Do read the whole of Matthew Parris's piece about Gordon Brown's Friday press conference, but here's a few extracts:
"And now, it appears, another living waxwork is to join the grisly ranks in modern history. Another sweating, stumbling shell of a political career, drained of power or genius, impelled and sustained only by anger and pride. Another brittle, prickly carapace gone all squishy inside, surrounded by a plotting politburo, theoretically able to launch nuclear weapons, attend international summits, pat the heads of schoolchildren and kiss the hands of popes and monarchs, but disconnected from the control of anything the Government actually does.
...
This is pathetic. This is toe-curlingly awful. This is so abjectly, senselessly broken-backed that it almost isn't interesting to watch. I've seen poisoned rats die slowly, too, and after a while the spectacle loses the appeal even of the macabre.
It is also an act of supreme selfishness on Mr Brown's part. Wrapping himself like some wingless albatross around his administration's throat, starving his own colleagues of oxygen in his mindless determination that other careers should not live in order that his should not die, he has brought his Government and his party to the ground, broken their legs - and yet still will not release his grip. They must crawl on, shackled together, past the humiliation of Thursday's elections and onward for another year: plans jettisoned, policies stalled, Bills postponed, shelving everything bold, all in the name of mere survival. Mr Brown's survival. Never mind Labour's, never mind the future of progressive politics, never mind the ideas and spirits of capable men and women in and around his Cabinet. "
