Skipper

I have to confess that I've been disappointed with Brown, after his early highly promising start, and have watched frozen with alarm as he has allowed himself to slide into a deeper and deeper hole. However I have only been watching through my own left of centre perspective. A peek through the blue in tooth and claw Janet Daley's political lens produces an even more worrying result when reviewing Cameron's performances against brown in PMQs:

There is an understandable, and democratically legitimate, impulse to go in for the kill when your political opponents are sinking - but that is not quite the same thing as deliberately winding up a man whose personal fragility has become embarrassingly, painfully visible. Mr Cameron has traded heavily - and successfully - on being a nice guy. Looking like the sadist of the lower sixth egging on a baying gang of henchmen is not consistent with his engaging New Conservative image and particularly not with the year and a half that was devoted to the Not-The-Nasty-Party-Any-More public relations campaign.

Have we really come to the point when Gordon's enemies are feeling it incumbent on them to chide their leader with, 'Come on Dave, lay off him, he's had enough'? On reflection, probably not. Daley possibly thought this nice additional line of faux concern would pile on a little more agony. Her readers, as evidenced by their comments clearly did not think so- witness the injunctions from her Telegraph readers' comments for Dave to 'put the boot in' with even greater venom.

Yet, perhaps even more distressing were those who genuinely agreed that Cameron had already done too much 'Bullingdon Bullying' and ought to hold back punishing a man who was clearly unravelling in public. The comment which was most to the point however, reminded us the Janet who had been so effusive in her praise of Gordon way back in July, should not be taken too seriously when taking an opposite tack a couple of months later. At heart she's just a hackette seeking to fill her word allocation for the day.