Gordon Brown garotted by Rockabilly Blears!

Gordon Brown's got a year to think about whether he jacks it in and becomes a visiting lecturer (highly paid!) or soldiers on, with the possibility of doing his health in. He's looking decidely jaded and fraught at the moment. Apparently he is upping the moodiness to such a degree that civil servants have to give him some good news before he gets the bad.

Into the fray comes the ever grinning Hazel Blears. She took Tony Blair's grin from the Cheshire Cat when he left Downing Street. Hazel knows how to kick-start an ailing engine and she's just given Gordon a boot in the gonads.

This is a fast moving show and all manner of performers are coming on stage to do an act. The audience has left the theatre, but no worries, the cast keeps going if only the script was the same for each.

Hazel Blears is right to say that they were "on the wrong side of the British sense of fair play, and no party can stay there for long without dire consequences". However, she may be whistling the wrong tune for Gordon Brown. He is notoriously stubborn and is now severely isolated. Somebody needs to knock on his door and tell him the game's up. Maybe Peter Mandelson is that person. He knows how to tell someone that bad news is really good news!