It’s amazing to think that New Labour looks to be going out like a bunch of screeching playground chavs squabbling over the last Marlboro Light. Shedding all claims to dignity and self-awareness, and confirming the essentially hollow nature of New Labour, its ‘ideology’ (the term is used loosely) and intellectual underpinnings (ditto), the main protagonists are going at each other’s throats, having nothing else to argue over other than the grottier aspects of their respective personalities.

It’s only to be expected really, all of them being complicit in the crimes of the New Labour era. They can’t criticise each other over Iraq or the fact they spent billions on computer systems only to receive steaming turds in return (to read but two charges from the epic rap sheet). It’s like Reservoir Dogs where the characters soon forget about why and how the heist went wrong and instead focus on the personality Mr Blonde. Blonde in this case, of course, being Gordon Brown - he’s mental say his detractors and a coward (more Mr Yellow than Blonde, it has to be said).

It probably goes without saying that the rocks hurled at Brown by Charles Clarke this week would have carried more weight had they been thrown by just about anyone else. As Nosemonkey points out, Clarke’s hardly the model of consistency on these matters. Six months ago The Safety Elephant was talking about Brown and Blair conducting a ‘dual premiership‘ but now is telling anyone who’ll listen that Brown is, in effect, the political equivalent of Holden Caulfield (’control freak’, ‘deep weakness’, ‘deluded’). Then he says, ‘I’m trying to give a reasonable, dispassionate view of what I think the issues are’. You never know, he might really believe that.

What seems to pass people (including Clarke) by is that he’s speaking to newspapers (the Telegraph today and the Evening Standard yesterday) whose reasons for existence are to do down Labour governments of every stripe at every turn. He’s gone carping to - fraternising with - his party’s enemies. And they’re loving it. What next? Writing an article for ConservativeHome? A whisper in the ear of Guido Fawkes?

Still, as with all these things, there are diamonds of truth nestling amongst the horseshit of hysteria dressed as statesmanship. They’re welcome no matter whether they’re Freudian slips or intentional coded attacks on Blair. ‘What people are looking for is some sense of authenticity,’ says Clarke, “People don’t want someone with an image of slipperiness.’ Hire a plane and write it in the sky, Charles.

All this can be taken on board, even coming from someone so lacking in introspection as Clarke. We are talking about someone - Brown - who wants the power of life and death over every last one of us after all. If he’s going to receive this level of scrutiny, that can only be a bonus. Charles doesn’t like it when it’s done to him, of course, but nicking him for hypocrisy lacks the same satisfaction as convicting Al Capone for tax fraud. It’s the smallest of his misdemeanours.

But then Charlie blows it. ‘[T]he Chancellor wants to run the country by “pulling levers at the centre”, while the Prime Minister is more inclined to “trust the people”,’ he says. Which is a hilarious piece of (self) deception that only causes the laughter die on your lips when you survey the wreckage of our democracy caused by such innovations (to name but two) as Blairite ‘kitchen cabinets‘ and the giving of power to those like Paul Drayson and Lord Sainsbury by the simple expedient of them being filthy rich.

Clarke finally calls the nurse for another shot of Thorazine by declaring Alan Milburn as ‘leadership material’. Big, bruising, bouffanted Alan Milburn, a man described by Matthew Norman in the Independent yesterday as someone whose ‘belligerence is matched only by his irrelevance’. A man who is to consensus politics (’arrogant’, ‘patronising’ and ‘macho’) as a stingray is to Australian wildlife botherers. As somebody for who the phrase ‘promoted to his level of incompetence’ could have been invented, Milburn’s been a rich source of material for this blog in it’s short life. Clarke’s suggestion, however unlikely, of Milburn’s potential kindles idle, wistful daydreams that the geordie privateer could be an inspiration again. At the very least a Milburn premiership would put paid to the dangerous and damaging reasoning that clings to nostalgic notions of Britain being a great nation punching above its weight on the world stage.

Still, all this fallout torpedoes the witless yammering talk of a ’stable and orderly transition’ - surely, hopefully, a phrase shortly to slip into usage as a ironically bathetic description of destruction and misery. A knowing, sarcastic companion to FUBAR and SNAFU. ‘It’s good to see Iraq making a stable and orderly transition to democracy,’ for example.

There are many who don’t want to see a smooth handover of power. It goes against justice. As Alex Harrowell says of Blair:

I don’t want an orderly succession. I want him to be dragged out of Downing Street, screaming and clinging to his Anthony mug, and then conveyed on the sharp steel floor of a black Maria or army truck to Northolt and the jet that will deliver him to the Hague Tribunal.

As spectacles go, the current baiting and counter-baiting is worth pulling up a chair for if only because we know deep down we’re going to be denied the true satisfaction of seeing Alex’s dream made real. How anybody can say that this kind of thing is turning off voters is a puzzle. That said, just why country isn’t baying at the gates of Downing Street in an attempt to warm this crew’s heels to the cells is another mystery. Maybe the whole story is like William S. Burroughs’ ‘Man Who Taught His Asshole to Talk‘. ‘After a while the ass start talking on its own’ until eventually:

…finally his mouth sealed over and the whole head would have amputated spontaneous… except for the eyes, you dig. That’s one thing the asshole couldn’t do was see. It needed the eyes. But nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain couldn’t give orders any more. It was trapped in the skull, sealed off. For a while you could see the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes.

While Blair, Brown, Clarke are trapped in their arguments and bitching, they aren’t doing much damage anywhere else. We haven’t had a policy announcement since Tuesday which for this lot, for who press releases and ill-thought ideas usually come on a roll like toilet paper, is an eternity. We should just board up the doors with them inside and pass pizzas and toast and other flat sustenance through the letterbox.