Switch off the lights

Brown's new austerity measures included a ban on artificial light.

Labour must replace Brown with Johnson in the messy aftermath of the forthcoming Euro elections. That is the advice being given to the Labour Party by both friend and foe.  

The argument for such a move is strong. Johnson is clean, competent, funny and he chose a SFA track when he was on Desert Islands Discs. At the very least he may be able to get people to hate the party a little bit less – and this is the their last realistic goal. But I can’t think about the  proposed coup without getting tangled up in sad thoughts about the awfulness of Brown’s situation (if he goes, expect to see plenty of references to Jonathan Powell’s prescient likening of Brown’s career to a “Shakespearean tragedy”).

There is a great deal to be written about the personal dimension of Brown’s extraordinarily grim premiership; a lot of it will focus on his questionable management style and his propensity to surround himself with first-class shits. However, a minor physical matter struck me the other morning when I was listening to some related speculation on the radio while trying to will myself out of bed: he must be knackered.

He was one of Labour’s major players when in opposition, he then spent 10 years as a Chancellor with unprecedented responsibility for domestic policy. Since becoming PM he has gone from crisis-mode to major-crisis-mode to imminent-national-meltdown-mode. During the past 10 years he has also got married and had three children, one of whom died. It has been widely reported that he is almost always awake.

Sleep must be part of Gordon’s problems – and therefore a part of ours, too. People said that Blair was convinced that his powers of persuasion would allow him to overcome any problem. Brown is more like a disorganised student: he thinks that he can win-out by staying up all night and cramming. But I know from bitter experience that the latter strategy doesn’t work. In fact, it is completely crap.

So, Gordon, be more French. Have a holiday, sleep-in, hang-out with Steve Coppell, catch-up with the episodes of The Apprentice that you’ve missed, read the papers in bed. Actually, forget the last bit. 

I’m not calling on the PM to resign because that strikes me as a bit of a pompous thing for a micro-blogger to do – especially one that has previously only posted once in 2009. But when the peasants are lighting their torches and heading to SW1A, it is probably worth giving the idea some thought.