Men With Feet of Clay

At 10.00pm today, James Purnell resigned as Work & Pensions Secretary in Gordon Brown's cabinet. That makes three cabinet resignations in three days. Am I concerned? Not really. As this useless Labour government disintegrates, it is revealing just how little these lightweight individuals matter. There is no substance to this government. There is not a single cabinet minister who could ever be considered as a substantial figure in the history of the Labour Party. It is said that this is a consequence of any government sticking around for too long. It was said about John Major, as he struggled to keep his government and party together - with lots of ex-ministers on the back benches. But even at the end, John Major still had Michael Heseltine, Michael Howard, Kenneth Clark and Douglas Hurd in his cabinet - all reasonably respected, mature and experienced politicians. Now, we seem to have a Labour Party with very minor figures sitting as MPs, lacking in age, knowledge and experience and hopelessly over promoted beyond their own abilities. How can Gordon Brown construct a credible cabinet out of the material available? Some of the suggestions for men and women who could be future leaders are, frankly, absurd.

But am I persuaded of the quality of the Cameron team? No, I am not. Kenneth Clark is the only man in whom I would have any confidence whatsoever. Am I alone in thinking this? I believe not. It was long said that it was governments that lost elections, not oppositions that won them. That is certainly true today. The Tories have little more credibility than Labour and they have done as much, if not more, expenses fiddling than has Labour. Cameron has had an easy ride. He has managed to say very little about what he will actually do to get us out of this mess. And fundamentally, we need a major act of parliamentary reform that gives us the democracy that we have never had and gives more power for us to select the MPs that we want.

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The next few weeks may be very interesting but I hope we come out of it with something better than more of the same and a removal of all the fudge from the edges.