Blair must go

Peter Oborne explained in his recent book that one of the defining characteristics of the "political class" was the belief that their continuance in office is more important than any quaint notions of accountability for organisational failure. We saw it with Tony Blair when he refused to resign in the wake of the Butler Inquiry despite its devastating finding that intelligence on Iraqi WMD was distorted, and now we're seeing it with his namesake Sir Ian Blair over the equally damning de Menezes verdict.

David Davis, Nick Clegg and Iain Dale are right. He should go. Am I the only person who finds it both surprising and depressing that it is a Labour Government that should be seeking to defend him?

Not the election day

As other bloggers have already pointed out, today would have been General Election day had Gordon Brown announced a poll immediately after the end of the Conservative conference as was speculated at the time.

Interestingly one of the key calculations in Gordon's dilemmma over whether to hold the first November election in living memory would have been the state of the weather, with conventional wisdom suggesting that the month's customarily gloomy days and dark evenings would have hit Labour's turnout disproportionately more than the Tories'.

Well, I can't speak for the rest of the country, but up here in Derbyshire today it's been positively summery, so if the weather really was a factor in the Prime Minister's decision, he probably needn't have worried.

But autumn sunshine or autumn rains, would Brown have won? No, I don't think so. I think the main movements in terms of seats would have been from Labour to SNP in Scotland and from Lib Dem to Tory in the South, with a small number of marginals changing hands directly from Labour to Tory.

The upshot of all that would have made Labour the biggest single party in a hung Parliament, which would really have been the worst of all outcomes for all three party leaders.

Gordon Brown, having thrown away a majority of 66 in a reckless gamble, would probably have had to resign. Sir Menzies Campbell would have tried to put together some sort of Lib-Lab coalition, but Nick Clegg and David Laws would have stopped him, and he would probably have had to go too.

As for David Cameron, he might have struggled to persuade his party to give him a second chance in a situation where many Tory MPs would have expected him to win outright.

The end result would almost certainly have been some sort of caretaker administration, and a second election next spring, quite possibly with three different party leaders. In a word: chaos.

Brown is his own Chancellor

Who runs the Treasury? asks Ben Brogan a propos of Downing Street's leaking of today's partial U-turn on capital gains tax.

"No one seriously expected the new Prime Minister to surrender all interest in his old department, but recent weeks suggest Mr Brown still has an office there," he says.

I'm not sure Ben or anyone else should be terribly surprised by this. History shows there are two sorts of Chancellors - those who have their own independent powerbase, like Denis Healey, Ken Clarke and Brown himself, and those who owe their power entirely to the Prime Minister, such as Anthony Barber, Norman Lamont, and Mr Darling.

From this list it will be seen that the more successful Chancellors tend to be the former variety, which bodes ill for Mr Darling's tenure. I continue to take the view that Jack Straw would have been a more sensible appointment.

Is there more to Clegg than meets the eye?

I have to say that Nick Clegg went up in my estimation today after reading this story in which he pledges to lead a public campaign of law-breaking against the Government's ID card scheme.

"If the legislation is passed I will lead a grassroots campaign of civil disobedience to thwart the identity cards programme ... I, and I expect thousands of people like me, will simply refuse ever to register," he said.

Clegg has spent most of this leadership campaign giving progressives like me reasons not to vote for him - all the talk about the Lib Dems needing to stop "looking inward" is really just code for saying the party needs to travel lighter in ideological terms.

But if he really is prepared to become the first party leader in living memory to go to jail for his principles, then perhaps he is not quite the identikit member of the "political class" that on the surface he seems to be.

As I pointed out in my Saturday column last week, Gordon Brown's pretensions to be a champion of "liberty" will be pretty hollow unless he is prepares to reconsider the ID card scheme.

Loath as I am to urge him to nick any more ideas off the Tories, David Cameron's mob have put themselves on the right side of both popular opinion and liberal opinion on this one - two things that rarely seem to coincide.

Of all the crazy ideas put forward during the Blair era, this is the very first that Brown should have dispensed with in his determination to put some distance between him and his predecessor.

By comparison, supercasinos and the law on cannabis are pretty small beer.