Brown's coup

This is really an update to the post below, but if I put it underneath that post you're less likely to notice it and therefore follow this link to Daniel Finkelstein's excellent dissection of Gordon Brown's risible statement this afternoon. As Daniel says: "The Chancellor has mounted a coup against a serving Prime Minister, and a successful coup at that."

The Chancellor's disloyalty and destructiveness have disfigured public life to a far greater extent than Edward Heath's gracelessness towards Mrs Thatcher ever did. This, after all, is how government and not merely party has been run. The PM ought to have sacked Brown years ago. Even moving him from the Treasury to the Foreign Office would have had the dual benefit of demonstrating to a subordinate the consequence of insubordination and forcing him to tackle a subject in which, like the incumbent, he evinces minimal interest or competence.