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When the Prime Minister has the sheer brass balls to go on national television and say…

Well I’ve got to tell you, I was brought up in a household where integrity and telling the truth and doing everything honestly was what really mattered.

…surely the only sane response is: so what the bloody hell happened then, Gordon? That whirring sound you can hear is Gordon Brown’s parents spinning in their boxes at speeds matched only by his whirligig moral compass. The weather being what it is right now, I’d quite like to be standing next the Prime Minister’s moral compass – the breeze coming off it as it blurs around its spindle must be cold enough to chill beer.

It’s a sign of his desperation that almost everything that comes out of his mouth is a hostage to fortune. Of the current expenses scandal he says…

What I’ve seen offends my Presbyterian conscience. What I’ve seen is something that is appalling.

He really must get out more or at least take a closer look at just what the party he’s been at the centre of for 15 years has been up to since it came to power. As revolting as some of these MPs’ behaviour is, you have to wonder about a man who’s ‘Presbyterian conscience’ is offended by petty corruption after he wrote the cheques for the bombing of civilians, has a Home Office interning four year-olds, and has a Foreign Secretary trying to cover up allegations of torture.

Or how about this on the Today programme on Radio 4 this morning, on the subject of Damian McBride and his emails:

When people do bad things, they go, they resign, they get sacked.

Define ‘bad’ things for us, Gordon. Grotty emails? Bad. Cluster bombs, depleted uranium, white phosphorus, extraordinary rendition? Sorry, Gordon’s moral judgements on those aren’t on the record – he expects you to make your own.

Barely anything Brown says stands up to even the most cursory scrutiny…

We will be the reforming party on the Constitution. It’s always where I’ve wanted to be. I think you’ve known me for twenty years and you know exactly what my position has been on these issues and can acknowledge that, and now we’re in a position to move this forward.

He’s been Prime Minister for two years. A draft Constitutional Reform Bill is sitting covered in dust. December last year…

Moves to allow MPs a say on going to war and greater scrutiny of treaties were trumpeted by Gordon Brown when he became Prime Minister last year.

But, with recession-fighting measures now central to the Government’s plans, there was no Bill to enact the constitutional “renewal” reforms in today’s Queen’s Speech.

When Brown thought ’saving’ us from the recession was the key to restoring his popularity, constitutional reform could go and twist in the wind. Now bent MPs have pushed the recession off the front pages, it’s all hail Gordon the great reformer.

So is Labour MP Frank Field lying when he says:

Week after week MPs have been turning up but with almost no serious work to do. There is the odd bill to be sure. But there is no legislative programme to speak of… There is a wish amongst all sections of the PLP for the government to start governing. We wouldn’t care too much whether the ideas were Blairite or non-Blairite, as long as we could give the impression of supporting a government that was using the next year to mark out why we should stay in office.

Week after week MPs have been turning up but with almost no serious work to do. If Brown was serious about his hankering for constitutional reform – you know, if these plans of his really have been brewing for ‘twenty years’ and haven’t been thrown together in a panic in the weeks since the Daily Telegraph started printing details of MPs expenses – why didn’t he introduce his reforms into a seemingly almost empty legislative programme?

Let’s break it down. A Prime Minister with a professed twenty year-old urge to reform the way this country is governed shelves a draft bill to do just that despite apparently having plenty of space and time in Parliament to introduce it. Less than a year out from a General Election, when all but the most deluded believe he’ll be dubbed one of the worst Prime Ministers we’ve ever had, and amidst a massive political scandal, he pops up and says ‘oh aye, always been a fan of holding MPs to account and giving the people more power, me’.

You see, it makes no sense. Even if he isn’t he gives every impression of making it up as he goes along. He said on the Today programme that he’s ’staying on’ to ‘clean up’ politics. He’s been an MP since 1983, he was one of the longest serving Chancellors of the Exchequer in history, he’s been the country’s most powerful man for nearly two years. And only now his Presbyterian conscience is offended.

If Gordon Brown had a dog and it took a great big crap in the middle of his living room, we can only assume he’d tiptoe around the turds for the best part of 25 years before it occurred to him to get out the carpet shampoo.