for Blair will have been seeing Nick Brown, the grim-faced assassin from the North-East whom he sacked three years ago, telling David Dimbleby that something had to be done to halt the drift.

Asked whether there was anything Blair could actually do, Brown replied: "Well, he'll have to try." And if he fails, we all know what "Newky" will do next.

So what of the reshuffle? Well, there has been so much speculation about this over the past couple of days that I sense that literally anything could happen, and I'm not about to make an idiot of myself by making predictions that could look silly by the end of the day.

I reckon there'll be at least one big surprise, but whether it will be enough to save Blair is surely very much in doubt.

The problem isn't Prescott, Clarke or Hewitt - it's Tony Blair

"This Government does not need another relaunch, still less another shifting of the deckchairs on the Titanic. It needs putting out of its misery – and fast."

That's my verdict on the Government's current troubles, as set out in my Saturday Column and accompanying Podcast.

Charles Clarke is clearly on the way out and I doubt that John Prescott will be that far behind him - but I don't think either of these things are going to fundamentally alter the fortunes of this increasingly wretched government.

Only a change at the top will do that.

New Enquirer column goes live

The newly-launched North-West Enquirer has kindly granted me another platform to air my views on national politics, regionalism and other matters in the shape of a weekly column.

My first effort focuses on a question that has surfaced several times on this blog - whether there can be a future for elected regional government in the wake of the North-East referendum defeat in November 2004.

My general take on this is that while it is currently extremely unlikely, the creeping regionalisation of public services such as the police and fire brigades means the issue is eventually likely to recur in some form.

You can read it in full by clicking here.