"Gordon's for me", says Harriet Harman!

Very strange things are happening at the top of the New Labour edifice. The cracks are appearing and various characters are out night and day with pots of glue and sheets of brown paper. Or is it vinegar and brown paper?

Harriet Harman is the latest to sound off about her loyalty to the hapless leader. She has publicly declared that she is not remotely interested in the leadership. So if, Gordon Brown falls on his sword, let's hope there are those capable of holding her back. Known as Harriet Harperson for her slavish adherence to all things sexually equal, she is the complete opposite of a soft-boiled egg. She's soft on the outside and pretty hard inside. A perfect political operator and one Brown should be wary of.

It is said quite often that Gordon Brown is grumpy and moody. It is now being reported that he often flies into rages, is unpredictable, can be extremely morose and prefers to maintain close contact with only a small coterie of close companions. Is this the type of man we want leading the country? Is Gordon Brown really stable enough to cope with the complexities of a financial meltdown? It depends on who you believe.

The Cabinet is coming to the Brown rescue by saying he's the best man for the job. Whilst falling short of saying they'd die for him, they seem quite happy and pleased about it all. Has the prime Minister ever bellowed at one of them? Has he cowered them into submission?

It doesn't add up. Peter Oborne reported in the Daily Mail that Brown was getting increasing bunker-bound. Oborne says, "The fundamental fact is that Brown has lost control of a very large part of the Labour Party. For a control freak who deeply resents it when he fails to get his own way, this is intolerable. This powerlessness explains the recurrent reports emanating from Downing Street that Brown's personal behaviour has become erratic. He is prone to fits of rage, and there are reports that only last week he had to be taken to one side and calmed down by Peter Mandelson after a TV interview went wrong." Somebody witnessed that, unless Oborne is making it up, which I very much doubt. So can the likes of Alan Johnson still say he's the only man for the job?

Oborne goes on to say, "Worryingly for Gordon Brown, the conspirators do not just have their candidate. They have their chosen time. Next month's local and European elections are the moment of maximum risk for the Prime Minister. A truly disastrous performance at the polls - as seems very probable - will prompt many more MPs to come forward to call on Brown to go." So that will be that, then?

It is a very sad situation where we have a man in power with obvious qualities, and Gordon Brown does have those, but that his twin flaws of anger and vindictiveness are now outweighing the positive aspects of his nature. Perhaps the Cabinet have just had enough of being browbeaten.

If he goes in June and a new leader is in place, Labour could well get back in contention. I still think it hard for them to win an outright majority, but they could be in with a chance as far as a minority or coalition government is concerned. At the moment, they are doomed to go down like the Titanic.

The Labour Party made the grave mistake of accepting as fact that Gordon Brown was the only choice after Blair. Patently that was an absurd notion. Then, once in place, Gordon Brown made the catastrophic mistake of not calling a general election. He just bottled it. If he had gone to the country he could have won well. Any subsequent problems over the credit crisis would enable him to say he was backed by the country. As it is he isn't and won't be. We have a prime minister who finds decisions hard to make and who is very much becoming emotionallly unstable.

Harriet Harman is fooling nobody apart from herself.